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At the end of the eighteenth century, chemists began to understand that the substances, materials or organic objects in the world around us – from air to water, through metals, rocks and living organisms – are made of the same basic ingredients,
They have developed techniques for identifying and measuring the proportions of elements in more complex substances or "compounds". At the beginning of the 19th century, they understood that each element was composed of small indivisible particles called atoms, and that the compounds were composed of these atoms according to different arrangements and combinations.
So it was born modern chemistry, which created a system to explain how everything is formed.
But there was one thing that was still a mystery to science: organic substances.
But they can not decipher the complex combinations and mysterious proportions of these organic compounds produced by living organisms.
As a result, it was impossible for them to recreate organic substances in a laboratory. ” clbad=”img img-responsive image-large”/>
Nobody understands how nature works and believes that there is something unique in living organisms, a mysterious "life force" that gives them a special ability to synthesize. chemical products.
This theory was known as "vitalism", marked by the differentiation between natural products and those that can be made in the laboratory.
But this theory was disrupted in 1828 by a German chemist named Friedrich Wöhler created the first organic substance based on inorganic components and was therefore the first to be transformed. an inert material in a living product.
What was this miracle product?
The story of his discovery had begun a few years ago, but it was not a deliberate creation: Wöhler did not want to reproduce the urine.
In 1823, when the young German scientist settled in Stockholm, Sweden, to study with the famous Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius.
A year later, Wöhler found something interesting. He discovered that by mixing ammonia with a substance called cyanogen, made of cyanide, he could produce the compound of oxalic acid and white crystals that he could not identify.
It took him four years to realize that these crystals were urea.
The material had exactly the same proportion of elements as the salt called ammonium cyanide – one part of carbon and oxygen, two of nitrogen and four of hydrogen – but Wöhler found that he was not behaving at all like the cyanide of
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The discovery – which actually created two organic substances because it was found that the l & # 39; Oxalic acid that he also manufactured is found in some plants – entered the scientific annals as one of the most important stages of chemistry.
the birth of organic chemistry, which today makes it possible to manufacture drugs and fuels for perfumes.
Several scientific texts written from 1840 pointed to the creation of synthetic urea as the beginning of the end of vitalism.
The obituaries of Wöhler in 1882 say the same thing: he is regarded as the man who toppled the wall between the living world and the inorganic world.
The letters written between Wöhler and his teacher, Berzelius, reflect a great enthusiasm for success, but do not consider it as the result of vitalist theory.
In a letter, Berzelius even asked the young man not to let the discovery.
Peter Ramberg of Truman State University, Missouri (USA), conducted a theoretical study of organic chemistry and discovered that 90% of them contained "a version of this myth".
Ramberg and other modern scholars consider that the idea that the force of life was at the origin of the creation of organic matter has gradually declined – it was already a theory carried in 1828 when Wöhler synthesized urea.
But what is without a doubt is that the discovery of German demonstrated that chemicals could reproduce natural products, which led many of them to seek to imitate and even to compete with nature.
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