The Chemical Element

A Historical Perspective

Andrew G. Ede

• Publisher: Greenwood
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780313333040
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780313038648
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

One of the most familiar features of any high-school chemistry lab is the Periodic Table of Elements. Elegant, informative, useful to any student in the lab - the Periodic Table neatly summarizes our scientific knowledge of the chemical elements from hydrogen to uranium and beyond - atomic number, atomic weight, isotopes, and more. But how did scientists discover all of these features of the elements? How did the Periodic Table come to be? And, even more basically, how did the concept of the chemical element come to dominate how scientists understand chemistry? This book shows readers the answers to these and other questions regarding the scientific understanding of matter.

The Chemical Element, a volume in the Greenwood Guides to Great Ideas in Science, traces the history of this tremendously powerful concept from the ancient philosophers to the present day. The volume covers: the idea of the elements held by Aristotle and the other ancient Greek philosophers; how Chinese, Arabic and other ancient civilizations thought about the elements; Mendeleyev and the creation of the Periodic Table of Elements, the predictive power of which helped in the discovery of dozens of new elements; and the discovery of the artificial elements that are heavier than uranium

Jargon and mathematics is kept to a minimum, and the volumes includes a timeline, a glossary, and a bibliography, making The Chemical Element an ideal resource for students researching chemistry and the history and nature of the scientific understanding of the world around us.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• Series Foreword
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Ancient Matter Theory
• 2 Greek Matter Theory from Thales to Aristotle
• 3 Matter Theory in China, the Middle East, and India
• 4 Alchemy and the Concept of Elements
• 5 Corpuscles and Atoms
• 6 Bringing Order to Chaos
• 7 Making Elements Elemental
• 8 Seeking Order: The Periodic Table
• 9 The Atomic Elements
• 10 The Elements beyond 92
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: The Periodic Table
• Appendix 2: History of the Elements
• Appendix 3: The Elements by Alphabetical Order
• Appendix 4: The Elements by Date of Discovery
• Glossary
• Annotated Bibliography
• Bibliography
• Index
• Figure 1. Egyptian god Osiris.
• Figure 2. Geometric solids.
• Figure 3. Zeno’s paradox.
• Figure 4. Aristotle’s model of the Universe.
• Figure 5. Aristotle’s Four Elements and Four Qualities.
• Figure 6. Yin Yang symbol.
• Figure 7. Alchemical symbols for materials and planets.
• Figure 8. The Alchemist by David Teniers the Younger, c. 1645.
• Figure 9. Robert Boyle’s air pump.
• Figure 10. Joseph Priestley’s pneumatic trough used for collecting gases.
• Figure 11. Lavoisier’s constant pressure gas pump and reaction vessels.
• Figure 12. The calorimeter.
• Figure 13. Lavoisier’s table of simple substances from Elements of Chemistry (1790).
• Figure 14. Dalton’s elements and common “atoms.” From John Dalton, New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808).
• Figure 15. Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen’s spectrocope, from “Chemical analysis by Observation of Spectra,” (1860).
• Figure 16. Mendeleev’s periodic table from Annalender Chemie, (1872).
• Figure 17. Ceria and yttria isolation.
• Figure 18. Ultramicroscope.
• Figure 19. Fission.
• Figure 20. Fusion.