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The early Earth was not what it appears today. The Earth may have various inorganic chemicals that react with each other to form organic compounds. Further evolution has lead to the changes that we see today as the environment on Earth.

To mimic Earth’s early environment, Stanley Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, performed an experiment.

In his experimental set-up, he made a closed system with a large flask mimicking the sea, a flask above it containing the gases in the atmosphere, and one more flask connected through a condenser that mimicked the rain with organic compounds. He heated the large flask.

The vapors that mimicked the atmosphere were collected at the flask above it, containing ammonia, hydrogen, and methane gas. Sparks were discharged through electrodes that mimicked the lightning. These vapors condensed and cooled rainwater containing organic compounds and were collected in the last flask.

Miller also set up a control set of the same experiment where he didn’t discharge spark. The presence of a spark in the main experiment showed that the spark was required to provide energy to the inorganic compounds for reacting with each other.