Timeline of photosynthis discovery

The beginning

After measuring the mass of the soil a plant was using and the mass of the plant as it grew he noiteced the soil mass changed very little, thus hypothesized that the mass of the growing plant must come from the water.

Joseph Priestley

discovered that when an isolated volume of air under an inverted jar and burned a candle in it (which gave off CO2), the candle would burn out very quickly, much before it ran out of wax.

Jan Ingenhousz repeated Priestley's experiments. He discovered that it was the influence of sunlight on the plant that could cause it to revive a mouse in a matter of hours.

Jean Senebier demonstrated that green plants consume carbon dioxide and release oxygen under the influence of light. Nicolas-Théodore de Saussure showed that the increase in mass of the plant as it grows could not be due only to uptake of CO2 but also to the incorporation of water. Thus, the basic reaction by which organisms use photosynthesis to produce food (such as glucose) was outlined.

Cornelis Van Niel was the first to demonstrate that photosynthesis is a light-dependent redox reaction in which hydrogen reduces (donates its atoms as electrons and protons to) carbon dioxide. by studyng purple sulfur bacteria and green bacteria.

by testing plant productivity using different wavelengths of light. Robert Emerson discovered two light reactions. thus high lightung two photosystems.

prove that the oxygen developed during the photosynthesis of green plants came from water.

used radioactive isotopes to determine that the oxygen liberated in photosynthesis came from the water.

Melvin Calvin and Andrew Benson, along with James Bassham, elucidated the path of carbon assimilation The carbon reduction cycle is known as the Calvin cycle.