Nitrogen - 7N: historical information
It was known during the 18th century that air contains at least two gases, one of which supports combustion and life, and the other of which does not. Nitrogen was discovered by Daniel Rutherford in 1772, who called it noxious air, but Scheele, Cavendish, Priestley, and others at about the same time studied "burnt" or "dephlogisticated" air, as air without oxygen was then called.
Sometime prior to the autumn of 1803, the Englishman John Dalton was able to explain the results of some of his studies by assuming that matter is composed of atoms and that all samples of any given compound consist of the same combination of these atoms. Dalton also noted that in series of compounds, the ratios of the masses of the second element that combine with a given weight of the first element can be reduced to small whole numbers (the law of multiple proportions). This was further evidence for atoms. Dalton's theory of atoms was published by Thomas Thomson in the 3rd edition of his System of Chemistry in 1807 and in a paper about strontium oxalates published in the Philosophical Transactions. Dalton published these ideas himself in the following year in the New System of Chemical Philosophy. The symbol used by Dalton for nitrogen is shown below. [See History of Chemistry, Sir Edward Thorpe, volume 1, Watts & Co, London, 1914.]
