Pollard said in his paper that two years ago, he was only 17 years old and was a student of a pharmaceutical college in France. At that time, he studied salt lake water in his hometown of Montpellier. After salt is extracted from lake water, chlorine gas is introduced into the remaining mother liquor to obtain reddish-brown liquid. He knew that reddish-brown thing was probably "iodine chloride".
Just "maybe" is not enough. Pollard decided to confirm whether it was iodine chloride. Iodine chloride is an unstable chemical combination in principle and will decompose when heated. However, that reddish-brown thing will not decompose and has a pungent taste.
Pollard also studied seaweed. He found that burning seaweed into ash, leaching it with hot water, and then introducing chlorine into it, at this time, in addition to the purple-black solid-iodine crystal, a reddish-brown liquid was obtained. After careful study, Pollard concluded that this reddish-brown liquid is an undiscovered chemical element. Pollard gave it a name, which means "salt water" according to the original Greek. Pollard informed the French Academy of Sciences of his discovery. The Academy of Sciences renamed this new element "bromine". According to the original Greek meaning, it means "smelly". '
Justus von Liebig stamped his foot straight after reading the newspaper, and he regretted it! Why? A few years ago, a businessman took a bottle of red-brown liquid extracted from seaweed ash and asked him to identify it. He didn't study it in depth, but told the businessman that it was "iodine chloride" and labeled it. In this way, due to his carelessness, he naturally missed the opportunity to discover new elements. Justus von Liebig, I'm so sorry. He published an article saying: "It was not Pollard who discovered bromine, but bromine who discovered Pollard!"
Pollard's name went down in the history of chemistry because of the discovery of bromine. Justus von Liebig has the courage to correct his mistakes. He carefully took off the "iodine chloride" label attached to the sample bottle and hung it on the bedside as a lesson. He often shows it to his friends in the hope that they can learn from it. Later, when Justus von Liebig talked about it in his autobiography, he wrote: "From now on, unless there is a very reliable experiment as the basis, I will never fabricate my own theory out of thin air."