Category Archives: Periodic Blackwork

Vanadium was discovered not once but twice. In 1801 the Spanish mineralogist Andrés Manuel del Río, working in Mexico City, analysed a sample of the mineral now known as vanadite and concluded that it contained a new element. He first named the element panchromium, from the Greek for ‘all the colours’, as it formed manyContinue reading “Nuevos elementos”

Following on from indium and thallium back in the p-block, some more colourful chemistry today with rhodium and chromium. I’m rather enjoying finding ways of getting some colour into a black and white design! William Hyde Wollaston was an English chemist who made his fortune by purifying and selling platinum. It was while extracting theContinue reading “Roses are red, sunflowers are yellow”

The city of Darmstadt lies in the state of Hesse, in the centre of modern-day Germany. It was once the capital of the Grand Duchy of Hesse, with an army of Hessian soldiers wearing uniforms of a brown woven jute cloth which, as a result, came to be known as hessian. In 1905 the GrandContinue reading “City and state”

Extracting minerals from deep underground can be a risky business even now. Imagine the scene several hundred years ago with just a flame for light, the likelihood of encountering pockets of toxic or flammable gas, and significant risk of tunnel collapse . Small wonder that miners in these times believed their tunnels to be inhabitedContinue reading “Minecraft”

Zinc is a familiar element, used to galvanise iron to prevent rusting. But unlike iron, its widespread use is a relatively modern phenomenon because of the difficulty in extracting it from its ore. Zinc has a low boiling point and so at the temperatures used to smelt iron, zinc escapes as a gas. The technologyContinue reading “Zinc”

When a metal salt is burned, a distinctive coloured flame is seen – a property that is exploited in fireworks. If the light of the flame is viewed through a prism, it is separated out into its component colours and a pattern of different coloured lines is seen. Each element gives its own unique setContinue reading “Shoots and leaves”

Copernicium, element 112, is another of the synthetic elements, created only in laboratories and in vanishingly small amounts. One atom was made in 1996, another in 2000 and then two in 2004. Each existed only for a matter of seconds. The team at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, whoContinue reading “Heliocentricity”

The patterns I have chosen for boron and aluminium allow me to introduce you to one of my favourite books. From Atoms to Patterns by Lesley Jackson concerns the Festival Pattern Group, a project instigated by Cambridge crystallographer Dr Helen Megaw for the Festival of Britain in 1951. She brought together British crystallographers and industrialContinue reading “Patterns in crystals”