Nitrogen, it is usually agreed, was discovered in 1772 by the British chemist, Daniel Rutherford, although others, including Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Henry Cavendish, succeeded in isolating the gas at around the same time. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, who identified the gas as an element in 1776, named it {Iazote}, from the Greek word meaning 'no life', because of the impossibility of breathing in a nitrogen atmosphere. The present name was coined in 1790.
Phosphorus was discovered in 1669, when the German alchemist, Hennig Brandt, succeeded in isolating it from urine which had been left to stand in buckets for several days. The strangely-extracted substance was seen to glow in the dark.
All three of the remaining group members were known before nitrogen or phosphorus. Arsenic has been used as both a medicine and a poison for two and a half thousand years, and was probably isolated by the German alchemist, Albertus Magnus, in about 1250. Antimony too was known to both the ancients and the alchemists. The Bible tells of Queen Jezebel using an antimony compound as a cosmetic, and although alchemical records are unclear, it is probable that the element itself was discovered by Basilius Valentinus in the middle of the fifteenth century. Bismuth, which was confused with both arsenic and antimony during the medieval period, was a further subject of Valentinus' attentions.
