Lorenzo Romano Amadeo Carlo Avogadro, was born in Turin, Italy, on the 9th of August, 1776. He was the son of Count Filippo Avogadro and Anna Maria Vercellone. Avogadro’s father was a well known lawyer and a civil servant. His father was made president of the state of Vittorio. Avogadro went to school in Turin and at the age of twenty he had his doctrine in ecclesiastical law.
In spite of his successful legal career Avogadro showed interest in natural philosophy. In 1800 Avogadro began is own private studies of mathematics and physics. Joined with his brother Felice his first research project was on electricity. In Avogadro’s time chemistry was just becoming an exact science. John Dalton was proposing theories about atomic weight etc.
Gay-Lussac found that the ratio’s of volumes of reacting gases were small integer numbers. These theories made Avogadro start to think about there relationships. In 1811, Avogadro published an article that suggested that equal numbers of all gases at the same temperature and pressure contain the same number of molecules. This is known as Avogadro’s Principal.
Avogadro’s Principal was not recognized until a conference in 1960 (after Avogadro’s death ion 1956) when it was showed that it could not only molar masses but also indirectly, atomic masses. It was after Avogadro that the concept of a mole was introduced. Today the accepted amount for a mole is 6. 02*1023.
It is hard to comprehend the size of a mole, but here are some examples of the size of a mole: One mole of pop cans would cover the world about 61 meters high. If you took a mole of unpopped pop corn kernels you could cover the US 2. 7m deep. Avogadro married Felicita Mazze, they had a total of six children.
Avogadro was a modest man who worked in isolation . Avogadro died exactly one month before his 80th birthday, July 9th 1856.
