Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements

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which were later drawn to be correct. Agatha Christie's book 'The Pale Horse' revoloved around tellurium poisoning and some readers could identify their symptoms as an effect of tellurium poisoning. Mr Aldersey-Williams’ select bibliography now strongly and helpfully points me in the direction of I Nechaev’s 1942 book “Chemical Elements” (or rather of the translation from the Russian), as being my long-lost book. Also, some of the names I saw engraved on the chemistry building in college now have new meaning and were discussed in the book. One name for example was Berzelius who helped chemistry by determining the method to calculate atomic weights and developed the modern chemical symbols for the elements used in chemical equations.

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

Not only a cultural history of the elements, it is also a lament to the loss of science as a hobby"

Platinum had a low value and was seen as less valuable when compared to silver. Chabaneau was bought to Madrid to carry out Who knew, for example, that the British general Wellington was known as the “Iron Duke” not for his prowess in battle but because he had installed iron shutters on the windows of his London home as protection against the mob? And how many would-be murderers, intent on using the element thallium to poison their victims, have been foiled by Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse, where death by ingesting that metal is integral to the plot?

Periodic Tales - ChemistryViews Periodic Tales - ChemistryViews

I will admit that I am starting to get a bit weary of popular science books. Do not get me wrong being trained as a chemist and working in science and engineering for many years I find these books fascinating. Born of the age of alchemy and harbouring the kind of mysterious influence that alchemists sought, phosphorus brought wealth to a few but misery to many. For over 300 years, phosphorus maimed, killed, polluted and burned - sometimes on a terrifying scale. Yet, such were its perceived benefits that doctors prescribed it, every home contained it and whole industries were dedicated to its manufacture urn:lcp:periodictalescur0000alde:epub:566875bf-5efc-409c-bf0c-2ddb4d0479bd Foldoutcount 0 Identifier periodictalescur0000alde Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9t25zf4n Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780670918119 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9866 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000287 Openlibrary_editionIron has long thought to have male warlike properties. The metallic taste of blood was explained when Vincenzo Menghini roasted the blood of several mammals and poked the residue with a magnetic knife and found iron particles. Mars is covered with iron which

Periodic Tales - Penguin Books UK

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. Humans and other species have generally been very wary of bright colours in nature which may signify ripe fruit and fresh meat or warn of poisonous berries and venomous creatures. The colours of fruits are based on yellow xanthophyll, the orange carotenes and purple anthocyanins which are all organic compounds containing no metallic elements. 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.Both books are similar in style and cover the same elements (there are only a finite amount of them!) but do so in completely different and interesting ways. It might be due to the time between reading both books but I didn't notice any overlap in information or anecdotes. If something was familiar it was more like getting the other side of the story than a repeat of the same details. Periodic Tales’ adopts Nechaev’s central thesis; to describe the sheer human and technological excitement of the discovery of the chemical elements. Unsurprisingly, there is considerably more to say in 2011 than in 1942; and not only about the fleeting fascinating existences of the man-made transuranic elements; where physicists have gracelessly elbowed the chemists out of the party.