This is something that never actually got explained to me in chemstry lessons in school and I’ve always been curious about since.
How, before electron microscopes capable of seeing individual atoms, were scientists able to say for certain that some substances were only made of one type of atom (e.g. oxygen in oxygen gas/ozone, carbon in graphite/diamond, or iron) but others were made of multiple types (e.g. H2O)
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We experiment. For example, water H2O can be broken apart into H and O. SO we can see that if you do something like running electricity through water it becomes two different kinds of gasses, ergo water is a compound molecule.
Other experiments might include heating it up or exposing it to other kinds of chemicals and observing their reactions.
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