ELEMENTS AND THEIR DISCOVERIES

There are over a hundred elements in the periodic table and have you
wondered where did their names come from? Each element has its own history,
discovery, and origin that contributed in making its current name today. In this
essay the discoveries of some of the representative elements will be discussed
that will help in acquiring knowledge and awareness of their each unique history.
Gold has been known and used for a long time starting from the
Egyptians, Romans and Greeks but nobody really knows who first picked up or
discovered gold. The word Gold originated from the Anglo-Saxon word gold and
its symbol Au came from the Latin word aurum meaning "gold". Aside from the
fact that gold is commonly used in jewelries, currencies, awards and trophies,
arts and in dentistry, modern developments made golds way to medicinal uses.
As a matter of fact, injectable gold has been proven to help reduce pain and
swelling in patients affected by tuberculosis and rheumatoid arthritis. Because of
the golds value and benefits known today, its in demand to both humans and
miners that in fact as of 2009, it was estimated that humans have mined around
160000 tonnes of gold. Will there be a time gold will run out? We should use this
element wisely to keep its availability for the future generations.
Hennig Brand, the one who discovered Phosphorus in Germany in 1669,
isolated this element from urine making it the first element chemically discovered.
He kept this process he discovered and instead sold it to other alchemists and
became famous when it was sold to the French Academy of Sciences.
Phosphorus came from the Greek word for light bearing, phosphoros. This
element is the 18th most common element in seawater. Moreover, it is the 6 th
most common element in the human body and the 7th most common element in
the earths crust. Phosphorus has three main allotropes- the red, black and white.
Red phosphorus is typically used for making safety matches, fireworks, smoke
bombs and pesticides. White phosphorus, on the other hand, is poisonous and
can impulsively ignite when it comes in contact with air. While black phosphorus
is the least reactive form of phosphorus and has no significant commercial uses.
Originating from the Greek word helios meaning sun, the element Helium
is the 2nd most abundant element in the universe. It was first detected by PierreJules-Csar Janssen while studying a total solar eclipse in 1868 and Sir Norman
Lockyer named that yellow line in the suns spectrum, observed by Janssen,
Helium hypothesizing that that element exists in the sun. Sir William Ramsey,
finally, was the one who discovered this element in 1895. Helium is also the
second lightest element and as everyone knows, its used in inflating balloons.
People usually inhale Helium that changes his voice, although its non-toxic it
may cause asphyxiation due to oxygen deprivation. This element appears to be
colorless, and is odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, and inert.

The 88th element in the periodic table, Radium, originated from the Latin
word for ray, radius. Marie Sklodowska Curie, a Polish chemist, and Pierre
Curie, a French chemist, in 1898, discovered this element noticing that the
pitchblende, a material that contains uranium, was more radioactive than
uranium. Therefore, they reasoned out that there must be another element
present in it and then refined several tons of pitchblende until they obtained the
radioactive element radium and polonium. Because of its characteristics like
being brilliant white and luminescent, Radium is frequently used in self-luminous
paints. Despite being radioactive, this element is helpful in a few ways like acting
as a treatment for cancer. However, we shall keep in mind that radioactive
elements should be handled with care to prevent it from entering our skin,
swallowing it or inhaling its fumes. Marie Curie herself died because of working
with Radium causing her to have leukemia.
The first artificially produced element is Technetium discovered by an
Italian physicist Emilio Segre and his colleague Carlo Perrier found in a sample
of molybdenum bombarded by deuterons in 1937. Predicted by Mendeleev as
Element 43 many scientists tried to figure out what element is this and in 1920, a
group of researchers consisting of German chemists Walter Noddack, Ida Tacke,
and Otto Berg claimed that they discovered the 43rd element and named it
Masurium after the Masurian Lake region. However, no one can replicate or
reproduce Masurium again and hence considered their discovery as a false
discovery. After some time the Element 43 was discovered by Segre and Perrier
and named it Technetium from the Greek word technetos, meaning artificial.
This first synthetic or artificial element is used as a rusting preventive, as a
medical radioactive tracer and to calibrate particle detectors.
Seaborgium, a short lived radioactive and synthetic element, is named
after the scientist Glenn Seaborg, an American nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize
winner who discovered many of the transuranium elements. This element is
discovered by Albert Ghiorso in 1974 and since it was found it has no known
uses. The team of scientists led by Ghiorso created this element by bombarding
atoms of Californium with ions of Oxygen using a machine called the SuperHeavy Ion Linear Accelerator and produced atoms of Seaborgium and four free
neutrons. Some of the controversies of the synthetic elements are theyre
unstable and radioactive elements not naturally found on earth and are created
inside a laboratory by the process of nuclear fusion. The discovery of the
synthetic elements filled the gaps in the periodic table and helped in research
purposes. Furthermore, synthetic elements are named by the IUPAC
(International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) mostly after the place they
were discovered or after the scientist who discovered them.

Oxygen is a very important and useful element for us, humans, since we
need it to breathe. From the Greek word oxys and genes which mean acid
forming, the word oxygen was made and created by Antoine Lavoisier who

incorrectly supposed that oxygen is required to form all acids. This 8 th element in
the periodic table was separately discovered by both Joseph Priestley and Carl
Wilhelm Scheele by heating mercuric oxide (HgO). However, Priestly was the
one generally credited with the elements discovery who called the gas produced
in his experiments 'dephlogisticated air'. Oxygen is the third most abundant
element in the universe, covers nearly half of the mass of the earth's crust and
21% of the earth's atmosphere. Its also approximately 2/3 of the mass of the
human body and nine tenths of the mass of water. In addition to, it is customarily
as rocket fuel oxidant, oxy-acetylene welding, manufacturing steel, aid respiration
of patients in hospitals and of course for breathing. Even though oxygen is a
necessity for us to breathe, oxygen is toxic or even lethal at elevated partial
pressures that may show symptoms of seizures, twitching of muscles, coughing,
cataract formation, shortness of breath and others.
Given a few examples of how elements were discovered and named, it
could be generalized that elements were discovered by observing nature,
curiosity, accidental discoveries and doing the process of nuclear fusion for the
synthetic or artificially elements. Almost all of the elements were also named
after a Greek or Latin word related on how they discovered an element, after the
place where they found it or after the person who discovered it. Thus, elements
are not randomly named but behind each and every name of an element is a
glimpse of its history, discovery and a person who created it and helped the
periodic table to be complete, once created by Mendeleev incomplete.