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Acetic acid: History
Vinegar is as old as civilization itself, perhaps older. Acetic acid-producing bacteria are present throughout the world, and any culture practicing the brewing of beer or wine inevitably discovered vinegar as the natural result of these alcoholic beverages being exposed to air.
The use of acetic acid in chemistry extends into antiquity. In the 3rd century BC, the Greek philosopher Theophrastos described how vinegar acted on metals to produce pigments useful in art, including white lead (lead carbonate) and verdigris, a green mixture of copper salts including copper(II) acetate. Ancient Romans boiled soured wine in lead pots to produce a highly sweet syrup called sapa. Sapa was rich in lead acetate, a sweet substance also called sugar of lead or sugar of Saturn, which contributed to lead poisoning among the Roman aristocracy. The 8th century Persian alchemist Jabir Ibn Hayyan (Geber) concentrated acetic acid from vinegar through distillation.
In the Renaissance, glacial acetic acid was prepared through the dry distillation of metal acetates. The 16th century German alchemist Andreas Libavius described such a procedure, and he compared the glacial acetic acid produced by this means to vinegar. The presence of water in vinegar has such a profound effect on acetic acid's properties that for centuries many chemists believed that glacial acetic acid and the acid found in vinegar were two different substances. The French chemist Pierre Adet proved them to be identical.
In 1847 the German chemist Hermann Kolbe synthesised acetic acid from inorganic materials for the first time. This reaction sequence consisted of chlorination of carbon disulfide to carbon tetrachloride, followed by pyrolysis to tetrachloroethylene and aqueous chlorination to trichloroacetic acid, and concluded with electrolytic reduction to acetic acid.[2]
By 1910 most glacial acetic acid was obtained from the "pyroligneous liquor" from distillation of wood. The acetic acid was isolated from this by treatment with milk of lime, and the resultant calcium acetate was then acidified with sulfuric acid to recover acetic acid. At this time Germany was producing 10,000 tons of glacial acetic acid, around 30% of which was used for the manufacture of indigo dye.[3][4]
The content of this section is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (local copy). It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Acetic acid" modified March 11, 2007 with previous authors listed in its history.
