Every element has a story. These tiles visit a Kansas gas well that put out a flame, a Swedish quarry that named four elements, a children's radio show that broke chemistry news and a flask of dissolved Nobel medals. You will meet an alchemist who boiled down urine, a lab assistant who found element 87 and the uranium that once colored dinner plates, along with a few popular myths set straight.
Every tile in a The Chemical Elements game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Elements
nine stories
1The gas well that put out the fire
On the tile: Helium1903
In May 1903, drillers near Dexter, Kansas, struck a powerful flow of natural gas, and the town planned a celebration. After the mayor's speech, a burning bale of hay was moved to the well. The gas snuffed out the flame. Locals mocked it as "wind gas." A University of Kansas chemist, David McFarland, found it was mostly nitrogen, which does not burn. In December 1905, he and Hamilton Cady found something rarer in it: nearly 2% helium, an element then thought rare on Earth but abundant in the sun. By 1927, Dexter had a helium plant.
When the Washington Monument was completed on December 6, 1884, workers set a 100-ounce pyramid of solid aluminum on its peak. Why not gold or silver? Because aluminum was still a precious metal, selling for $1.10 an ounce, the same as silver. William Frishmuth, a German-born chemist in Philadelphia, cast the tip, the largest piece of aluminum cast up to that time. Before shipping it to Washington, he put it on display at Tiffany's jewelry store in New York without permission, then telegraphed officials to read about it in the newspapers.
German miners had a name for a troublesome ore that could be mistaken for silver ore but gave them only grief: kobold, a goblin or troublemaker. Smelting it released arsenic vapors that could sicken or even kill workers, so the goblins took the blame. The ore's oxide had long colored glass blue, but the color was credited to bismuth. In the 1730s, Stockholm chemist Georg Brandt showed that the blue came from a new metal and gave it the miners' cursed name, cobalt. For years, other chemists insisted it was merely iron and arsenic.
Tungsten's name is Swedish for heavy stone, yet its chemical symbol is W. That comes from wolfram, the name used in many European countries, which is believed to derive from the German for wolf's foam. Centuries ago, tin smelters noticed that a certain mineral in their ore cut their tin yield, devouring it, they said, as a wolf devours a sheep. In 1783, the Spanish brothers Juan and Fausto Elhuyar isolated the metal and asked to call it wolfram. Chemistry's international naming body dropped wolfram in 2005. The W stayed.
In 1875, French chemist Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran spotted a new violet line in the spectrum of zinc ore from the Pyrenees and tracked down a new metal, one that melts at about 30 °C (86 °F), warm enough to turn liquid in a pocket on a hot day. He said he named it gallium after Gallia, the Latin name for France. Some suspected another reason. Le coq means rooster, and the Latin for rooster is gallus, so the story goes that he slyly named the element after himself. His stated reason was France.
In 1898, at University College London, William Ramsay and Morris Travers let solid argon evaporate slowly and collected the first gas to come off. In their spectrometer it gave a startling glow. Travers later wrote that "the blaze of crimson light from the tube told its own story," a sight "to dwell upon and never to forget." The name came from Ramsay's 13-year-old son, who suggested novum, Latin for new. His father liked the idea but preferred the Greek word, neos. The result was neon.
Element 61 had a crowded past. In 1926, a group in Illinois claimed illinium and an Italian team claimed florentium, but neither result could be repeated. The real element turned up in 1945 at Clinton Laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where Jacob Marinsky, Lawrence Glendenin and Charles Coryell separated it from the fission products of uranium reactor fuel. The team planned to call it clintonium. Coryell's wife, Grace, persuaded them to honor Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. Promethium now powers long-lived nuclear batteries.
In July 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie reported that they had drawn from pitchblende ore a substance about 400 times more active than uranium. It behaved like bismuth, and they believed it held a new metal. If its existence was confirmed, they wrote, it should be called polonium "after the name of the country of origin of one of us." Marie's Poland was then divided among the German, Austrian and Russian empires. The same paper was the first time the Curies used the word radioactivity.
In 1801, chemist Charles Hatchett was arranging minerals at the British Museum when he noticed "a very heavy black stone, with golden streaks." Sir Hans Sloane's catalog said it had come from a Mr. Winthrop in New England, of the Connecticut family of colonial governors. Hatchett found a new metal inside and named it columbium, after Columbia. German chemist Heinrich Rose later renamed it niobium, for Niobe, daughter of Tantalus, because it is so like its neighbor tantalum. Americans kept calling it columbium even after the international chemistry union made niobium official in 1950.
