zaro

Who discovered ozone?

Published in Chemistry 1 min read

The discovery of ozone is credited to Christian Friedrich Schönbein, a German chemist, in 1840. While working with electrical experiments, he noticed a peculiar odor and determined it was not caused by electricity but by a newly formed substance. He named this substance "ozone," derived from the Greek word "ozein" meaning "to smell."

However, the ozone layer itself was discovered later in 1913 by French physicists Charles Fabry and Henri Buisson. They observed that some radiation from the Sun was missing when it reached Earth's surface, leading them to deduce that it was being absorbed by a layer in the atmosphere. This layer was subsequently identified as the ozone layer.