FYI February 22, 2018

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On This Day

1819 – By the Adams–Onís Treaty, Spain sells Florida to the United States for five million U.S. dollars.
The Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819,[1] also known as the Transcontinental Treaty,[2] the Florida Purchase Treaty,[3] or the Florida Treaty,[4][5] was a treaty between the United States and Spain in 1819 that ceded Florida to the U.S. and defined the boundary between the U.S. and New Spain. It settled a standing border dispute between the two countries and was considered a triumph of American diplomacy. It came in the midst of increasing tensions related to Spain’s territorial boundaries in North America against the United States and Great Britain in the aftermath of the American Revolution; and also during the Latin American Wars of Independence. Florida had become a burden to Spain, which could not afford to send settlers or garrisons. Madrid decided to cede the territory to the United States through the Adams–Onís Treaty in exchange for settling the boundary dispute along the Sabine River in Spanish Texas. The treaty established the boundary of U.S. territory and claims through the Rocky Mountains and west to the Pacific Ocean, in exchange for the U.S. paying residents’ claims against the Spanish government up to a total of $5,000,000 and relinquishing the US claims on parts of Spanish Texas west of the Sabine River and other Spanish areas, under the terms of the Louisiana Purchase.

The treaty remained in full effect for only 183 days: from February 22, 1821, to August 24, 1821, when Spain signed the Treaty of Córdoba acknowledging the independence of Mexico. The Treaty of Limits, signed in 1828 and effective in 1832, recognized the border defined by the Adams–Onís Treaty as the boundary between the United States and Mexico.

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Born On This Day

1879 – Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted, Danish chemist and academic (d. 1947)
Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted (Danish: [joˈhanˀəs ˈneɡolɑwˀs ˈbʁɶnsdɛð]; 22 February 1879 – 17 December 1947) born in Varde, was a Danish physical chemist.[1][2][3] He earned a degree in chemical engineering in 1899 and his Ph.D. in 1908 from the University of Copenhagen and was immediately thereafter appointed professor of inorganic and physical chemistry at the same university.[4]

In 1906 he published the first of his many papers on electron affinity,[4] and, simultaneously with the English chemist Thomas Martin Lowry, he introduced the protonic theory of acid-base reactions in 1923.[5][6] That same year, Gilbert N. Lewis proposed an electronic theory of acid-base reactions, but both theories remain commonly used.[4]

He became known as an authority on catalysis by acids and bases and was the namesake of the Brønsted catalysis equation. Working with Lowry[citation needed], he also developed the often-used theory of proton donation, theorizing that a hydrogen atom (which is always found in an acid) ionizes into hydronium upon dissolving in water, thereby losing its electron and becoming a proton donor, and that hydroxide (a water molecule stripped of one of its two hydrogen atoms) is a proton receiver. Mixing the two causes a neutralization reaction wherein hydronium and hydroxide combine, creating hydrogen hydroxide, a compound otherwise known as water. The pH scale may be interpreted as “power of hydrogen”, and the definition is based on the work of Brønsted and Lowry.[4]

In World War II, Brønsted’s opposition to the Nazis led to his election to the Danish parliament in 1947, but he was too ill to take his seat and died shortly after the election.[4]

 
 
 
 

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