Throughout the course of time, there have been many influential discoveries that have ultimately reshaped and changed the thought processes around not only those time periods, but around the expanses of the experimental breakthroughs found by future generations. The unearthing of palladium (Pd) can most assuredly be considered one of those significant findings. Possessing a history full of doubt, speculation, and intrigue, palladium has proven itself to be an element of monumental importance with a lasting impression that has spanned many centuries and eventually led to the reshaping of the daily lives of present day society.
In order to understand the scale to which palladium has molded the modern era, it is important to first understand the origins of this rare element. The path leading to the discovery of palladium originated from the investigation and use of platinum which dates back to some early civilizations such as the ancient Egyptians, Esmeraldas, and Spaniards. During the reign of the ancient Egyptians, platinum was used as a means of decorating, and enhancing, ornamental artifacts in exactly the same fashion as gold or silver. Similarly, the Esmeraldas, an aboriginal culture found in a specific locale within Northern Ecuador, where the first people to create jewelry out of pure platinum, or platinum combinations with other precious metals. It is speculated by anthropologists that the ability to craft such ornaments stemmed from a rather complex utilization of an area of science known as powder metallurgy. The concept of powder metallurgy involves creating metals from powder through a process known as sintering.
However, despite the significant skill displayed by the Esmeraldas in terms of their ability to work with ...
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...nse of skepticism, intrigue, admiration, and an outright need in order to further the continuance of the present day way of life. Without this precious metal, laboratory experiments, dental procedures, electronic technology developments, automobile productions, and even jewelry making practices would not exist in their current forms or as contemporary modes of thought. It may even be said that some of the most influential, scientific breakthroughs of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty first centuries would not have been possible had it not been for the existence of palladium containing compounds to serve as catalysts. It is for this reason that palladium has been, and will continue to be, one of the most important elements that has ever been discovered – most assuredly it has been one of the most significant contributions to the twenty first century way of life.
Although some of the elements have been known for thousands of years, our understanding of many elements is still young. Mendeleev’s first Periodic Table contained only 63 elements, and about that many were discovered in the following 100 years. Just like countries, emperors, philosophers, and cities, elements have histories, too.“The Disappearing spoon” by Sam Kean, is a detailed history of the elements on the Periodic Table. Kean does a important job of telling every single element’s journey throughout the history of mankind: from the earliest times, when chemistry was intermingled with alchemy, to these days of modern chemistry. For example: Thallium is considered the deadliest element, pretending to be potassium to gain entry into our cells where it then breaks amino acid bonds within proteins. The CIA once developed a plan to poison Fidel Castro by dosing his socks with thallium-tainted
Strontium was discovered by Adair Crawford, an Irish chemist, in 1790 while studying the mineral witherite (BaCO3). When he mixed witherite with hydrochloric acid (HCl), he did not get the results he expected. He assumed that his sample of witherite was contaminated with an unknown mineral, a mineral he named strontianite (SrCO3). Strontium was first isolated by Sir Humphry Davy, an English chemist, in 1808 through the electrolysis of a mixture of strontium chloride (SrCl2) and mercuric oxide (HgO). Strontium reacts vigorously with water and quickly tarnishes in air, so it must be stored out of contact with air and water. Due to its extreme reactivity to air, this element always naturally occurs combined with other elements and compounds. Strontium is very
achieved by Rutherford, has led to the creation of elements not found in nature; in work
We all know the saying, “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover.” Similarly, every element in the periodic table has its’ own story and its’ own unique meaning. However, the average high schooler simply associates these elements as something used in their chemistry classes. In fact, the elements seen on the periodic table actually have much more to do in our daily lives and in history than most people know. While giving a whole new perspective to the meaning of Chemistry, author Sam Kean successfully recounts the hidden tales through humor and wit in his bestselling novel The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements. Specifically, Chapter 15, “An Element of Madness,” addresses the lives of several “mad scientists” associated with selenium, manganese, palladium, barium, and roentgenium that ultimately led to their downfall.
The Maya didn’t discover metallurgy until late in the Classic period and used it only to produce jewelry and decorations for the elite. Artists and their numerous assistants cut and filled the stones used for palaces, pyramids, and housing, aided only by levers and stone tools. Each wave of construction represented the mobilization of thousands of laborers.
Gallium is a metal that was discovered in 1875 by Paul Emile Lecoq De Boisbaudren and is a “byproduct of the manufacture of aluminum” (“Gallium.” Web). Gallium has a low melting point of 29.76°c which is just slightly above room temperature. But even with an unusually low melting temperature, gallium has a very high boiling point of 2204°c. “Gallium expands by 3.1% when it solidifies” (“Gallium.” Avalon). Gallium was an element that was predicted by Dmitri Mendeleev and it “Validated his periodic table of elements” (“Gallium.” Avalon). When in solid form, Gallium has a Silver and reflective appearance.
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, a national bestseller by Sam Kean, breaks down the periodic table and explains chemistry, an often exasperating subject, in a funny and comprehensible way. Kean, who has been featured in numerous science journals and the New York Times Magazine, demonstrates how chemistry is applied in the real world by giving amusing anecdotes rather than the generic and boring applications, such as how Billy and Pablo used chemistry to make a baking soda and vinegar volcano for their fourth grade science fair, that textbooks typically provide. Each chapter explores different elements on the periodic table; the tenth chapter, “Take Two Elements, Call Me in the Morning,” discusses the positive and negatives effects of the applications of certain elements as medicines.
