This book offers a largely chronological illustrated guide
to how the chemical elements were discovered over the past three millennia. It
provides a view not just of how we came to understand what everything is made
of but also of how chemistry developed from a trial-and-error craft of making
and transforming substances into a rational modern science that provides us
with new materials, drugs, and much else.
While other books have described the properties of the chemical elements and
often delved into their histories, none has done so in this highly visual
manner. The closest comparison is Theodore Gray’s illustrated book The
Elements - but this does not take a historical approach as this does
here. The pictorial material for this subject is very rich, including some
gorgeous alchemical documents as well as portraits, colour charts, woodcuts of
mining, artefacts such as John Dalton’s wooden balls, advertisements (for
example, for radium 'cures') and postage stamps.
The book contains separate short sections for each element or groups of related
elements, which are gathered into several sections to order the sequence into
several chronological eras of element discovery. Included are short
'interludes' (or 'feature spreads') presenting important intellectual
milestones in how we think about elements.
With 192 illustrations
About the Author
Philip Ball has written more than 20 books on
scientific topics, including Elegant Solutions: Ten Beautiful
Experiments in Chemistry (which was awarded the Dingle Prize for books
by the British Society for the History of Science), Critical Mass (which
won the Aventis Science Books award in 2005), and A Very Short
Introduction to The Elements, one of the VSI series from Oxford University
Press.
Philip is a presenter of the science history series Science
Stories on BBC Radio 4. He holds a BA in Chemistry from the University
of Oxford and a PhD in Physics from the University of Bristol, and is a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a board member of its magazine Chemistry
World, in which he writes a regular column.
