Ethanol has been known and used throughout history, moving from use as an intoxicating drink in ancient times to an important chemical for industry and transportation in this century Ethanol is isolation as a relatively pure compound was first achieved by Islamic alchemists who developed the art of distillation during the Abbasid caliphate, the most notable of whom was Al-Razi Antoine Lavoisier described ethanol as a compound of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen Al-Kindī (801-873) unambiguously described the distillation of wine. Distillation of ethanol from water yields a product that is at most 96% ethanol in 1796, Absolute ethanol was first obtained by Johann Tobias Lowitz, by filtering distilled ethanol through charcoal in 1808, Nicolas-Théodore de Saussure determined ethanol's chemical formula in 1826, Ethanol was first prepared synthetically, through the independent efforts of Henry Hennel in Britain and S.G. Sérullas in France in 1828, Michael Faraday prepared ethanol by the acid-catalysed hydration of ethylene, in a process similar to that used for industrial ethanol synthesis today in 1858, Archibald Scott Couper published a structural formula for ethanol: this places ethanol among the first chemical compounds to have their chemical structures determined