Atom and Atomic Theory

The word ‘atom’ was first coined by Democritus (500 B.C.) from the Greek atomos

(“uncuttable”), which refers to small, indivisible particles that he believed comprised all

matter. This claim was challenged many years later until experimental evidence solidified

some of its tenets. For example, evidences now point that atoms are not exactly indivisible as

they consist of subatomic particles such as electrons, protons, and neutrons. In 1808, English

scientist John Dalton formulated the definition of atoms as follows: (1) atoms comprise

elements, (2) atoms of one element are all identical in size, mass, and chemical properties but

also differ from atoms of another element, (3) compounds are composed of atoms of more

than one element in whole number ratio, and (4) chemical reactions involve rearrangement of

atoms, not their creation or destruction. The first statement means that atoms are building

blocks of matter. The second derives itself from a fundamental characteristic that all atoms of

one element have the same number of protons and that no two different elements have the

same number of protons, and this property became known as atomic number. The third one

means that formation of compounds require specific elements in a specific ratio, and this

property is said to be an extension of two principles: (1) law of definite proportions, which

states that different samples of the same compound contain elements in the same proportion,

(2) law of multiple proportions, which states that when two elements combine to form more

than one compound, the masses of the comprising elements exist in whole number ratio,

which means that different compounds made up of the same elements differ in the number of

atoms of each element. The last statement is consistent with the law of conservation of mass,

where matter can neither be destroyed or created. All these insights were so groundbreaking

that they paved the rapid advancement of chemistry back in 1900s (Chang 1170).
References:

Chang, Raymond. Chemistry Tenth Edition. McGraw-Hill. 2010. Print.