In 1669, Hamburg alchemist Hennig Brandt boiled down urine, heated the residue until it was red hot and collected the vapor under water. What he caught glowed in the dark: phosphorus, from the Greek for bringer of light. Brandt kept it secret, believing he had found the philosopher's stone, which was supposed to turn ordinary metals into gold. When his money ran out, he sold phosphorus to Daniel Kraft, who showed it off around Europe. A century later, Joseph Wright of Derby painted The Alchymist, a kneeling alchemist lit by a glowing flask.
2He found two gases in air, and others got the credit
On the tile: Carl Scheele1777
Carl Wilhelm Scheele found two of the main gases in air, yet others usually get the credit. His family could not send him to university, so he trained as a pharmacist in Sweden. In the early 1770s he made a gas in which a candle burned very strongly and called it fire-air. We call it oxygen. He also isolated what he called spoiled air, now known as nitrogen. But his book on both did not appear until 1777. By then Joseph Priestley had published on oxygen, and Daniel Rutherford had found nitrogen independently in 1772.
Antoine Lavoisier helped overthrow phlogiston, the old idea that burning released a mysterious substance, and the new chemical names he helped create gave us oxygen and hydrogen. He had a partner. Antoine did not read English, so when Irish chemist Richard Kirwan defended phlogiston in a 1787 essay, his wife, Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier, translated it into French and added a preface attacking it. She had studied drawing with the painter Jacques-Louis David and contributed 13 illustrations to Antoine's textbook. In her drawings of his breathing experiments, she drew herself taking notes.
4He found vanadium first, then was talked out of it
On the tile: Andrés del Río1801
In 1801, Andrés Manuel del Río, a Spanish mineralogist teaching in Mexico City, found what he believed was a new metal in a lead mineral. He named it erythronium and sent a sample to Paris. French chemists concluded it was only chromium, and del Río came to accept their verdict. About three decades later, Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefström found the element again and named it vanadium, after Vanadis, a name for the Norse goddess Freyja. Del Río had been right all along. Today most vanadium goes into steel, toughening tools, axles and crankshafts.
On October 6, 1807, at the Royal Institution in London, Humphry Davy sent current from the large battery he had built through molten potash. His younger cousin Edmund, who was assisting, recalled that when Humphry saw "the minute globules of potassium burst through the crust of potash, and take fire as they entered the atmosphere, he could not contain his joy." The new metal was lighter than water and skimmed across it, burning with a lavender flame. That same month Davy isolated sodium, and he went on to isolate calcium, magnesium and barium.
Four years before Dmitri Mendeleev announced his periodic table, British chemist John Newlands noticed that when the elements were lined up by atomic weight, similar ones recurred at regular intervals. He compared the pattern to the musical scale and called it the law of octaves. When he presented it to the Chemical Society of London on March 1, 1866, the society would not publish his paper, and one listener asked whether he had tried alphabetical order. Newlands lobbied hard for credit. In 1998, the Royal Society of Chemistry put a blue plaque on his birthplace.
A popular story says Dmitri Mendeleev saw the periodic table in a dream. There is no evidence for it. What he did was bolder. His 1869 table left gaps for elements no one had found, and by 1871 he had named some of them, using eka, Sanskrit for one. His most accurate forecast was for ekasilicon. In 1886, in a new mineral from a silver mine near Freiberg, Germany, Clemens Winkler found an element that fit Mendeleev's predictions, right down to its gray color. Winkler first considered calling it neptunium, then chose germanium.
Chemists had long ordered the periodic table by atomic weight, while atomic number was just an element's place in line. In 1913 and 1914, British physicist Henry Moseley measured X-rays from a series of metals and found that their wavelengths varied in step with atomic number, not weight. Atomic number was real; it was later understood as the number of protons in the nucleus. His results also explained why chemists had placed cobalt ahead of nickel, though cobalt atoms are heavier. He was killed at Gallipoli in 1915, aged 27, and it is widely believed he would soon have won a Nobel Prize.
