March
11
/ 2019
During the 19th century, the members of the British upper class engaged in a peculiar form of entertainment known as laughing gas parties. Such parties involved the inhalation of nitrous oxide (N 2O), which was discovered during the 18th century. Such parties spread across the Atlantic to the United States, where the anesthetic and pain reducing effects of nitrous oxide were recognized. Although the novelty of laughing gas parties eventually wore off, nitrous oxide has significant medical uses even today. When Was Nitrous Oxide Discovered? Nitrous oxide was first discovered in 1772 by Joseph Priestley, an English chemist. Priestley published this discovery three years later in Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, in which the gas (which he
