A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis

The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis, by Glen W. Watson This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org 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: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ELEMENT DISCOVERY *** Produced by Mark C. Orton, Erica Pfister-Altschul and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net A Brief History of ELEMENT DISCOVERY, SYNTHESIS, and ANALYSIS Glen W. Watson September 1963 LAWRENCE RADIATION LABORATORY University of California Berkeley and Livermore Operating under contract with the United States Atomic Energy Commission Radioactive elements: alpha particles from a speck of radium leave tracks on a photographic emulsion. (Occhialini and Powell, 1947) [Pg 1]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.