Introduction to Chemistry

This publication is an entry-level textbook designed to meet the needs of college students who learned some chemistry in their high school years, but not enough to prepare them for advanced courses in chemistry, or to satisfy the chemistry prerequisite for courses they might want to take in other scientific disciplines. The history of chemistry is emphasized to an unusual degree here primarily to give the narrative a storyline, but its historical emphasis has an important secondary benefit. Much of the vocabulary chemists use to describe chemical phenomena today emerged early in the development of the discipline, when their understanding of them was still in a primitive state. As such, the persistence of these words and the concepts behind them makes sense only in the light of history.