Chlorine

Chlorine’s great importance and versatility makes it quite the chlorified chemical.

Chlorine is a fundamental element of chemistry denoted by the atomic symbol ‘Cl’ and the number 17.
Out of the world’s most common crust elements, chlorine is listed as number twenty-one, but it generally exists in an impure form, such as in common salt.
At 0°C (32°F) and 100 kPa of pressure, chlorine can be found in a gaseous form, and the gas is a green-yellow colour, while the liquid form tends to be more yellow in colour.
Although part of the common salt compound (sodium chloride) was commonly used by ancient civilisations, chloride in its pure gaseous form was first known in 1630 by Jan van Helmot, a chemist from the Southern Netherlands, however this finding was originally considered unimportant.
The chemist most commonly credited with the discovery of chlorine is Carl Wilhelm Scheele from Sweden, in 1774, however he suggested the chemical was a compound (with multiple individual elements) rather than an element itself.

Chlorine as an element is typically extracted from brine, sodium chloride (common salt) dissolved in water, using an electric current.
It was only in 1809, that newly published results of an experiment speculated that chlorine was its own element, as observed by the French chemists Joseph Gay-Lussac and Louis-Jacques Thēnard; and the element was later isolated and named in 1810 as ‘khlōros’, a Greek word referring to the colour green, by Humphry Davy, a chemist from England, and he changed this term soon after, to the one we use today.
Chlorine is commonly used for disinfectants, especially for pools; to purify water for drinking; and to create dyes, plastics, insecticides, and house cleaning chemicals like bleach, among others.
Around the 1830s, various compounds were created using chlorine, to remove the smell of dead flesh in hospitals.
Chlorine was used by the Germans during World War I, as a lethal gas that damaged respiratory organs, eyesight and skin.

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