Element number 33 is arsenic. Little was known about his element until German chemist Robert Bunsen started working with it. While experimenting with arsenic-based cacodyls, he got arsenic poisoning, for which he developed an antidote for (which is still used today). He lost half his eyesight for the later part of his life from an explosion, after which he stopped working with arsenic and started studying natural explosions-geysers, volcanoes, etc. In the 1850s, he settled back into chemistry at the University of Heidelberg and invented the spectroscope, which was limited because it was difficult to get the flames hot enough to excite the elements. To fix this problem, Bunsen added a valve to adjust oxygen flow in the Bunsen burners. He also instructed people responsible for work in periodic law, one of which was Dmitri Mendeleev.
Mendeleev is credited with creating the first periodic table, but in reality, he merely put it together and created a way to group things together effectively. One of his rivals, Julius Lothar Meyer, published a table around the same time. They both split a "prestigious pre-Nobel Prize called the Davy Medal in 1882 for codiscovering the periodic law." However, both greatly contributed to the table. Mendeleev understood that even if some traits don't persist, others do. Also, he knew how many elements smelled and felt like. He obsessively revised his table, and he predicted that new elements would be dug up to fill the empty spaces. (Most chemists simply left spots blank.) He was even able to predict correctly the densities and atomic weights of some unknown elements. This stunned many people, and he even named them "using the Sanskrit word for beyond: eka."
Eka-aluminium, or gallium, was discovered by Paul Emile Francois Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1875. He had been examining a mineral and saw never-before-seen color bands. Since it is one of the few liquid metals you can touch with your fingers, it has been used to mold spoons to serve in tea. Then hosts laugh when "their Earl Grey "eats" their utensils." (This practical joke has been used by many scientists all over the world!) However, the results Lecoq de Boisbaudran published did not match up to the predictions Mendeleev made, so he went back and checked his work. He found out that Mendeleev was correct, but not all the time. There were many elements he could not predict, such as the lanthanides after cerium. These metals tend to clump together, and they are difficult to separate. One chemist, Johan Gadolin was able so successfully isolate clusters of these elements in Ytterby, a coastal village in Sweden.
The book also tells this cool story of one guy named Johann Friedrich Bottger. He performed a little magic trick of making two silver coins disappear, and materializing a single gold piece in its place. Rumors spread, and eventually the king of Poland caught him, and locked him up. Then he pulled a Rumpelstiltskin move on him, and locked him in a castle to spin gold for the king's realm. Since Bottger could not comply, he was subject for hanging. However, he claimed he knew how to make porcelain, which was very valuable in that time. It was said to stop you from being poisoned when you drank from a porcelain cup. So anyway, Bottger became an assistant to Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus, who was already assigned to work on porcelain. Eventually, they were able to produce porcelain, and they showed it to the king. Unfortunately, this made Bottger more valuable, and he was locked under tighter security. So, sadly, Bottger was in a pickle. But he still helped contribute to porcelain and his life story tells a great tale!
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