Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements

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The history, science, art, literature and everyday applications of all the elements from aluminium to zinc' The Times

Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from

The red poppy which we commemorate the loss of life in World War I is a symbol of survival- the flower grew from the soil of the battlefields which were fertilized with the blood of the slain. However, chlorine- which was used in 1915 would both choke lungs and bleach the flowers white. Chlorine is the most brutal weapon as it rips through the blood vessels that line the lung and the victim eventually drowns in a fluid produced as the body attempts to repair the damage. Haber's wife, Clara, commited suicide using her husband's revolver whereas his son by his second marriage, Lutz, was haunted by his father's history and wrote the book The Poisonous Cloud. Haber was forced to leave Germany with his family when his Berlin research insitute was shut down by the Nazis. pattern (it contained then-undiscovered elements osmium and iridium), and later abandoned the work only returning to itThe elements do not belong in a laboratory; they are the property of us all. Periodic Tales is a record of the journey with the elements that I never encouraged to take when I was a chemist,” writes Aldersey-Williams in the introduction. With this start, the author presents an unorthodox and invigorating look at the elements in our cultural history and in many areas of everyday life. Aldersey-Williams takes the reader on a personal and emotional journey through the world of several elements along with their discoverers and discovery location. To quote the author: "My aim in this book has been to show that the elements are all around us, both in the material sense that they are in the objects we treasure and under our kitchen sinks, but also around us more powerfully in a figurative sense, in our art and literature and language, in our history and geography, and that the character of these parallel lives arises ultimately from each element's universal and unvarying properties." Cleopatra- as reported by Pliny- thought of impressing Marcus Antonius by announcing that she would throw the most expensive banquet ever given. The food was rich enough but not worth what was declared and Antonius' protests were met by Cleopatra removing her pearl earrings- the largest ever known- and dissolving them in vinegar. She then drank this liquor and won the wager. 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.

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Not all these periodic tales are so appealing. The 17th-century alchemist Hennig Brand boiled down gallons of his own urine to produce a residue that glowed in the dark. This was the element phosphorus. Brand carried out his work in Hamburg which, 270 years later, had 1,900 tonnes of incendiary phosphorus bombs dropped on it by Allied bombers. The resulting firestorm destroyed much of the city, including the district where Brand had discovered the element, and "melted between 40,000 and 50,000 people," according to the historian Jorg Friedrich. Sadly, phosphorus is still employed to make weapons, as Israel demonstrated during a raid in Gaza in 2009. "The smokescreen that phosphorus produces remains moral as well as literal," notes Aldersey-Williams. The third chapter, “Craft”, makes clear that we would not have bells without tin and that silver led to photography, for example. We are confronted by the properties of metals such as zinc, aluminum, copper, titanium, tantalum, and niobium not only in architecture, art, and power lines, but also in medicine.Why did a little lithium (Li, 3) help cure poet Robert Lowell of his madness? And how did gallium (Ga, 31) become the go-to element for laboratory pranksters? The Disappearing Spoon has the answers, fusing science with the classic lore of invention, investigation, discovery and alchemy, from the big bang through to the end of time. Wollaston was a precise and self-controlled man. He could write on glass with a diamond with the script being so small that

Periodic tales : the curious lives of the elements : Aldersey Periodic tales : the curious lives of the elements : Aldersey

Svante Arrhenius: First director of the Nobel Institute. Arrived at an estimate of the amount of gold dissolved in the seawater and his calculations boiled down to 6 mg per tonne of seawater. At this level, the total reserve of gold in the world's oceans Glenn Seaborg was the greatest elemental discoverer of all time- having produced plutonium,curium,americium,berkelium, With every breath, you literally inhale the history of the world. On the ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar died of stab wounds on the Senate floor, but the story of his last breath is still unfolding; in fact, you're probably inhaling some of it now. Of the sextillions of molecules entering or leaving your lungs at this moment, some might well bear traces of Cleopatra's perfumes, German mustard gas, particles exhaled by dinosaurs or emitted by atomic bombs, even remnants of stardust from the universe's creation. Like the elements that Aldersey-Williams collected in his youth, this book is just that: a fun and accessible collection of stories about the periodic table and the elements that comprise it. I largely enjoyed reading Periodic Tales, but the disjointed nature of the content made it a bit difficult to read in large chunks, and I found my motivation to finish it dwindling as time progressed (although I’m entirely glad I did finish it since Aldersey-Williams’s excursions to the mines of Germany and Sweden offered some interesting avenues for my research and writing).

An extremely enjoyable book. To date it’s the closest I’ve found to one of my absolute favorite childhood books, passed down to me, long since mislaid; the title and author of which I cannot remember. That book had a red cover. Inside there were the most marvelous stories of the discovery of (amongst others) the composition of air (Scheele, Cavandish, Lavoisier), the alkali-earth metals (Davy), and helium (Kirchoff & Bunsen) in our Sun. Neither of these books is a history of the development of the periodic table, a group-by-group discussion of chemical properties or a discussion of recent variations in the presentation of the table. For these the reader should consult such books as that by Eric Scerri. Andrew Robinson is a writer based in London, and author of The Story of Measurement. [email protected] ,

Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersey-Williams | Waterstones

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. Nevertheless, with 2011 being the International Year of Chemistry, it should not be surprising that there were several books published on that iconic representation of chemistry - the periodic table. While their chemical properties of the elements in the periodic table are important it is the cultural baggage these substances have accumulated that the author is most concerned with. This is particularly true when talking about the things we value and esteem. Gold and silver are not only objects of worth but symbols of it as well. Just ask the guy who gets the bronze medal. However there was a time when aluminum was so highly valued that the guests at Napoleon III's table were given cutlery made for it to eat with while the less favored were given silver or gold.

Penguin, 2011

Lccn 2011009864 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL24895938M Openlibrary_edition To quote the author: "My aim in this boo experiments on the metal. Chabaneau thought he had managed to obtain the pure metal but as it refused to settle down to a standard Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements/A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc