Fluorine: historical information

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Fluorine was discovered by Henri Moissan at 1886 in France. Origin of name: from the Latin word "fluere" meaning "to flow"

In 1670 a recipe containing Bohemian emerald (now known as calcium fluoride, CaF2) was used to etch glass. It seems that George Gore made a little fluorine through an electrolytic process but his apparatus exploded when the fluorine produced reacted with hydrogen from the other electrode. The element finally was isolated in 1886 by Ferdinand Frederic Henri Moisson who used an apparatus constructed from platinum. His reward was the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1906.

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fluorine atomic number