{"id":10432,"date":"2019-12-28T16:12:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-28T23:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=10432"},"modified":"2020-01-04T16:15:28","modified_gmt":"2020-01-04T23:15:28","slug":"periodic-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2019\/12\/28\/periodic-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Periodic History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The New Yorker<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Histories Hidden in the Periodic Table<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

From poisoned monks and nuclear bombs to the \u201ctransfermium wars,\u201d mapping the atomic world hasn\u2019t been easy.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Neima Jahromi<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
As element hunters have become element makers, the periodic table\u2019s meaning has changed. It now describes what is possible, in addition to what merely exists.<\/em> Illustration by Ilya Milstein<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The story of the fifteenth element began in Hamburg, in 1669. The unsuccessful glassblower and alchemist Hennig Brandt was trying to find the philosopher\u2019s stone, a mythical substance that could turn base metals into gold. Instead, he distilled something new. It was foamy and, depending on the preparation, yellow or black. He called it \u201ccold fire,\u201d because it glowed in the dark. Interested parties took a look; some felt that they were in the presence of a miracle. \u201cIf anyone had rubbed himself all over with it,\u201d one observer noted, \u201chis whole figure would have shone, as once did that of Moses when he came down from Mt. Sinai.\u201d Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, put some on his hand and noted how \u201cmild and innocent\u201d it seemed. Another scientist saw particles in it twinkling \u201clike little stars.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first, no one could figure out what the Prometheus of Hamburg had stolen. After one of Brandt\u2019s confidants provided a hint\u2014the main ingredient was \u201csomewhat that belong\u2019d to the Body of Man\u201d\u2014Boyle deduced that he and his peers had been smearing themselves with processed urine. As the Cambridge chemist Peter Wothers explains in his new history of the elements, \u201cAntimony, Gold, and Jupiter\u2019s Wolf<\/a>\u201d (Oxford), Brandt\u2019s recipe called for a ton of urine. It was left out in buckets long enough to attract maggots, then distilled in hot furnaces, creating a hundred and twenty grams of \u201ccold fire.\u201d Brandt believed that, if he could collect enough of this substance, he might be able to create the philosopher\u2019s stone. In 1678, the Duke of Saxony asked him to collect a hundred tons of urine from a garrison of soldiers and render it into what Boyle and others soon started to call phosphorus\u2014Latin for \u201clight-bearer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The soapy phosphorus that Brandt cooked up was a curiosity. But, in England, Boyle began producing it in a purer, more solid form, which turned out to be highly flammable. Another scientist toying with Boyle\u2019s phosphorus found that, \u201cif the Privy Parts be therewith rubb\u2019d, they will be inflamed and burning for a good while after.\u201d Boyle, for his part, wondered whether it could be harnessed as a starter for gunpowder. (His assistant, the apothecary Ambrose Godfrey, set his head on fire and burned \u201ctwo or three great holes in his breeches\u201d while investigating the substance.) The phosphorus industry grew throughout the eighteenth century, in part because physicians wrongly believed that it had medicinal value. In the eighteen-hundreds, match producers found that wood splints tipped with phosphorus were less dangerous than their sulfur-coated predecessors; not long afterward, the discovery that electric furnaces could extract phosphorus from ore at a large scale led to the development of explosives. In the Second World War, in what Wothers calls \u201ca tragic twist of fate,\u201d Hamburg, Brandt\u2019s home town, was destroyed by Allied bombers dropping phosphorus munitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at TNY<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New Yorker The Histories Hidden in the Periodic Table From poisoned monks and nuclear bombs to the \u201ctransfermium wars,\u201d mapping the atomic world hasn\u2019t been easy. By\u00a0Neima Jahromi The story of the fifteenth element began in Hamburg, in 1669. The unsuccessful glassblower and alchemist Hennig Brandt was trying to find the philosopher\u2019s stone, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10432\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}