History of Determining Total Water Hardness in Czechoslovakia

The analytical determination of the sum of calcium and magnesium in water (commonly known as water hardness) can be divided into the era of the soap solution titration (until 1945) and that of the complexometric titration introduced by Gerold Schwarzenbach and his team (since 1945). This article describes the history in the Czech lands from the first mention of soap titration in 1863, via the era of Czechoslovakia (1918–1992) to the modern present (Czech Republic), when chelatometry is widely used.