Discovery of photosynthesis

In 1727, the English botanist Stephen Hales published a book, Vegetable Staticks, in which he observed that the plants use mainly air as the nutrient during their growth.

In 1774 Joseph Priestly discovered oxygen and experimented with this new, invisible gas. He found that plants could restore air which has been injured by the burning of candles.

A few years later, in 1977, Jan Ingenhousz, Dutch physician to the Austrian empress read about Priestley’s experiment and was fascinated.

He rented a house in the English countryside and in the short space of three months conducted more than five hundred experiments on the properties of plants and their effects on the air. He determined that plants produced far more oxygen than they absorbed.

He discovered that the plants immersed in water produced a steady stream of tiny oxygen bubbles when in direct sunlight.

Ingenhousz had discovered the process of photosynthesis. In 1779 he published his results in Experiment upon Vegetables. The name photosynthesis was created some years later and comes form the Greek words meaning ‘to be put together by light.’

In 1783, Jean Senebier, a Swiss minster discovered the essential role of carbon dioxide or ‘fixed air’ has in the process.

Another Swiss scholar de Saussure in the early nineteenth century studied the quantitative relationships between the carbon dioxide take up by a plant and the amount of organic matter and oxygen produced and came to the conclusion that water was also consumed by plants during the assimilation of carbon dioxide.

In 1845, German surgeon Julius Robert Mayer put together the earlier discoveries and recorded that plants are able to convert solar energy to chemical energy on a massive scale.
Discovery of photosynthesis