History
Aristotle (384–322 BC) first recorded that burning coals emanated toxic fumes. An ancient method of execution was to shut the criminal in a bathing room with smouldering coals. What was not known was the mechanism of death. Galen (129–199 AD) speculated that there was a change in the composition of the air that caused harm when inhaled. In 1776, the French chemist de Lassone produced CO by heating zinc oxide with coke, but mistakenly concluded that the gaseous product was hydrogen, as it burned with a blue flame. The gas was identified as a compound containing carbon and oxygen by the Scottish chemist William Cumberland Cruikshank in the year 1800. Its toxic properties on dogs were thoroughly investigated by Claude Bernard around 1846.
During World War II, a gas mixture including carbon monoxide was used to keep motor vehicles running in parts of the world where gasoline and diesel fuel were scarce. External (with a few exceptions) charcoal or wood gas generators were fitted, and the mixture of atmospheric nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and small amounts of other gases produced by gasification was piped to a gas mixer. The gas mixture produced by this process is known as wood gas. Carbon monoxide was also used on a small scale during the Holocaust at some Nazi extermination camps, the most notable by gas vans in Chelmno, and in the Action T4 "euthanasia" program.
Read more about this topic: Carbon Monoxide
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)