A scientist weighed trees, and figured out that it is carbon from the air that comprises the weight gain.?

Question

It seems that this happened a couple hundred years ago. It was one of the earliest experiments that clarified the carbon cycle.

What is this guy's name?

Answer 1

Ummm, since trees have large amounts of water in them (leaf and bark cellular structure, sap, etc) the wight of plants cannot be soley from carbon. This research is obviously flawed. His name is therefore irrelevant.

Answer 2

In 1649, Jan Baptista Van Helmont's did experiments with a willow tree in which he tried to determine why a plant grown in a pot put on a certain amount of weight. Unfortuantely, he came up with the wrong answer. In 1804, the Swiss scientist Nicholas Theodore de Saussure repeated Van Helmont’s experiment but carefully measured the amounts of carbon dioxide and water that were given to the plant. He showed that the carbon in the plants came from carbon dioxide and the hydrogen from water. Then, forty years later, a Garman scientist, Julius Mayer, showed that the energy of sunlight is captured in photosynthesis. .

Answer 3

I forget the scientist's name, but I remember the experiment you are talking about.

He weighed some soil and put it in a tub. He then planted a tree in the tub and watered it for some length of time. After a while, he removed the tree, collected all of the soil, and weighed the soil (after drying). Since the weight of the soil was basically the same, he concluded that the weight of the tree must come from the water and/or the air, but not the soil. (or at least only a tiny amount of weight from the soil)

Hopefully, this will help clarify it for the next answerer.