Jabir Ibn Hayyan
( Geber)
(The Father Of Modern Chemistry)
Jabir Ibn Hayyan, who died in 808 AD, was a renaissance man, a Sufi , a pharmacist and a great chemist who spent most of his life at home in his laboratory in Damascus. He is known in the west as: Geber. He wrote more than 200 books including 80 books on chemistry.
He was the father of molecular chemistry who correctly identified the union of elements at a molecular level to form new compounds without losing their own structure. This was more than 10 centuries before John Dalton "discovered" the same thing.
Jabir was respected as a great scientist during his life while Dalton was considered a sorcerer by his neighbors. When Dalton died, his neighbors sealed his house then asked the parson to burn his books to rid the town of evil!
Jabir constructed a scale capable of weighing objects as low as 1/6,480th of a pound in weight. He identified combustion as the release of the latent energy of the combustible material when combined with oxygen at the proper temperature.
He developed noncombustible paper, florescent ink, anti rust coatings, and water repellant coatings for fabrics. He recommended building chemical laboratories away from population centers to protect people from chemical pollution.
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Revised on 10/3/99
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