Periodic Tales Quotes

“It is through this cultural life rather than through experimental encounter in a laboratory that we really come to know the elements individually, and it is a cause for sadness that most chemistry teaching does so little to acknowledge this rich existence.”
― Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc

“Each element has a characteristic atomic spectrum, due to the absorption and emission of light associated with the unique energy levels of its orbiting electrons.”
― Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc

“Needham”
― Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc

“everything is made of elements, yet the pure elements themselves seem oddly elusive, almost always locked away in inscrutable minerals and compounds. Searching for the elements in nature was like raiding a bakery and finding plenty of cakes and buns but no sign of the flour and sugar from which they were made.”
― Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc

“Beauty comes out of necessity. For though we may dress up the truth with fancy aesthetic theories, we are biologically programmed to appreciate colour and the reflected glare of the sun for our survival.”
― Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc

“Lead’s dull truth is that beauty fades. Time corrodes our bodies, our skin acquires its own oxide coating, but the soul may be kept pure within.”
― Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc

“Before modern regulations, manufacturers sometimes used the poisonous and unstable copper acetoarsenite, the pigment artists call Paris Green, for this purpose.”
― Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc

“Different yellows and oranges are created by sodium salts, powdered charcoal and iron filings, for example. Green has traditionally been made using copper salts, such as verdigris”
― Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc

“Working with Bohr in Copenhagen was the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy, who in 1923 had discovered the element hafnium, naming it after the Latin for the city, ‘Hafnia’. Hevesy first suggested that they bury the medals, but Bohr felt it was too likely they would be discovered. Instead, as Nazi troops flooded into the city, he set about dissolving them in aqua regia–with some difficulty, he complained later, as there was a considerable amount of gold and it was reluctant to react even with this strong acid. The Nazis took over the Institute for Theoretical Physics and carefully searched Bohr’s laboratory, but omitted to enquire as to the contents of the bottles of brown liquid on a shelf, which remained there undisturbed for the duration of the war. After the war, Bohr wrote a letter to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences accompanying the return of the medal gold explaining what had happened to it. The gold was recovered, and the Nobel Foundation duly minted new medals for the two physicists.”
― Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc

“Edwin Hubble escaped the glare of ‘Orange county’ by retreating to a mountaintop observatory north of Pasadena, where he recorded the motions of the galaxies that led to his discovery of the expanding universe. But it wasn’t sodium that caused him difficulties. Potassium burns with a mauve flame which can sometimes be seen in a gunpowder explosion or when lighting a match. One night Hubble was excited to detect a potassium spectrum while he examined the galaxies through the world’s most powerful telescope. But it soon became apparent that the reading must be false. Eventually Hubble realized that the equipment had picked up the light from the potassium in the match that he had used to light his pipe.”
― Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc

“It is said that chlorinated drinking water brought to troops in the First World War saved more lives than were lost to the gas as a weapon.”
― Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc