Talk:Discoveries of the chemical elements
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is a current featured list candidate. A featured list should exemplify Wikipedia's very best work, and is therefore expected to meet several criteria. Please feel free to leave comments. |
 |
This article is supported by the Elements WikiProject, which gives a central approach to the chemical elements on Wikipedia. Please participate by editing this article, or visit the project page for more details. This article has also been selected for the Version 0.5 release of Wikipedia. |
||
| B | This article has been rated as B-Class on the quality scale. | ||
| Low | This article has been rated as Low-importance on the importance scale. | ||
|
Article Grading: The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need. |
|||
Archive 1 - discussion prior to merge (2003-2005)
Including atomic numbers in this table would make it more useful.
Contents |
[edit] Last natural element discovered?
This article says Francium was the "last naturally occurring element discovered" (1939), then says Astatine was discovered in 1940. But the article on Astatine says it is naturally occurring (in the second sentence). Could this apparent contradiction be fixed please? McKay 01:12, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Beryllium
I don't know much about the history of the discoveries of elements, so I don't know why berylium is listed twice: 1798 and 1828. Just thought I'd point that out to anyone who is interested in the subject and would like to research it. --DangApricot 03:38, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I just noticed this too. So far as I can see, the 1798 entry is Vauquelin's discovery of the oxide, and the 1828 entry is Wöhler and Bussy's independent first isolations of the metal. Now the introduction says "The elements are listed generally in the order in which each was first defined as the pure element", but then I'm not at all sure what that actually means. I suspect that the elements mentioned up to and including the first half of the 19th century had by no means all been obtained 'pure' - so where does that leave us? Given that sodium and suchlike are listed for first isolation of the metals, even though (AFAIK) chemists had been sure that the alkali metal salts did contain metals, that would lead us to prefer the later date and we should remove the earlier one. Opinions? Kay Dekker 01:06, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Ununoctium
Ununoctium appears to have been discovered twice. There should be only one instance of discovery on the chart, right? - Unsigned
[edit] Oxygen
Should it perhaps be noted that Scheele discovered oxygen a few years earlier than Priestly, but did not publish the discovery until 1777? On the page Carl Wilhelm Scheele it is also stated that he "also discovered other chemical elements such as barium (1774), chlorine (1774), manganese (1774), molybdenum (1778), and tungsten (1781)". This is in disagreement with what is said in these tables. Myself, I am not familiar enough with the history to be of much help, but it seems to me both pages cannot be right... Osquar F 13:59, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
Gold is missing from the list of elements known in antiquity.
John Woodruff
[edit] Time-line Table of elements?
Just an idea - you could make a table of elements colour coded with the century of discovery ... e.g. dull (e.g. grey) for anciently discovered and bright (e.g. red) for more recent. Just to add a splash of colour, may be there is a nice trend -- Quantockgoblin 07:07, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
