The Disappearing Spoon Chapter Summary

Sidharth Sirdeshmukh
1/8/2016
Mr. Murphy
AP Chemistry, 3&4 Period
Disappearing Spoon Chapter 7 Analysis The Disappearing Spoon, by Sam Kean, calls attention to parallels among various groups and subsets of elements, what these elements are useful for, and the history behind them, using a profusion of historical examples, and personal anecdotes to back up and validate his claims. The author, Sam Kean has had an affinity for the Periodic Table of the Elements from a very young age. The time he spent goggling at mercury from broken thermometers, as well as his study of the elements in recreational reading as well as college texts, gave Kean the general interest and aptness to write this novel. Chapter 7 of the book, Extending the Table, Expanding

In addition, Seaborg and his team used the University of California’s Radiation Laboratory’s Cyclotron to perform the experiment once the samples had been prepared. The machine functions by attracting and repelling charged samples (ions) towards and away from the outer walls of the machine, to induce a spiral effect on the sample. When the sample speeds up, and moves farther towards the outside of the chamber, collides at high speed with a detector, and at that instant has proton(s) removed from the sample creating the new element (American Institute of Physics,

Unlike the Rutherford gold-foil experiment where Alpha Particles were beamed at foil to test for the presence of protons in the nuclei, the gold itself was being hurled at the detector within the Cyclotron. Therefor, the rules and applications derived from the Rutherford experiment were not in play for the Mendelevium-discovery experiment. The element was finally discovered when fire alarms on the University of California campus rang, due to Seaborg’s lab technician’s crafty idea to wire the Cyclotron detector to the alarm system on the campus. The rings confirmed the discovery of Mendelevium, and gave way to the fabrication of 5 other elements thereafter. Overall, it is evident that the use of new methods proposed by Seaborg and his team helped to beget Mendelevium and 5 other trans-elements that followed. Without the use of new technology like the Cyclotron, particle isolation and setting methods like the gold foil usage, and general ingenuity by the University of California team, the Periodic Table of Elements that we know today would not