A famous Greek philosopher considered water to be one of the four elementary components of Nature along with fire, air and earth. He propounded that animate beings came into being from inanimate objects. The alchemist, who was precursor chemist concerned with the transmutation of basemetal into gold regarded water as an element.
The concept of water as an element persisted until the experiments of Henry Cavendish (1781), who established water as a combustion product of hydrogen . Hydrogen was discovered by Henry Cavendish in 1766. In 1783, Antoine Lavoisier discovered the water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. This marked the beginning of the modern chemistry of water.
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Aristotle