A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

To indicate the number of atoms in a molecule, Berzelius employed a superscript notation, as in H2O. Later, for no special reason, the fashion became to render the number as subscript: H2O.

This doesn't come across in the Goodreads note, but H2O was apparently literally just written like that. With the 2 in the middle. For some reason, people just decided to start making it subscript.

When he first isolated the element in 1808, he called it alumium. For some reason he thought better of that and changed it to aluminum four years later. Americans dutifully adopted the new term, but many British users disliked aluminum, pointing out that it disrupted the -ium pattern established by sodium, calcium, and strontium, so they added a vowel and syllable.

an astronomer with the cheerily intergalactic name of Vesto Slipher (who was in fact from Indiana)

one atom is to the width of a millimeter line as the thickness of a sheet of paper is to the height of the Empire State Building.

After becoming crippled with polio, Midgley invented a contraption involving a series of motorized pulleys that automatically raised or turned him in bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the cords as the machine went into action and was strangled.

For most of us that is of course an utterly meaningless measure, but then with astronomical measures most distances are so huge as to be utterly meaningless.

The leading early investigator, G. K. Gilbert of Columbia University, modeled the effects of impacts by flinging marbles into pans of oatmeal. (For reasons I cannot supply, Gilbert conducted these experiments not in a laboratory at Columbia but in a hotel room.)

Nor could we quickly build a new one because, amazingly, the plans for Saturn launchers were destroyed as part of a NASA housecleaning exercise.