Nothing like a hot cup of tea after a long day of chemistrying.
Lemme just stir in some sugar here ...
Alright ...
Real funny, Guys.
Where’s my spoon?
The answer to that question is in this here chart.
Recognize it?
There it is in all its glory - the periodic table of elements.
Perhaps to some chemists, a holy testament to the power of science.
But when it first came out, it was a different kind of holey.
And its journey to classroom walls everywhere had a whole lot of bumps.
The tale takes us back to the mid 1860s..
Ulysses S Grant is president of the USA, Germany elects their very first chancellor, Ernest
Rutherford is born and about 63 elements have already been discovered.
But the beautifully organized columns and rows we know today hadn’t been devised yet,
and chemists were just starting to glimpse the repeating chemical properties they represent.
John Newlands, Lothar Meyer and Dmitri Mendeleev were all working on their own theories of
the elements.
Newlands actually predicted the yet-to-be-discovered element of Germanium, but his version of the
table wasn’t recognized until over ten years later.
Meyer’s work seemed more promising.
He brought some organization into the elements by classifying them according to their ability
to combine with other elements, but he only managed to work that out for 53 of them
and his table didn’t have room to grow.
Which is a problem because, remember, there were 63 elements.
This leads us to St, Petersburg, Russia.
Mendeleev is teaching organic chemistry at St Petersburg University.
There he publishes a book called Principles of Chemistry.
In this book was his version of how to organize the elements -- the Periodic Table.
Here’s what that table looked like.
But something’s off.
Mendeleev’s table was full of missing holes because he had figured out something
the other two scientists hadn’t.
Mendeleev recognized that the elements’ properties repeated in a pattern -- they were
periodic.
And he figured any new elements ought to fit the pattern -- even though no one had observed
them yet.
His proposed table left room for all the missing elements.
This was more than a chart, it was a tool that could predict things nobody even knew about yet.
Mendeleev gave names to these undiscovered elements such as “eka-aluminum,” “eka-silicon”,
and “eka-manganese."
Over the next 4 years, no new elements were discovered and the periodic table remained
unchanged.
Enter French chemist Paul É-m-i-l-e ...
Help me Internet Robot Lady.
You're my only hope.
Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran
So our friend Paul was in France studying sphalerite, using analytical spectroscopy.
This was the most cutting-ist edgiest version of the good ‘ol flame test, thanks to work
by Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchoff.
The new spectroscope allowed chemists to measure the colored light produced when metals burn.
Regardless of who burned the metal on what part of the planet, or what prism they used,
the same unique lines would be produced for the same metal.
This gave chemists a fingerprinting system for the elements.
So when Paul’s sphalerite sample showed a completely new light spectrum with two violet
lines, he realized he had discovered a new metal, a new element that fit the properties
of density and atomic mass predicted by Mendeleev’s holey periodic table, right there in the spot
Good ol’ Dmitri had labeled eka-aluminum.
But instead of that, Paul called his new element, "gallium."
Now here’s where the drama comes in.
Mendeleev claimed he discovered gallium, but Paul disagreed since he kinda did all the work.
In a sort of Crimean War of articles in scientific journals, the Russian and the Frenchman
duked it out for years.
Think of it as the 19th century version of an epic Twitter beef.
The winner of this battle is in the name for gallium itself.
Mr. Paul gave it a play on the Roman name for France: Gaul.
It was a trend in the 19th century to name elements after geographical regions.
But maybe he named it after himself: an English translation of this French chemist’s name
is Paul Emil The Rooster Of Boisbaudran.
And the Latin word for “rooster” just happens to be gallus.
By that logic, gallium narrowly misses being chickenium.
So anyway, how much did science benefit from this newly found element?
At first, gallium wasn’t all that useful.
Its primary use was for thermometers due to its low melting point, and because it’s
non-toxic unlike pesky mercury.
Chemists like to say that gallium melts in your mouth AND in your hand!
Right?
I mean that’s a thing people say...
Gallium’s low melting point is also great for pranks . Pranks like … making a spoon
disappear in a hot cuppa tea.
Being a shiny metal, it was easy to disguise gallium as
silver.
Tricksters would fashion it into a spoon, then hand their mark a cuppa and what looked
like regular old silverware.
You can order a gallium spoon and try it for yourself!
As some of the comedians around this office evidently already done.
Gallium isn’t considered toxic.
But you shouldn’t swallow it, either, so I’m just gonna...go make a fresh cuppa.
Today, however, gallium is a VERY sought-after not for tricks but because it makes a great semiconductor.
A semiconductor is a material solid that can pass an electrical current under the right
conditions.
Since chemistry allows us to manipulate what the “right conditions” are, semiconductors
have revolutionized electrical circuitry making mass production of electronics and computers
possible.
Some semiconductors are also gangbusters at converting light into electricity, giving
us inexpensive solar cells.
Gallium arsenide is a very common semiconductor, found in the chip in your smartphone, and
powering those plucky robots rolling around on the surface of Mars.
Gallium is so popular these days, some say it may even be more useful than another common
semiconductor...silicon.
So maybe tech billionaires will start saying they live in Gallium Valley.
So the next time you sit down with your precious mobile device watching science videos on YouTube,
make sure to thank Paul The Rooster and his rival the bearded Russian.