August 9, 1776 – Birth of Amedeo Avogadro, physicist and chemist who formulated the famous Avogadro's Law

He was an Italian physicist and chemist who spent his career as a professor of physics at the University of Turin.

He is known for formulating his Avogadro's Law, which announces that "equal volumes of different gases, under the same conditions of pressure and temperature, contain the same number of molecules." To do this, he relied on John Dalton's atomic theory and Gay-Lussac's Law on motion vectors in the molecule.

The greatest difficulty he had to overcome was related to the confusion existing at that time between atoms and molecules and that the scientific community did not give a good reception to his theories, not immediately accepting his hypotheses. It was not until the works of Gerhardt, Laurent and Williamson on organic molecules that they showed that Avogadro's Law was essential to explain why equal numbers of molecules occupied the same volume in the gaseous state.

In his honor, the name was given to Avogadro's number or constant (L or NA) which is the number of constituent particles (usually atoms or molecules) found in the amount of a substance of one mole. Therefore, it is the proportional factor that relates the molar mass of a substance to the mass of a sample. Its value is equal to 6.023 x 1023.

If you want to know more about this well-known scientist, click on the following link: Amedeo Avogadro