If chemical elements were people, chlorine would be a celebrity. Although intrinsically no more or less important than any other element, chlorine has had a knack of making headlines. It was surrounded in controversy right from its “birth”, or rather its first isolation, by Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1774. Scheele actually did not think of it as an element, and called it “dephlogisticated marine acid”, marine acid (or muriatic acid) being the old name for hydrochloric acid. When Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his colleagues overturned the phlogiston theory, they re-named our curious substance “oxygenated muriatic acid”. The definite confirmation of its elemental nature only came with Humphry Davy’s work in the 1810s, also bringing down Lavoisier’s theory of acids, which presumed that all acids, including marine acid, contained oxygen. Afterwards chlorine also featured prominently in other debates about fundamental issues in the theory of matter, including Prout’s hypothesis and the solar neutrino problem.
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机译：如果说化学元素是人类，那么氯将是名人。尽管本质上不比任何其他元素重要，但氯已经成为头条新闻。 1774年，卡尔·威廉·谢勒（Carl Wilhelm Scheele）从诞生之初就对其进行了争议，或者更确切地说，它是第一次被隔离。谢勒实际上并不认为它是一种元素，而是称其为“去酸的海洋酸”，海洋酸（或毛里求斯酸）。酸）是盐酸的旧称。当Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier和他的同事推翻发火物质理论时，他们将我们好奇的物质重命名为“氧化的盐酸”。对其元素性质的确定性确认只有在汉弗莱·戴维（Humphry Davy）在1810年代的工作中才提出的，同时也推翻了拉瓦锡（Lavoisier）的酸理论，该理论假定所有酸（包括海洋酸）都含有氧气。后来，氯在物质理论的其他基本论争中也占有重要地位，其中包括普鲁特的假设和太阳中微子问题。
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