AS AN ear and respectable sce is often said to date from 1661,    o distinguis it eic transition. Into teentury scable in botionable    , given t materials, he could make himselfinvisible.

        Perter typifies trange and often actal nature of cs early days t gold could someilled from y ofcolor seems to or in y buckets of    for monte processes, ed t into a noxious paste and to a translut anone of it yieldedgold, of course, but a strange and iing ter a time, tancebegan to glo often spontaneously burst into flame.

        tential for tuff—s meaning “lig lost on eager businesspeople, but ties of manufacture made it too costly to exploit. An ounce of pailed forsix guineas—peroday’s money—or more than gold.

        At first, soldiers o provide terial, but suc rial-scale produ. In t named Karl(or Carl) Sanufacture p t ery of p Sches.

        Scraordinary araordinarily luckless fellotle in tus,    elements—gsten, nitrogen, and oxygen—and got credit for    into publication aftersomeone else ly. annic acid, and    to see tential of c made otremely hy.

        Scable sing en tasting a little of everytoriously disagreeable substances as mercury, prussic acid(anot150 years later Er (see page 146). Scually caug forty-t oxicced for tunned and terminal look on hisface.

        ere t and Swedish-speaking, Scheele would have enjoyed universal acclaim.

        Instead credit eo lodge ed cs, mostly from t for various breakinglyplicated reasons could not get imely manner. Instead credit to Josepley, ly, but latterly, in to receive credit for textbooks still attribute co , but ty-six years after Scheele had.

        Altry ury t separated Neill o go teentury (and in Priestley’s case a little beyond) stistseveryually found, t just tiated airs, depicated marine acids, perraqueousexions, and, above all, pon, ta    to be tive agentin bustion. Some, terious élanvital, t brouge objects to life. No one kne you could e    of electricity (anotion Mary Sed to full effe ein ) and t it existed insome substances but not otwo brancry:

        anic (for ta    to ) and inanic (for t didnot).

        Someone of insigo t cry into t oine-Laurent Lavoisier. Born in 1743, Lavoisiery (itle for t a practig sitution called ted taxes and fees on be. Alts mild and fair-mi did not tax t only ten arbitrarily. ForLavoisier, titution    it provided o follo oday’s money.

        ter embarking on tive career pateen-year-olddauging of s and minds botelled soon ively alongside her husband.

        Despite to put in five    days—time to be issioner of gunpoo deter smugglers, ric system, and coauture Cs.

        As a leading member of to take aninformed and active i in opical—ism, prison reform, tion of is, ter supply of Paris. It Lavoisier made some dismissive remarks about a neion t ted to tist. t tist never fave .

        t. At a time    anybody eresting po ially, some ts    to befound—Lavoisier failed to uncover a single o certainly    for    of beakers.

        Lavoisier een t o an almost preposterous degree, t private laboratory ience.

        Instead ook t ponand mepic airs. ified oxygen and    t,    rigor, clarity, ao cry.

        And    did in fae in very remely exag studies requiring tmeasurements. termined, for insta a rusting object doesn’t lose ed t trag elemental particles from t    realization tmatter    be transformed but not eliminated. If you burs matter    amount of stuff in the same.

        tion of mass, and it ionary cept.

        Unfortunately, it cided ype of revolution—tirely on the wrong side.

        Not only    ically builtt enclosed Paris—an edifice so loat it    ttacked by tizens. Capitalizing on t, noionalAssembly, denounced Lavoisier and suggested t it    time for his hanging.

        Soon after do long after t e Corday, but by time it oolate for Lavoisier.

        In 1793, terror, already intense, ratced up to a oberMarie Antoio tiardy plans to slip ao Scotland, Lavoisier ed. In May y-one felloribunal (in acourtroom presided over by a bust of Marat). Eiged acquittals, but Lavoisier andtaken directly to tion (noe of t of Frenes. Lavoisier cepped up and accepted e. Less ter, on July 27, Robespierrecerrorsly ended.

        A er atue of Lavoisier ed in Paris and mucil someone pointed out t it looked notioning tor admitted t i and p—apparently    no one ice or, iced, . tatue of Lavoisier-cum-dorain in place for anotury until t aken aed down for scrap.

        In trous oxide, or lauger it    its use “tended by a    ury it y, ime devoted to little else. ters put on “laugeers could refres inion aain taggerings.

        It    until 1846 t a around to finding a practical use for nitrous oxide, asaic. Goodness kno of t obvious practicalapplication.

        I mention to make t t cry, eentury, rat its bearings in t decades of teentgeology ietly it o do ations ofequipment—tano trifuges until tury,severely restrig many kinds of experiments—and partly it as gentlemen, o be drao geology, natural ory, and physics.

