We'll give you a hint: It's not 867-5309. That's Jenny's number, not Avogadro's.

You're also not

going to find these digits scrawled in marker on the wall of the public bathroom. You will,
however, discover it within the pages of a standard chemistry textbook: It's 6.0221415 10 23.
Written out, that's 602,214,150,000,000,000,000,000. Short on time? Just call it a mole.

Just like a dozen is 12 things, a mole is simply Avogadro's number of

things. In chemistry, those "things" are atoms or molecules. In theory, you
could have a mole of baseballs or anything else, but given that a mole of baseballs would
cover the Earth to a height of several hundred miles, you'd be hard-pressed to find good
practical use for a mole of anything bigger than a molecule. So if the mole is only used for
chemistry, how did Amedeo Avogadro (full name: Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro)
and chemistry cross paths?

Born in Italy in 1776, Avogadro grew up during an important period in the development of
chemistry. Chemists like John Dalton and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac were beginning to
understand the basic properties of atoms and molecules, and they hotly debated how these
infinitesimally small particles behaved. Gay-Lussac's law of combining volumes particularly
interested Avogadro. The law stated that when two volumes of gases react with one another to
create a third gas, the ratio between the volume of the reactants and the volume of the product
is always made of simple whole numbers. Here's an example: Two volumes of hydrogen gas
combine with one volume of oxygen gas to form two volumes of water vapor (at least when
temperatures are high enough) with nothing left over, or:

2H2 + O2 2H2O

Tinkering around with the implications of this law, Avogadro deduced that in order for this to
be true, equal volumes of any two gases at the same temperature and pressure must hold an
equal number of particles (Avogadro's law). And the only way to explain that this law could
be true for any example, including the one we just mentioned, is if there was a difference
between atoms and molecules and that some elements, like oxygen, actually exist as
molecules (in oxygens case, O2 rather than simply O) Granted, Avogadro didn't have words
like "molecule" to describe his theory, and his ideas met resistance from John Dalton, among
others. It would take another chemist by the name of Stanislao Cannizzaro to bring
Avogadro's ideas the attention they deserved. By the time those ideas gained traction,
Avogadro had already passed away.

So where does Avogadro's number fit into this? Because Avogadro's law proved so critical to
the advancement of chemistry, chemist Jean Baptiste Perrin named the number in his honor.
Read on to see how chemists determined Avogadro's number and why, even today, it's such an
important part of chemistry.

Avogadro's Number in Practice

How on Earth did chemists settle on such a seemingly arbitrary figure for Avogadro's
number? To understand how it was derived, we have to first tackle the concept of the
atomic mass unit (amu). The atomic mass unit is defined as 1/12 of the mass of
one atom of carbon-12 (the most common isotope of carbon). Here's why that's neat: Carbon-
12 has six protons, six electrons and six neutrons, and because electrons have very little mass,

1
1/12 of the mass of one carbon-12 atom is very close to the mass of a single proton
or a single neutron. The atomic weights of elements (those numbers you see below the
elements on the periodic table) are expressed in terms of atomic mass units as well. For
instance, hydrogen has, on average, an atomic weight of 1.00794 amu.

Unfortunately, chemists dont have a scale that can measure atomic mass units, and they
certainly dont have the ability to measure a single atom or molecule at a time to carry out a
reaction. Since different atoms weigh different amounts, chemists had to find a way to bridge
the gap between the invisible world of atoms and molecules and the practical world of
chemistry laboratories filled with scales that measure in grams. In order to do this, they
created a relationship between the atomic mass unit and the gram, and that relationship looks
like this:

1 amu = 1/6.0221415 x 1023 grams

This relationship means that if we had Avogadro's number, or one mole, of carbon-12 atoms
(which has an atomic weight of 12 amu by definition), that sample of carbon-12 would weigh
exactly 12 grams. Chemists use this relationship to easily convert between the measurable
unit of a gram and the invisible unit of moles, of atoms or molecules.