The true beginnings of the modern periodic table are found in 1669 when alchemist Hennig Brand became the first person to discover an element, phosphorus. This was accomplished accidentally through an alchemical process using urine meant to produce the fabled philosopher’s stone that was highly sought after during the time period. The actual chemical process that occurred involved the reaction of sodium phosphate and organic compounds found in urine at the high heat at which brand was boiling the urine. This reaction produced carbon monoxide and elemental phosphorus which then condensed and solidified in the form of the white phosphorous allotrope, which has a tetrahedral structure, is insoluble in water, and is highly thermodynamically unstable. He named the element, though he was not aware it was an element at the time, phosphorous meaning “light-bearing” as white phosphorous glows strongly when it is exposed to air. A few years later, English alchemist and scientific investigator Robert Boyle was able to independently isolate phosphorus through an improved process by adding sand to the urine causing a reaction in which sodium phosphate and carbon from the urine reacted with silica forming sodium metasil...
The first theory to do with the atom was by Democritus and Leucippus who first proposed the idea of the atom as an invisible particle that all matter is made of. However, the first real discovery of an element, besides those like Gold and Silver etc. (which people had been aware of before written history) was phosphorus, which was discovered by Henning Brand in 1649. In 1787, a French chemist called Antoine Lavoisier, made a list of all 33 known elements of the time. Between 1649 and 1869, the Periodic table was added to and in 1869 a total of 63 elements had been discovered. In 1864, John Newlands made a huge advancement in the arranging of these elements, as he was able to sort them in order of atomic weights and was also able to observe similar properties between elements. The creation of the Periodic table, however is considered to be done by Russian scientist Dimitri Mendeleev who proposed a table as a classification system for all of the elements that had been discovered and he even left spaces for elements that had not yet been discovered, but he predicted they would. The Periodic table contin...
The Periodic Table of Elements is a table that arranges all known chemical elements by order of their atomic numbers. During the 1600s, vast amounts of knowledge about the properties of elements and their compounds were discovered and by 1869 63 elements had been discovered. As more and more elements were discovered, scientists began to recognise similarities between their properties and began to devise means of classification. Thus the periodic table of elements was created. The current periodic table contains 117 elements, however more may yet be discovered. The elements in the periodic table are classified in groups, periods and blocks. Groups refer to elements with similar properties and are the vertical columns of the table. The periods are the horizontal rows and illustrate the number of valence electrons each element has (how many electrons are in the outer shell of the element). The position an element is in on the table allows a scientist to easily judge its properties, its reactivity and its similarities to other elements.
Because other metals were thought to be less perfect than gold, it was reasonable to believe that nature created gold out of other metals found deep within the earth and that a skilled artisan could duplicate this process. It was said that once someone was able to change, or transmute a "base" chemical into the perfect metal, gold, they would have achieved eternal life and salvation. In this way, alchemy turned into not only a scientific quest, but a spiritual quest as well. Although the purposes and techniques were often times ritualistic and fanciful, alchemy was in many ways the predecessor of modern science, especially the science of chemistry.The birthplace of alchemy was ancient Egypt, where, in Alexandria, it began to flourish during the Hellenistic period. Also at that time, a school of alchemy was developing in China.
Uranium, a radioactive element, was first mined in the western United States in 1871 by Dr. Richard Pierce, who shipped 200 pounds of pitchblende to London from the Central City Mining District. This element is sorta boring but I found something interesting, they used it to make an an atomic bomb in the Cold War. In 1898 Pierre and Marie Curie and G. Bemont isolated the "miracle element" radium from pitchblende. That same year, uranium, vanadium and radium were found to exist in carnotite, a mineral containing colorful red and yellow ores that had been used as body paint by early Navajo and Ute Indians on the Colorado Plateau. The discovery triggered a small prospecting boom in southeastern Utah, and radium mines in Grand and San Juan counties became a major source of ore for the Curies. It was not the Curies but a British team working in Canada which was the first to understand that the presence of polonium and radium in pitchblende was not due to simple geological and mineral reasons, but that these elements were directly linked to uranium by a process of natural radioactive transmutation. The theory of radioactive transformation of elements was brilliantly enlarge in1901 by the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford and the English chemist Frederick Soddy at McGill University in Montreal. At dusk on the evening of November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Rontgen, professor of physics at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, noticed a cathode tube that a sheet of paper come distance away. He put his hand between the tube and the paper, he saw the image of the bones in his hand on the paper.
The next era is the end of the 17th century- mid 19th century also known as “traditional chemistry”. In the 1700’s, Johann J. Beecher discovered a substance called phlogiston. When substances burn, phlogiston is supposedly added from the air to flame the object that’s burning. Charles Coulcomb the ...
John Dalton�s Periodic Tables. 2014. John Dalton�s Periodic Tables. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.sussexvt.k12.de.us/science/The%20History%20of%20the%20World%201500-1899/John%20Dalton's%20periodic%20tables.htm. [Accessed 12 May 2014].