Discovery of Sulfur

Sulfur has been known since ancient times. In the Bible it is called brimstone. It can be found in its elemental state around volcano vents.

The name may have been derived from the Arabic ‘sufra’ meaning yellow, or the Sanskrit ‘shulbari’ meaning enemy (ari) of copper (shulba).

The Sanskrit possibility is appealing, because it carries a message about people’s knowledge of chemistry from long ago: sulfur actually does react easily with many metals, including copper. (Sanskrit is one of the oldest Indo-European languages – over 3000 years old. Despite this, it is the human language most compatible with artificial intelligence. )

When sulfur burns it produces sulfur dioxide, a poisonous gas. At one time this gas was used in New York to fumigate buildings harboring infectious diseases.

The use of burning sulfur for fumigation began several thousand years ago. In Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’ which is about 2800 years old, Odysseus says, “Bring sulfur, old nurse, that cleanses all pollution, and bring me fire, that I may purify the house with sulfur…”⁾

In the year 808 a Chinese text provides us with possibly the first recipe for gunpowder, containing saltpeter, sulfur and carbon.

Sulfur is also believed to have been a component of ‘Greek Fire,’ a weapon similar to a flamethrower used by the Byzantine Empire.

Sulfur became a recognized chemical element in 1789, when Antoine Lavoisier included it in his famous list of the elements.

In 1823, German chemist Eilhard Mitscherlich discovered sulfur’s allotropy: he showed that the crystal shapes of sulfur obtained from cooling molten sulfur were different from those obtained when the element crystallized from a solution.

The sulfur obtained from molten sulfur is called monoclinic sulfur, while sulfur obtained from crystallizing a solution is called rhombic sulfur. Both forms consist of S₈ rings. The difference between the forms is the way the rings are arranged within a crystal.

At this time the concept of allotropy – different structural forms of the same element – had not become a formal part of chemistry. It was not until 1841 that Berzelius introduced the term to explain sulfur’s monoclinic and rhombic forms.

By the 1800s sulfur, in the form of sulfuric acid, had become the best way to judge a country’s wealth. Countries had even gone to war over sulfur.

Here’s what the great German chemist Justus Liebig had to say about it in about 1843:

“It is no exaggeration to say, we may fairly judge the commercial prosperity of a country from the amount of sulfuric acid it consumes.

(Sulfur’s price affects the price of…) bleached and printed cotton stuffs, soap, glass, etc, and remembering that Great Britain supplies America, Spain, Portugal, and the East, with these, exchanging them for raw cotton, silk, wine, raisins, indigo, etc, we can understand why the English Government should have resolved to resort to war with Naples (in 1839) in order to abolish the sulfur monopoly, which the latter power attempted recently to establish.”

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