a German-Swiss chemist who is best known for inventing the fuel cell (1838) at the same time as William Robert Grove, Robert Cumming and his discoveries of guncotton and ozone. It was while doing experiments on the electrolysis of water that Schönbein first began to notice a distinctive odor in his laboratory. This smell gave Schönbein the clue to the presence of a new product from his experiments. Because of the pronounced smell, Schönbein coined the term "ozone" for the new gas, from the Greek word "ozein", meaning "to smell". Schönbein described his discoveries in publications in 1840. He later found that the smell of ozone was similar to that produced by the slow oxidation of white phosphorus.
