The Chemistry Behind Your Home’s Water Supply

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We take for granted the water that comes out of the taps in our home when we turn them on – but a lot of work goes into getting it there. Chemistry, too, has a hand in making sure that the water is safe to drink. Here, we take a look at the water treatment process, and in particular the chemicals used to get clean drinking water to your tap.

The water that ends up in our homes can begin in a number of places. Much of it is groundwater – water beneath the Earth’s surface, trapped between the pores and cracks in rocks. This water can actually be relatively pure, due to natural filtration through chalk and similar rock types, and as such can sometimes skip through some of the treatment steps we’ll detail here, as it contains little by way of debris and organic material.

Linus Pauling and Electronegativity

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Today, February 28, marks the birthday of Linus Pauling. For chemists Pauling likely needs no introduction; he’s famed for his work on the nature of chemical bonds and also on the structures of biological molecules. Here we take a brief look at one aspect of his work to which he lent his name: the Pauling electronegativity scale.

Though Pauling’s name is lent to the scale that measures it, electronegativity wasn’t a concept that he came up with. In fact the term was introduced way back in 1811 by another famous chemist, Jöns Jacob Berzelius. However, Pauling was the first scientist to propose a measurable scale for electronegativity and to fully define the concept as we know it today.