The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Brief History of Element Discovery,
Synthesis, and Analysis, by Glen W. Watson

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Title: A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis

Author: Glen W. Watson

Release Date: March 13, 2010 [EBook #31624]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ELEMENT DISCOVERY ***

Produced by Mark C. Orton, Erica Pfister-Altschul and the
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[Transcriber's Notes: The following errors are noted, but have not been
corrected:

Page 17, footnote: "plutomium" should be "plutonium"
Page 8: "knowns" should be "knows"

In element names, {} represents subscripted numbers and <> represents
superscripted numbers. Readers may also refer to the HTML version of the
text, in which super and subscripted numbers are represented visually.

Italic emphasis is indicated by surrounding the word with _underscores_.

Greek letters in the original text are marked in brackets, e. g. [alpha]
or [gamma].

Table I (THE TRANSURANIUM ELEMENTS) has been moved from pages 12-13, in
the middle of the book, to the end of the text.]

A Brief History
of
ELEMENT DISCOVERY,
SYNTHESIS, and ANALYSIS

Glen W. Watson
September 1963

[Illustration]

LAWRENCE RADIATION LABORATORY
University of California
Berkeley and Livermore

Operating under contract with the
United States Atomic Energy Commission

[Illustration: Radioactive elements: alpha particles from a speck of
radium leave tracks on a photographic emulsion. (Occhialini and Powell,
1947)]

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ELEMENT DISCOVERY, SYNTHESIS, AND ANALYSIS

It is well known that the number of elements has grown from four in the
days of the Greeks to 103 at present, but the change in methods needed
for their discovery is not so well known. Up until 1939, only 88
naturally occurring elements had been discovered. It took a dramatic
modern technique (based on Ernest O. Lawrence's Nobel-prize-winning atom
smasher, the cyclotron) to synthesize the most recently discovered
elements. Most of these recent discove