A physician named Daniel Rutherford discovered nitrogen in Scotland in 1772. It was studied by other chemists around the same time but they called it air without oxygen or it was also known as “burnt or dephlogisticated air.” French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier recognized nitrogen as an elemental gas around 1776. Nitrogen is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, and nontoxic gas. It makes up about 78% of the air on Earth, by volume, which makes it the most plentiful element in the atmosphere. Earth’s atmosphere is made up of more than 4000 trillion tons of nitrogen. Nitrogen can be obtained from the atmosphere by passing air over heated copper or iron, which removes oxygen and leaves nitrogen and mixed gases. Pure nitrogen is obtained from liquefied air through a process known as fractional distillation because nitrogen has a lower boiling point than oxygen and can distill off
Nitrogen combines with other elements only at very high temperatures or pressures. It can be converted into an active form by passing through an electric discharge at low pressure. When the active nitrogen is produced, it combines with alkali metals to form azides, nitrides, and cyanides. Active nitrogen returns to its ordinary nitrogen form in about a minute. In conclusion, nitrogen is a very important element. It has many uses today in many industries. It is the most plentiful element in the Earth’s atmosphere, and it is easy to obtain. It is very important to animals and plants so that they can live. Nitrogen also forms many important compounds.
Nitrogen has many uses such as in foods, fertilizers, poisons, and explosives. It is important to plant nutrition because certain bacteria in the soil convert nitrogen into a form that can be absorbed by plants, a process known as nitrogen fixa
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