        (tly less true in tial Europe tain, but only slig isperelling t one of t important observations of tury, Broion,ure of molecules,    by a c but by a Scottisanist, Robert Broiced, in 1827,    tiny grains of pollensuspended in er remained indefinitely in motion no matter osettle. tual motion—ions of invisible molecules—ery.)t    not been for a splendidly improbable amedt von Rumford, itle, began life in oburn,Massacts, in 1753 as plain Benjamin tious,“ure and figure,” occasionally ceous and exceedingly briguntroubled by anyt een een years    at tbreak of revolution in ts, for a time spying on teful year of 1776, fag arrest“for lukey,” ai-Royalists armed s of    tar, bags of feat desire to adorn h.

        to England and to Germany, o t of Bavaria, so impressing ties t in 1791 von Rumford of t the English Garden.

        Iakings, ime to duct a good deal of solidsce.    auty on t toelucidate tion of fluids and tion of o currents. ed several useful objects, including a drip coffeemaker, type e still knooine-Laurent. t asuccess and ted. Rumford stayed on in France,    his former wives, in 1814.

        But our purpose iioning    in 1799, during a paratively briefinterlude in London, itutio a popped into being all over Britain in te eigeenturies. For a time it    titution of standing to actively promote try, and t    eo a brilliant young mannamed ed titution’s professor of cry slyafter its iion and rapidly gained fame as an outstandiurer and productiveexperimentalist.

        Soon after taking up ion, Davy began to bang out nes oeranotassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, and aluminum or aluminium,depending on which branch of English you favor.

        1s not somucute as because ecricity to a molten substarolysis, as it is ks, a fiftotal of     unfortunately as a young man tac to tpleasures of nitrous oxide. taco t    (literally) times a day. Eventually, in 1829, it is t to have killed him.

        Fortunately more sober types     person to intimate ture of an atom (progress t ely a little furtalian iame of Lorenzo Romano Amadeo Carlo Avogadro, t of Quarequa ao,made a discovery t erm—namely, t type, if kept at temperature, aiiumbers of molecules.

        table about Avogadro’s Principle, as it became kno, itprovided a basis for more accurately measuring t of atoms. UsingAvogadro’s matics, cs ually able to , for insta atypical atom er of 0.00000008 timeters,    no one kne Avogadro’s appealingly simple principle for almost fiftyyears.

        2Partly tiring fellole ists, publistended ings—but also it ings to attend arial Revolutioidecisiveness onDavys part.    isolated t in 1808,    alumium. For son reasoer oft and c to aluminum four years later. Ameris dutifully adopted term, but mai Britising out t it disrupted tterablisrontium, so they added a vowel and syllable.

        2to ter adoption of Avogadros number, a basiit of measure in cry, s value is placed at 6.0221367 x 1023, udents ing just    is, so I report t it is equivalent to to cover ted States to a depter in t drink s t acked, cover to adept number of Ameri pennies rillio is a big number.

        driven in large part by developments in cry, a as an anized sce crybarely existed for decades.

        ty of London    founded until 1841 and didn’t begin to produce aregular journal until 1848, by    learned societies in Britain—Geological,Geograpicultural, and Linnaean (for naturalists and botanists)—least ty years old and often mucitute of Cry didn’t e intobeing until 1877, a year after ty. Becausecry o get anized,    breakt begin to bee general until t iional cry gress, in Karlsruhe,in 1860.

        Because cs for so long ion, ventions o emerge. Untilo tury, t meao one cbut o anot ed everywhere.

        Cs also used a bey of symbols and abbreviations, often self-ied.

        Sters by decreeing tts be abbreviated on tin names, in ferrum ) and t for silver is Ag (from tium ). t so many of tions accen, O for Oxygen, s Englisiure, not itsexalted status. to indicate toms in a molecule, Berzelius employed asuperscript notation, as in er, for no special reason, to re: h2O.

        Despite tidyings-up, cry by teenturyoprominen 1869 of an odd and crazed-looking professor at ty of St. Petersburgnamed Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev.

        Mendeleyev (also sometimes spelled Mendeleev or Mendeléef) tobolsk, in t of Siberia, into a ed, reasonably prosperous, and verylarge family—se, in fact, t ory    track of exactly een . All agree, atany rate, t Dmitri . Luck    alri    to raordinary ory. All    il 1848, o penury. Determio get    , table Mrs. Mendeleyev cri four to St.

        Petersburg—t’s equivalent to traveling from London to Equatorial Guinea—and deposited titute of Pedagogy. orn out by s, ser.

        Mendeleyev dutifully pleted udies aually landed a position at ty. tent but not terribly outstanding o once a year, ts in tory.

        ty-five, o toy e ts. At time, elements omice). Mendeleyev’s breakto see t table.

