What is the history of chemistry?

Chemistry has a very long history. Some of its major principles have been known since ancient times among the Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, and Mesopotamians. One of the earliest applications of chemistry was metalworking, as ancient civilizations mixed different metal elements to create alloys for their weapons and armor. In ancient Greece, Aristotle postulated that everything is made of 4 elements, fire, air, earth and water, the earliest known statement that smaller elements made up the world. Scientists continued experimenting throughout the Middle Ages and started applying the scientific method to chemistry. The discipline grew more diverse with the Enlightenment. Chemists throughout Europe discovered new elements and learned more about how atoms and molecules comprised our world. In the 1860s, Dmitri Mendeleev developed the periodic table of elements, a design that we still use today. Since then, new subfields of chemistry have developed like organic, radioactive, and mechanic, as scientists applied findings from other sciences to the study of chemistry.