French chemist · 1802–1876
Antoine-Jérôme Balard
Antoine-Jérôme Balard discovered bromine in 1826, aged 23, while working as an assistant pharmacist in Montpellier.
How Bromine was found
Balard was studying the bitter brine left after sea salt is extracted from the salt marshes near Montpellier. Adding chlorine water turned it a deep brownish-orange. He extracted the coloured substance and obtained a dark red liquid with a choking smell.
He first called it muride, but it was renamed brome, from the Greek for “stench”. The leading German chemist Justus von Liebig had seen the same liquid years earlier and labelled it as iodine chloride. Afterwards he kept the bottle in what he called his cabinet of mistakes.
Shared the credit
The discovery is credited jointly to these scientists.
Life and career
Born 1802 · Died 1876
Balard was born in Montpellier to a family of wine growers and trained as a pharmacist. The discovery made him famous, and he became professor at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France in Paris.
He later worked on extracting sodium sulfate and potassium salts from seawater for industry.
Discovered in the same era
Other elements identified within ten years of 1826.