Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius was born #OTD in 1859. He was famous for showing how dissolved salts separate into charged particles ("ions"). In developing a theory to explain the ice ages, Arrhenius, in 1896, was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide will increase Earth's surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.
In 1889, Arrhenius explained the fact that most reactions require added heat energy to proceed by formulating the concept of activation energy, an energy barrier that must be overcome before two molecules will react, the so called Arrhenius equation.
In 1903 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the extraordinary services he has rendered to the advancement of chemistry by his electrolytic theory of dissociation."
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