Amedeo Avogadro Lab Report

Amedeo Avogadro was an Italian mathematician in the middle 1800’s. He devised a way of measuring the concentration of particles in a sample. Whether the sample is composed of atoms or molecules, he determined that the number of particles having a mass number matching the “atomic weight” was always 6.02 X 1023. In other words, if you had a sample of carbon with a mass of 12.011 grams, then you would have an Avogadro number of atoms. If you had a sample of water with a mass of 18.00 grams, then you would have his number of molecules in that water sample. Avogadro gave us the ability to count particles (concentration) by simply weighing the sample. This made balancing equations and the application of chemistry a predictable science. Avogadro’s number has become the standard in chemistry. When we look at the periodic table, and read the “mass”, we are really getting the mass of six hundred and two, billion-trillion atoms.
As no two lima beans are the exact same size, then they can’t be expected to have the exact same mass. To negate these differences in the beans of our sample, we randomly gather and weigh three groups of beans. Each groups mass is added together. The simple math of dividing the total mass of all of the beans in the three groups by the number of beans which were weighed produces the average mass of one bean. This would be the equivalent of what is now called the molar mass. Now one needs only to weigh a sample of that bean and then divide by this determined average mass, to predict the total number of beans in the sample being investigated. This procedure is repeated for the other three types of beans and a pattern