Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements

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Was Napoleon murdered by arsenic poisoning on St. Helena? Probably not, though a significant amount of it was later found in his body – arsenic was widely used during the nineteenth century to make a vivid green color, and was frequently found in common household items such as wallpaper. Was there a time when aluminum was more precious than gold, and why do Europeans add an extra ‘I’ to make it ‘aluminium’? The initial extraction required enormously expensive raw materials, but when a process was developed using electrolysis its price, as well as its haute couture appeal, dropped sharply. As for that extra syllable, the word was spelled various ways by the early users, but ‘ium’ is a frequent word ending for elements, so it became the accepted spelling in some places.

Periodic Tales - Wikipedia

One difference from Kean's book is that Aldersey-Williams' book is more autobiographical and outlines a number of personal household experiments which he carries out to illustrate the properties of the elements under discussion - such as pouring molten lead into water to produce weird shapes from which one's fortune can be told and extracting phosphorus from one's own urine. of a synthetic route to make ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen. After discussions, Haber resolved to pay the 269 billion goldmarksIt’s easy to see how an element like gold was appreciated and has many historical uses. It doesn’t tarnish, can be used as currency and is desirable purely as ornament. What to do with neon though? It is a relative late-comer to the table, isolated in 1898. Eventually in the 1940s, 50s and 60s it had a glorious life. Viva Las Vegas! Alas it is expensive, found largely in unpleasant places and in short supply today. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out collects the best short works of rule-breaking genius Richard Feynman, showing his passion for knowledge and sense of fun at their most infectious.

Periodic Tales The Curious Lives of the Elements - NHBS Periodic Tales The Curious Lives of the Elements - NHBS

Below are a selection of wider reading and ideas for you to advance your chemistry knowledge before embarking on A level. If you buy a standard ‘30C’ dose of any homepathic treatment, it means the active ingredient has been diluted thirty times, by a factor of 100. That might not sound like too much, until you realise that your chance of getting even one molecule of the original substance in your pill is one in a billion billion billion billion. In his influential book Bad Science, Skeptic superstar Dr Ben Goldacre explained that you would have to drink a sphere of water that stretches from the earth to the sun just to get one solitary, pointless molecule of it. (p. 129) Ampere warned Davy about the dangers of the experiment- which Davy ignored and proceeded to receive cuts to his eye from flying glass. Autors pastāsta arī dažus savus eksperimentus, uz kuriem viņu ir pamudinājusi grāmatas sarakstīšana. Tad nu varam uzzināt kā no urīna iegūt fosforu vai no asinīm dzelzi.

However, I suppose I’m a bit different than many readers in the sense that while I’m certainly no expert in the field of chemistry, I do seem to possess more knowledge and curiosity for this science than the average person (attributable to a chemist ex of mine, who would therefore speak about organic chemistry to me often in extensive detail).

Chemistry: A cultural history of the elements | Nature Chemistry: A cultural history of the elements | Nature

Mr Aldersey-Williams’ writes for an adult, or interested teenager, audience, whereas I was reading Nechaev whilst still in primary (age 6-11) education. ‘Periodic Tales’ is wider, deeper, and longer; dipping into literature, mining, cookery, war, oceanography, classical history, Christianity, art, materials science, architecture …. That is by no means a comprehensive list. Joseph Priestley: A man of intellectual curiosity who was inspired by Benjamin Franklin to take up experimental science. He later turned his attention to the constant bubbling of the 'fixed air' which emanated from the beer mash next door. These omissions made many scientists suspicious until, in 1875, they isolated gallium, whose atomic weight and chemistry had been predicted by Mendeleev. The great Russian was vindicated while chemists' lives were enriched by a substance of beguiling behaviour, as is suggested by the title of Kean's book. Gallium looks like aluminium but melts at a mere 29C. Make a spoon of it, give it to guests to stir their tea and watch it melt and form a metallic puddle at the bottom of their cups. Laugh? They have to mop it up. Grob thematisch gegliedert widmet Aldersey-Williams seinen Elementen oder manchmal auch zusammengehörigen Elementegruppen ein eigenes Kapitel und zeigt, dass Chemie in alle Lebensbereiche hineinspielt und keinesfalls nur aus öden Formeln und hin und wieder mal einem Experiment mit Knalleffekt besteht. Er berichtet zudem von seiner eigenen Leidenschaft für das Fach und seinem Versuch, sich ein eigenes Periodensystem mit Proben aller existierenden Elemente zusammenzubauen (Spoiler: es ist ihm nicht gänzlich gelungen).

Humans are meaning-making beings, attaching significance and projecting our fears and desires onto the natural world. In his 2011 book, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc, British author and journalist Hugh Aldersey-Williams examines how we’ve given meaning to the elements. Through a wide-ranging collection of historical examples, Aldersey-Williams examines how the elements on the periodic table don’t simply stay on a chart but are rather woven into the fabric of our culture, popping up in artists’ studios, streetlamps, cosmetics, fireworks, and more. Along the way, in addition to learning the history and science of the elements that make up the periodic table, Aldersey-Williams also examines how we’ve assigned specific cultural significance to these elements and integrated them into our everyday lives.

Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from

Also interesting were the seemingly universal reactions to certain elements - disgust at the “yellow vomit of light” in sodium (mostly in street lamps), respect for the “purity” of silver, awe at the “immortality” of gold, and so on. I also liked the historical examples of thallium and arsenic securing their place in the world as dangerous poisons used by stealthy murderers. Perhaps my favorite chapter in Randall Munroe's What If? is his examination of what would happen if you assembled Man, iespējams nepamatoti, ir šķitis, ka populārzinātniskās grāmatas latviski tiek izdotas daudz par maz. Un tādēļ man ir neviltota sajūsma ieraugot grāmatu veikalu plauktos kādu zinātnei veltītu grāmatu latviski. Ieraugot šo grāmatu, man uzreiz radās vēlmi to izlasīt. Pirmkārt tādēļ, ka tā bija latviešu valodā un otrkārt, viņa man labu laiku stāv izlasāmo sarakstā. Random relationship tip here: it’s always good to date intelligent people, and even better when you take the opportunity to learn things from them you otherwise wouldn’t have known. That way, if/when things end, you can say you learned a great deal from your experience in more ways than one, lol. I learned a lot of things thanks to this book. It is practically a science book for college students. I learned what explodes when reacted with water, what makes our streetlights glow, what makes an object a certain color, and what possibly killed Napoleon (undetermined if it was the actual cause of death). Also, I learned some chemistry terms. This book made me change what I read because I really want to read interesting facts now, either from the internet or from a book. I need to expand my horizon of what I read because someday, the information I gained could help me later in the future.Great fun to read and an endless fund of unlikely and improbable anecdotes ... sharp and often witty" is speculated to have originated from the meteorites instead of a volcanic eruption. Richard Ford discovered that by varying the amount of coal or coke added to the ore, one could produce iron which was brittle or tough. Each chapter and even each sub-section tells a fun and fascinating tale along the way while we watch the author try (and sometimes fail) to add another element to his collection.