Carbon chemistry is also called organic chemistry, because all of the key compounds found in living things contain carbon. Some carbon compounds are inorganic.
In 1828, Friedrich Wöhler synthesized urea, reacting lead cyanate and ammonia and heating the ammonium cyanate, reducing the special status of organic compounds.
William Perkin made the first of the aniline dyes in1856, while investigating coal tar, a left-over from the manufacture of coal gas, starting a new industry.
In 1924, methanol, traditionally made by wood distillation, was able to be made from carbon monoxide and hydrogen in the presence of a suitable catalyst.
Carbon chemistry shows parallels and differences when compare with other group 4 elements, but the others do not form long chains as carbon does.
Carbon atoms can form a total of four bonds with other nearby atoms, so that they can link together to form chains, rings, nets, sheets and balls.
In 1874, van't Hoff and Le Bel proposed a 3-dimensional stereochemical representation of organic molecules and proposed a tetrahedral carbon atom.
Hydrocarbons can be altered with a substitution reaction, where one attachment (such as hydrogen atom) is replaced by another (such as chlorine atom).
The carboxyl group, generally written -COOH, is found in all carboxylic acids, along with a functional group which accounts for any observed differences.
A polymer is made from monomers, but different polymers may use the same monomer in different ways, by linking it differently or having more or less branching.
Carbohydrates are compounds containing the elements carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that contain a lot of energy and that are easy to store as polymers.
Amino acids may be assembled into a polypeptide chain which may then be folded down and held in shape by disulfide bridges, when it is referred to as a protein.
Proteins are polypeptides, that is, polymers made of strings of amino acids. The actual properties of a protein depend on how the polypeptide folds.
DNA has four bases (adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine) on a sugar phosphate polymer backbone. RNA has a similar structure, with uracil instead of thymine.
In 1990, Krätschmer, Lamb, Fostiropoulos, and Huffman discovered that buckminsterfullerene can be separated from soot because it was soluble in benzene.
In 1985, Harry Kroto and his colleagues discovered the unusual stability of the carbon-60 buckminsterfullerene molecule and deduced its structure.