In 1925, chemist Ida Tacke, working in Berlin with Walter Noddack, whom she married the next year, and Otto Berg, announced element 75. They named it rhenium, for the Latin name of the Rhine, and it was the last stable element to be discovered. Presenting the results, she was the first female colleague to address the Association of German Chemists. In 1934, Ida Noddack challenged Enrico Fermi's claim to have made element 93, suggesting that bombarded heavy nuclei might break into several large fragments. The idea, later called nuclear fission, was largely ignored.
Pencil lead is not lead at all. In Cumberland, in northern England, people had long used a soft black mineral called wad to mark their sheep. In the 16th century it found new work, from molds for casting cannonballs to writing, and the earliest reference to what we would call pencils dates from 1565. Because it looked like the metal, it was called black lead or plumbago. In 1789, German mineralogist A. G. Werner named it graphite, from the Greek for to write. It is a form of carbon, like diamond.
French inventor Georges Claude showed the first neon lamp to the public in Paris on December 11, 1910. It turned heads but sold no tubes, since people did not want to light their homes in red. Claude found that bent tubes could spell glowing letters, and in 1923 his company, Claude Neon, brought the signs to the United States, selling two to a Packard car dealership in Los Angeles. People called them liquid fire and stopped to stare, even in daylight. Neon itself glows red-orange; for other colors, sign makers turned to argon and glowing coatings inside the tubes.
In 1918, a draft-board doctor in Houghton County, Michigan, rejected nearly 30% of potential Army recruits because of goiters and underactive thyroids, caused by too little iodine. The Great Lakes states lay in the "goiter belt," where the soil lacked iodine. University of Michigan pediatrician David Murray Cowie read of a Swiss plan to add iodide to table salt and persuaded salt makers to try it. On May 1, 1924, iodized salt reached grocers' shelves across Michigan, with no law requiring it. By 1935, goiter in Michigan had dropped by 74% to 90%.
Borax, the washing-powder mineral whose Arabic name, buraq, gave the element boron its name, once left Death Valley the hard way. From 1883 to 1889, the famous twenty-mule teams pulled massive wagons of borax from the Harmony Borax Works near Furnace Creek to the railhead near Mojave, a grueling 165-mile, ten-day trip across primitive roads. The teams ran for only about six years, yet they became a lasting symbol of the Old West, thanks to advertising for 20-Mule-Team Borax Soap and the long-running Death Valley Days radio and television program.
Since 1967, the official second has come from atoms, not astronomy. That year, it was defined as exactly 9,192,631,770 cycles of the natural frequency of cesium atoms, replacing a second based on Earth's motions. Cesium is a soft, silvery-gold metal that can ignite spontaneously in air. Its appeal is a lone outer electron that flips when hit with microwaves of just the right frequency, and that frequency is the tick. The first practical cesium clock was built at Britain's National Physical Laboratory in 1955. Today, commercially available cesium clocks keep time to within 1/3,000,000 of a second per year.
The rechargeable battery in your phone traces back to the oil crisis of the 1970s. Stanley Whittingham built a lithium battery with a titanium disulfide cathode, but its metallic lithium made it too explosive to be practical. In 1980, John Goodenough showed that cobalt oxide holding lithium ions could produce as much as four volts. In 1985, Akira Yoshino swapped the lithium metal for a carbon material and made the first commercially viable lithium-ion battery. When the three shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Goodenough was 97, the oldest Nobel laureate ever.
When the Homer Laughlin Company of West Virginia introduced Fiesta dinnerware in 1936, its most popular color owed its shade to uranium. Uranium oxide gave Fiesta red its deep orange-red, and uranium may make up as much as 14% of the glaze by weight. Then World War II intervened. Because uranium could be used to make an atomic bomb, the government confiscated the company's supply, and Fiesta red disappeared. It returned in 1959, colored with depleted uranium, and was discontinued for good in 1973. The old red pieces are still easily detectable as radioactive.
In 1952, Swedish researcher Per-Ingvar Brånemark was studying blood circulation by placing a small titanium chamber in a rabbit's leg, planning to remove it and use it again. Instead, he found that the titanium had fused with the bone, with no sign of rejection. Brånemark coined a word for it, osseointegration, and kept working on the idea at the University of Gothenburg. In 1965 he performed the first successful dental implant in a human. Titanium anchored in bone now also supports knee and joint replacements and even hearing aids.
