Aristotle

Aristotle added a fifth element, aither.

(aether in Latin, “ether” in English) eather way, he said that the heavens were made of this element. But what did he know?

Copernicus

Copernicus in 1500 claimed the planets had the sun at the center of their orbit.

He said that the Earth rotates daily on its axis.

Kepler

Kepler,in 1600, proposed a lot of nonsense about the six planets. He described their orbits as perfect circles. When stunned by the possibility of elliptical orbits, he quit and went into banking.

No, he wrote an incomprehensible conjecture in his paper ‘On the six-cornered snowflake’.

His friend Thomas Harriot was more practical and delved into cannon ball stacking. Somehow, this led to atomic theory.

The Telescope

A telescope was a 1608 patent submitted to the government in the Netherlands by Middelburg spectacle maker Hans Lipperhey.
It was primarily to spy on his girlfriend who he thought was cheating on him.

Galileo

Galileo wasted no time in building his own telescope in 1609, patent or no patent.
He started to make much better observations and recording them. Recorded observations are much better than ones you just toss out at the local pub.

Jupiter has moons.

He observed Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, which proved that celestial bodies can orbit a planet other than Earth.

The Phases of Venus

He discovered that Venus goes through phases like the Moon, proving it orbits the Sun rather than Earth.

The Moon is not Smooth

The Moon is covered in rough terrain, mountains, and deep craters. And that there is no actual “man in the moon.”

Isaac Newton

In 1668, Isaac Newton
built an even better telescope. He did a lot of other stuff, too.

The Atom

It was thought, for centuries, that the atom was the smallest thing. In fact, the word atom means ‘smallest thing around’.

In about 1780, Lavoisier showed that water could be broken down to oxygen and hydrogen. And those two could not be broken down further.

It’s elemental, he proclaimed. His broken down theory was a hit. But when he said oxygen was part of combustion, it was too much.

The phlogiston theory comes from the ancient word phlogistón which means ‘burning like house on fire.’ The theory was first proposed as serious in the late 1600s by J J Becher and written down by Georg Ernst Stahl a bit later. (The ‘e’ is intentionally left off ‘Georg’ which was a sore point with him all his life.)

With Lavoisier throwing cold water on that theory, as it were, it set Becher and Stahl rolling over in their graves.

Unfortunately, during the French Revolution, Lavoisier was charged with various crimes and guillotined. The French government did apologize several years later.

His wife lived on and wrote a bunch of stuff he said. Included was “They’re gonna do what?” when they told him what was coming.

With atomic theory on a roll and two elements identified, the French Revolution over, the element table was easy to remember until it exceeded 24 elements.

Amedeo Avogadro created the word “molecule” in 1811. He stated that:

The smallest particles of gases are not simple atoms, but are made up of a certain number of these atoms united by attraction to form a single molecule.

Actually, that is a cleaned up version derived from those who penetrated his thick accent.

It took, in 1833, the French chemist Marc Antoine Auguste Gaudin to make something sensible of the hash stew Avogadro had made of his own hypothesis.

He cleared up things saying water was H2O
And that two given samples of a gas, of the same volume and at the same temperature and pressure, contain the same number of molecules. Like anyone could count them and prove him wrong.

Meanwhile, better known, André-Marie Ampère published the same law with similar conclusions.

The hypothesis was then referred to as Ampère’s hypothesis. Later, called Avogadro–Ampère thesis or Ampère–Avogadro hypothesis and sometimes even Amped-up Avocados hypothesis.

You’d think Ampere could let it go with friends like Alessandro Volta of Italy, Georg Ohm of Germany, James Watt of Scotland and Michael Faraday of England. Streets are named after Ampère, and a mountain on the moon, an asteroid and an electric ferry in Norway.