
A prelude to chemistry chemical encyclopedia
1. The starting point of human civilization - the use of fire Millions of years ago, man lived a very simple primitive life, subsisting on hunting, eating raw meat and wild fruits. According to the research of archaeologists, at least 500,000 years ago, we can find evidence of human use of fire, that is, the place where Peking Man lived in Zhoukoudian, Beijing, found the fossilized bones of animals after fire. With the fire, the primitive man said goodbye to the life of eating and drinking blood. After eating cooked food, human health is improved, intelligence is also developed, and survival ability is improved. Later, people learned to make fire by rubbing and drilling wood, so that fire could be carried with them. Thus, people are no longer stewards of the fire, but become fire makers who can control the fire. Fire is a weapon used by human beings to invent tools and create wealth. Using fire to produce a variety of chemical reactions, human beings began to make pottery, metallurgy, brewing and other processes, and entered a broad world of production and life. 2. A time-honored craft - pottery making Since the beginning of history, the chemical industry has been inseparable from the process of developing productive forces, ensuring the necessities of human society and coping with war. In order to meet these needs, it began with simple processing of natural substances to produce chemicals, and later carried out deep processing and imitation to create products that are not found in nature at all. It plays an important role in the historical industrial revolution and the contemporary new technological revolution, which is enough to show its important position in the national economy. Filtration, evaporation, distillation, crystallization, boring and other unit operations in the production of the application, has a history of thousands of years, according to archaeological findings, at least 10,000 years ago, the Chinese have mastered the art of firing pottery with kilns, 5,000 years ago by the use of sunlight evaporation of seawater, crystallization of salt; The Egyptians began making wine 5,000 years ago during the Third Dynasty and filtered the grape juice in cloth bags during production. But for a long time, these operations were small manual operations. As one of the modern engineering disciplines, chemical engineering emerged in the second half of the 19th century with the development of the production process of large-scale chemical products. After more than 100 years of development, chemical engineering has become an engineering discipline with unique research objects and complete systems. The use of fire is the first discovery and creation in the history of human chemistry and chemical industry production. Due to the use of fire, people were able to fire pottery, forming the earliest silicate chemical process. With the improvement of human living standards, people need more living utensils, pottery is just like this came into being.