The Chemical Element: A Historical Perspective (Greenwood Guides to Great Ideas in Science) - Hardcover

"This high-school level or general reader's guide to the study of matter at the theoretical and experimental level starts almost in the darkness of time with the Egyptian god Osiris and the ancient theory of matter. It then covers Greek matter theory including geometric solids, Zeno's paradox, Aristotle's model of the universe, including his four elements and four qualities, and discusses Chinese, Middle Eastern and Indian concepts, including the Yin-Yang symbol. It covers the alchemical symbols that sorted materials and planets and the contributions of alchemist David Teniers the Younger in the seventeenth century, the building of order through Boyle's air pump, Priestley's gas-collecting pneumatic trough, Lavoisier's constant pressure gas pump and reaction vessels, and Lavoisier's table of simple substances, followed by research on the atomic elements and the elements above 92." - SciTech Book News "In this volume, Andrew Ede delivers more than the title suggests. The book is not only a history of the modern chemical elements, but a history of the very concept of matter being composed of a small number of irreducible, primary substances in varying combinations....This book provides a well-founded view of the concept's contributing origins....[t]he author has provided an interesting view of our developing understanding of matter." - Science Books & Films "This excellent book on the historical perspective of the chemical element provides information not only on the history of the chemical elements, but also contains very useful appendices that should be of interest to chemistry students and their instructors at the high scholl through college levels....One of the nice features of the book is that every chapter contains interesting diagrams of reactions, tables, photographs, or sketches of equipment used by scientists over the ages....I highly recommend The Chemical Element as a resource for all high school chemistry teachers, and also to be included in secondary school libraries. It is the best book on this topic of which I am aware." - School Science and Mathematics "[A] delightful book written for an audience of scientists with an interest in the history of science. It is also suitable for nonscientists, as long as they have some level of interest in the fascinating details of how the chemical elements were first recognized as such and then, one by one, more were discovered. The alchemists and their obsession with transmutation, combined with Greek philosophy, on the one hand put a long dent in what would now be recognized as serious chemistry. On the other hand, the alchemists discovered a lot of useful synthetic techniques in their experiments and pioneered the development of useful chemical apparatus. The section on the periodic table and the short piece on the life of Mendeleev were certainly eye-openers for this reviewer. Scientists really do have life a lot easier these days....Highly recommended. General readers; lower-division undergraduates; faculty; professionals; two-year technical program students." - Choice

One of the most familiar features of any high-school chemistry lab is the Periodic Table of Elements. Elegant, informative, useful to any student in the lab - the Periodic Table neatly summarizes our scientific knowledge of the chemical elements from hydrogen to uranium and beyond - atomic number, atomic weight, isotopes, and more. But how did scientists discover all of these features of the elements? How did the Periodic Table come to be? And, even more basically, how did the concept of the chemical element come to dominate how scientists understand chemistry? This book shows readers the answers to these and other questions regarding the scientific understanding of matter. The Chemical Element, a volume in the Greenwood Guides to Great Ideas in Science, traces the history of this tremendously powerful concept from the ancient philosophers to the present day. The volume covers: the idea of the elements held by Aristotle and the other ancient Greek philosophers; how Chinese, Arabic and other ancient civilizations thought about the elements; Mendeleyev and the creation of the Periodic Table of Elements, the predictive power of which helped in the discovery of dozens of new elements; and the discovery of the artificial elements that are heavier than uranium Jargon and mathematics is kept to a minimum, and the volumes includes a timeline, a glossary, and a bibliography, making The Chemical Element an ideal resource for students researching chemistry and the history and nature of the scientific understanding of the world around us.