        As is often tually been anticipated teur    England named Joed t    certain properties—in a seo every eigly unime    quite yet e, aves and like to taves on a piano keyboard. Peration, but tally preposterous and    gatimes ask    s to play ttle tune. Disced, Neher.

        Mendeleyev used a slig approato groups of seven,but employed fually t andive. Because ties repeated tionbecame knoable.

        Mendeleyev o aire in Nortience elseically. Using a broadly similar cept, s in alroical ns called groups. tantly s ofrelationso side. Specifically,tical ns put toget ies. ts ontop of silver and silver sits on top of gold because of ties as metals, erminant intron valences, for al ro is knoomiumber.

        tructure of atoms and tons    all t is necessary is to appreciate t one proton, and so it omiumber of one and es first on t; uraniumy-tons, and so it es omiumber of wo.

        In ted out, cry really is just a matter of ting.

        (Atomiumber, ially, is not to be fused omis in a give.) till a great deal t knoood.    o in tno one element, s existence    even been suspectedbefore t—and t o in t roscopeduring a solar eclipse,    beisolated until 1895. Even so, to Mendeleyev’s iion, cry ing.

        For most of us, table is a ty in tract, but for cs itestablise orderliness and clarity t    ated. “it adoubt, table of ts is t elegant anizational cever devised,” e Robert E. Krebs in tory and Use of Our Earts, and you    find similar ses in virtually every ory of cry in print.

        today y-turally    ones plus acouple of dozen t ed in labs. tual number is sligentiousbecause ts exist for only milliontssometimes argue over ed or not. In Mendeleyev’s dayjust sixty-ts    part of o realize t ts as t make a plete picture, t many pieces ed, s    in whey werefound.

        No one knoally, s migomic    ain is tanyt is found    ly into Mendeleyev’s great scheme.

        teentury    great surprise for cs. It began in 1896    of uranium salts o some time later, o discovert ts , just as if te o ligs ting rays of some sort.

        sidering tance of urer over to a graduate student for iigation. Fortuudent    émigré from Poland named Marie Curie.     certain kinds of rocks poured out stant araordinary amounts of energy,yet    dimiable il Einstein explai ting mass into energy in an exceedingly effit way.

        Marie Curie dubbed t “radioactivity.” In ts—polonium, ry, and radium.

        In 1903 tly ary, in 1911, to ry and p McGill Uy in Mo Ruterested in tive materials. it immense reserves of energy s of matter,and t tive decay of t for most of th.

        t radioactive elements decayed into ots—t one dayyou om of uranium, say, and t you om of lead. trulyextraordinary. It aneously.

        Ever tist, Rut to see t ticalapplication in ticed t in any sample of radioactive material, it alook t of time for o decay—ted    teady, reliable rate of decay could be used as a kind of clock. By calculating backerial ly it its age. ested a piece of pitc to be 700million years old—very muc people o grant th.

        In traveled to London to give a lecture at titution—t anization founded by t von Rumford only 105 years before,t poant eon pared ness of te Victorians. Ruto talk about egration tivity, as part of    chblende.

        tactfully—for t, if not aledt Kelvi t ions out. Rut oto radioactivity tly y-four million yearsKelvin’s calculations allowed.

        Kelvin beamed at Rutful presentation, but    unmoved. ed to    astute and important tribution to sce—far greater thermodynamics.

        As        stific    revolutions,    Rut universallyaccepted. Jorenuously insisted o t ty-nine million years old, and opped only to    Rutoo mucime. But even ric dating, as decay measurements became kno ual age. Sce    track, but still .

        Kelvin died in 1907. t year also sari Mendeleyev. Like Kelvin, ive enceof radiation or tron or anyt .    mostly st out of labs aure    101 es Paul Stratis an unstable element.”

        Radiation, of course,    on and on, literally and in ed. In to experience clear signs of radiation siess—notably dull acless .

        Marie Curie spent t of in in to foundted Radium Institute of ty of Paris in 1914. Despite o t because after ted an affair    t ly indiscreet tosdalize even t least tter.

        For a long time it    anytic as radioactivitymust be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toote and laxatives put radioactivets, and at least until te 1920s tel in tless otured iceffects of its “Radioactive mineral springs.” Radioactivity    banned in erproducts until 1938. By time it e for Madame Curie, , is so pernicious and long lasting t even noo    in lead-lined boxes, and to see t don protective clothing.

        to ted and untingly    atomic stists, by tietury it    Eartionablyvenerable, tury of sce ly say quite    to get a nesoomie.

        PARt    III     A NE AGE DANSA P is toms’    atoms.

        -Anonymous
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