HydrogenThe Essential Element pptx

[...]... chemical elements and many of the elements had yet to be discovered However, some forty elements were known—a sufficient number to prompt a man of Prout’s passion to seek unity in this diversity of chemical elements In the tables he developed to organize his results, Prout applied his ideas to forty-two elements The atoms of each chemical element are characterized by a definite weight: the atoms of any one element. .. the “fundamental number” of other chemical elements He specifically mentioned the elements oxygen and carbon Had Balmer chosen to apply his effort to any chemical element other than hydrogen, we would never have heard of the high-school teacher from Basel He owed his success to a judicious choice: to study the spectral lines of hydrogen, the simplest chemical element Through Balmer’s success, the hydrogen... colleague Francis William Aston built the first “accurate” mass spectrograph and showed in 1920 that the stable element neon had two isotopes with atomic masses of twenty and twenty-two As additional elements were analyzed by Aston’s technique, it was established that the atomic weights of heavy elements were not exactly whole-number multiples of the atomic weight of hydrogen Prout’s intriguing hypothesis... those for whom the lure of a generalization that could unite the elements into a coherent theory of matter was enticing Physicists generally fell into this latter group along with some physically minded chemists Michael Faraday, for example, said to William Crookes, “To discover a new element is a very fine thing, but if you could decompose an element and tell us what it is made of—that would be a discovery... hydrogen, the weight of potassium is forty times the weight of hydrogen, and the weight of iodine is 124 times the weight of hydrogen And so it went with the other elements Prout examined For him the results were convincing “Others [chemical elements] might doubtless be mentioned,” concluded Prout in his 1815 paper, “but I submit the matter for the present to the consideration of the chemical world.”... life When atoms first began to take form, the ingredients available were limited There were photons (particles of light) and neutrinos, and elementary particles of matter—electrons and protons (the nucleus of the hydrogen atom is a proton) There were composites of elementary particles—deuterons, a proton plus a neutron (the deuteron is a special part of the story told in this book because it is the nucleus... research, by proponents and opponents alike, designed to test the validity of Prout’s idea Experiments were conceived to measure with the greatest possible accuracy the atomic weights of the chemical elements As new elements were discovered, they were put to the Proutian test Through the decades leading up to the First World War, Prout’s hypothesis was neither proved nor disproved In 1886, sixty years after... one element all have the same weight, but the atoms of some elements are heavier than those of others Oxygen atoms, for example, weigh more than those of nitrogen The hydrogen atom, the simplest of all atoms, weighs the least If, Prout reasoned, hydrogen was the fundamental building block of all the heavier atoms, then the atomic weights of all elements should be exact multiples of the atomic weight of... German physicist Johann Wilhelm The Spectra of the Chemical Elements 21 Ritter (1776–1810) discovered the presence of another invisible radiation at the other end of the visible spectrum, beyond the violet or, as we now call it, the ultraviolet From the beginning of the nineteenth century, scientists relied on the glass prism as an active element in optical experimentation During the year following... could be used to detect the presence of these metals in very small samples A few years later, William Talbot (1800–1877) showed that the spectrum of each of the chemical elements was unique and that it was possible to identify the chemical elements from their spectra It often takes time for the implications of experimental data to be understood and to be acted upon Fraunhofer’s earlier observation that .