Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Periodic Table of the Elements

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

You’ve seen it in your science classrooms, and there was probably a copy of it on the inside cover of your chemistry book. Maybe if you are a real nerd, you might even have your own personal copy. Yet its very creation was a revolutionary breakthrough that helped scientists and generations of students understand the very things which make up our world. Learn more about the Periodic Table of the Elements and how it helped explain the natural world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You've seen it in your science classroom, and there was probably a copy of it on the inside cover of your chemistry book. Maybe if you're a real nerd, you might even have your own personal copy. Yet its very creation was a revolutionary breakthrough that helped scientists and generations of students understand the very things that make up our world. Learn more about the periodic table of elements and how it helped explain our natural world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR.

This episode is sponsored by audible.com. My audiobook recommendation today is Periodic Tales, a cultural history of the elements from arsenic to zinc by Hugh Adderzley-Wil. Williams. Like the alphabet, the calendar, or the zodiac, the periodic table of chemical elements has a permanent place in our imagination. But aside from the handful of common ones, the elements themselves remain wrapped in mystery. We don't know what most of them look like, how they exist in nature, how they got their names, or what use they are to us. Unlocking their astonishing secrets and colorful paths, periodic tales is a passionate journey through the minds and

artist studios, to factories and cathedrals, into the woods, and to the sea, to discover the true stories of these fascinating but mysterious building blocks of the universe. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and two free audiobooks by going to audibletrial.com slash everything everywhere, or by clicking on the link in the show notes. The very first elements were discovered by early humans. The very first ones were all metals. Copper, lead, iron, silver, gold were some of the very first elements that humans recognized. They had no clue what an element was or an atom, but they knew it was a thing, and they knew

that one thing like copper was different from another thing like iron. By the time the end of the 18th century rolled around, America was a newly independent country, and there were a little over two dozen known elements at the time. In 1789, a French chemist by the name of Antoine Lavassier made the first systematic attempt at trying to list all of the known elements. He came up with a list of 33 elements and group of the first. them by known attributes. He primarily divided them into metals and non-metals. Unfortunately, many of his elements weren't really elements. He included things like light and heat, which weren't even physical

things. However, he did get one thing pretty much right. He defined an element as something which could not be broken down any further. Today, we call them atoms. As the 19th century began and chemistry became more sophisticated and analytical, there was a rush of new elemental discoveries. Doesn't of new elements, usually rare ones, were discovered in the first half of the 19th century. In 1829, German chemist Johann Wolfgang Doberriner got a little closer. He noticed that many of the elements that displayed similar properties could be grouped into threes, and that the atomic weights of the elements were all next to each other. Over the next few decades, as more elements were discovered, chemists noticed that there was a pattern with how elements bonded

to each other. For example, carbon could bond to four hydrogen atoms, or it could bond to two oxygen atoms. However, all the attempts to try to organize all of the known elements didn't work. It seemed to make sense in bits and pieces, but when you tried to put it all together, nothing seemed to make sense. In 1860, a conference was held in Germany on the subject of atomic weights. They determined that hydrogen had an atomic weight of one, and that every other element would be measured in comparison to hydrogen. In 1862, a French geologist named Alexander Mielbier de Shankachois came really close to the same. when he noticed that there was a periodicity in the elements. This was a huge step forward

in understanding how everything fit together, but it wasn't quite there yet. He actually proposed organizing them in the form of a helix or a screw. The 1860 saw several other attempts at organizing the elements, and each attempt brought something new to the table which helped describe the elements in relationship to each other. There was one problem, however, that no one had figured out. The big breakthrough in the organization of the elements came from a Russian chemist named Dmitri Mendelev. In 1869, he published his table in which he used rows and columns to organize the elements by atomic weight. He would start a new row when attributes started to repeat. The breakthrough element of his chart, and the thing that no one else had really done

until this point, was that he left empty spaces where there were undiscovered elements. everyone else just put all the known elements together, and that was why everything didn't fit. Mendelev just let the atomic weight speak for themselves, and if there wasn't a known element that fit, he'd just assume that it would be discovered later. By leaving space as empty, he also guessed at what the general property of the new element in that spot would be. He was also willing to occasionally ignore the order of atomic weights when it made sense and occasionally switched elements around. His first table in 1869 wasn't perfect. He produced another table in 1871, which had more spaces for undiscovered elements. There was also one big unresolved problem. There was a huge gap in

atomic weights between the elements serum and tantalum that he couldn't resolve. At first, no one really gave his table much attention. Then a huge discovery in 1911 really set the periodic table on firm ground. New England physicist Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus of the atom. After that, it was suggested that the chart followed the atomic number of the atom, which is the number of protons in the nucleus. It turned out, the table was almost already a perfect fit. Based on this new understanding of the periodic table, English physicist Henry Morsley predicted in 1913 that there were still three elements to be discovered between aluminum and gold. His prediction was 100% correct. The last,

natural element discovered was francium, which was discovered in 1939. That big gap between Assyrium and tantalum was finally resolved by Glenn Seberg in 1942, who identified the rare earth elements which are usually separated from the rest of the chart at the bottom. They are also known as the lanthinines and actinines. One of the interesting implications of the periodic table is that the last natural element is uranium, with an atomic number of 92. However, there are a bunch of empty spaces beyond the number 92. Unlike the missing elements lower on the chart, these can't be found in nature, so scientists have been working over the decades to make them themselves. The elements closest to uranium can be created via nuclear reactions. However,

the farther out you go, the only way to make them is via smashing together other large atoms. As of 2009, researchers have created all of the elements to fill up the table. The last artificial element to be created was Element 117, which is called Tennessean. The last element on the periodic table is Element 118 called Agneson, and it falls in the same column as the noble gases. All of these artificial elements have extremely short half-lives, and often don't exist more than a tiny fraction of a second. It isn't known if there are stable elements further out, or if there might be stable versions of the atoms that they've already created. So how do you read the periodic table? Starting in the upper left with hydrogen, it goes horizontal by atomic number. Hydrogen is one, helium is two, lithium is three, etc. As I mentioned before, the atomic number is the number of protons in the nucleus, and that's what determines what an element is. Each row is called a period. Each period corresponds to the number of electron shells the element has. The first shell has two electrons in the shell, so there are two elements in the first row. The second and third shells have.

have eight electrons, so there are eight elements in the second and third row. The rare earth elements at the bottom are usually displayed separately, but they do fit on the table. However, if you printed the table with them in their proper place, it would be really, really wide, so it usually isn't presented in that fashion. Each column is known as a group. The group reflects the number of electrons in the upper electron shell. The first column is known as the alkali metals. All of these metals have one electron available and everything in that group is extremely reactive. This includes lithium, sodium, and potassium. If you haven't seen it, go look up a video to see what happens to these elements in their pure metallic form when they're placed in water. There are many videos

online that show this. They are all explosive and they get more explosive the further down the group you go. In the last group are the noble or inert gases. They rarely react with anything because zero-electron shells are full. They include helium, neon, argon, xenon, and radon. Metals tend to be on the left side and in the middle. The periodic table is really an amazing thing. It's so neatly and cleanly encapsulates how all the elements which make up the world relate to each other. It isn't just a handy educational aid, but it also should be considered an actual thing of beauty. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com.

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