The Chemist Who Tasted Everything

Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered oxygen. He also discovered chlorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, and tungsten. He isolated citric acid, lactic acid, and glycerol. Working alone in the back rooms of Swedish pharmacies with homemade equipment, he made more chemical discoveries than virtually anyone in the eighteenth century.

Almost none of them are named after him.

Scheele had a problem: he was catastrophically bad at publishing his results. He'd discover something extraordinary, then take years to write it up, by which time some better-connected chemist in London or Paris would announce the same finding and receive all the credit. He discovered oxygen two years before Joseph Priestley, but his book arrived at the printer late. He identified element after element but couldn't be bothered with the politics, so others got the honors. He was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and reportedly attended exactly one meeting.

He had another problem, too. Scheele's method for identifying a new substance was to taste it. Hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, mercury, lead — he noted their flavors the way a sommelier might describe a wine. He once described prussic acid as having "a peculiar, not unpleasant smell."

He turned down offers from Berlin and London, preferring his small pharmacy in Köping, population roughly one thousand. He died there at forty-three, two days after a deathbed wedding arranged so his landlady could inherit his estate. His body was, by that point, a museum of his own discoveries.

The one thing that does bear his name is Scheele's Green — a gorgeous pigment he invented from arsenic that took Victorian Europe by storm.

It may have killed Napoleon.