The most common kind of smoke detector holds a tiny radioactive source, usually one microcurie or less of americium-241, an element first made in 1944 at a wartime laboratory in Chicago. Its radiation ionizes the air inside a small chamber, and two charged plates collect the ions, creating a small but steady current. When smoke drifts in, it interrupts the current and sets off the alarm. The first license to distribute these detectors came in 1963, mainly for factories and warehouses. In 1969, homeowners were allowed to use them without a license.
In 1787, Karl Arrhenius came across an unusual black rock in an old quarry at Ytterby, near Stockholm. He thought it was a new tungsten mineral and passed it to Johan Gadolin in Finland, who announced in 1794 that it contained a new earth, the oxide now called yttria. The rock kept giving. In 1843, Carl Mosander found that yttria actually held three oxides: one white, one yellow and one rose-colored. Chemists kept teasing out rare earths, and four elements now carry the small town's name: yttrium, ytterbium, terbium and erbium.
Bismuth-209 was commonly thought to be the heaviest stable isotope in nature, but theory said it should slowly decay by giving off alpha particles. In 2003, physicists at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France, finally caught it happening, using detectors cooled to 20 thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Counting 128 alpha particles over five days, they calculated a half-life of about 19 billion billion years, more than a billion times the age of the universe. The experiment was a by-product of the team's search for dark matter.
A breath of helium makes a voice sound like a cartoon chipmunk, so it seems obvious that the gas raises your pitch. It does not, according to physicists at the University of New South Wales. Pitch is set by the vibration of the vocal folds, which keep vibrating at essentially the same rate. What changes is the gas in the throat and mouth. Sound travels faster in helium, which shifts the resonances of the vocal tract and changes the voice's timbre, its tone color. The same physicists warn that breathing helium can suffocate.
A popular story says cold tin helped defeat Napoleon's army in Russia in 1812. In the bitter winter, the tale goes, the soldiers' tin buttons crumbled into powder, leaving them exposed to the cold. The Royal Society of Chemistry calls the story's accuracy debatable, but the chemistry is real. Below about 13 °C (56 °F), pure tin can slowly change from a shiny metal into a brittle gray powder. In cold northern European winters it crumbled tin organ pipes, a problem long known as tin pest. Alloying tin with other metals prevents it.
Superman squeezing a lump of coal into a diamond makes a good movie scene, but the Gemological Institute of America says it does not work that way. Coal forms from plant debris at the surface and is rarely buried deeper than about two miles. Natural diamonds typically form 150 to 200 kilometers (about 90 to 125 miles) down, in the mantle. Most dated diamonds are also older than Earth's first land plants, the raw material of coal. Their carbon was most likely trapped deep inside Earth or carried down by sinking plates.
The story goes that King Hiero II of Syracuse suspected his goldsmith of swapping some gold in a sacred wreath for an equal weight of silver. Archimedes, stepping into a full tub, saw the water run over and rushed home naked, shouting "Eureka," I have found it. The tale comes from the Roman architect Vitruvius, in the first century BC. By one modern calculation, a realistic wreath with 30% silver would raise the water only about 0.4 millimeter more than pure gold. Weighing wreath and gold against each other underwater would have been more practical.
More than 2,000 years ago, historian Sima Qian wrote that the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, China's first emperor, held liquid mercury, apparently forming rivers and lakes on a great map of China. The tomb, near Xi'an and guarded by the Terracotta Army, is believed never to have been opened. But in 2016, researchers scanned the air above the burial mound with a laser system and found mercury vapor at up to 27 nanograms per cubic meter, well above the area's usual 5 to 10. The old account may be more than legend.
Europium was named for Europe by French chemist Eugène-Anatole Demarçay, who separated it in 1901 after a painstaking series of crystallizations. A century later, the element helps guard Europe's money. Europium glows red under ultraviolet light, and it is used in printing euro banknotes, so a forgery can give itself away by lacking that red glow. The element has another claim to fame. It lies behind the blue glow of some fluorite, and that mineral's glow gave us the word fluorescent.
In April 1940, as German forces occupied Denmark, Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen was sheltering the gold Nobel medals of German physicists Max von Laue and James Franck, engraved with their names. Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved both in aqua regia, a mixture of acids that can dissolve gold. "While the invading forces marched in the streets of Copenhagen, I was busy dissolving Laue's and also James Franck's medals," he later wrote. The flask sat on a laboratory shelf through the war. Afterward the gold was recovered, and the Nobel Foundation recast the medals.