Periodic Videos

I watched quite a few of their videos a very long time ago, but since then I haven’t really been following along. I happened to stumble across the channel on Friday evening, and this meant there was a lot of catching up to do.

I’ve added some of the videos I really enjoyed, but I couldn’t include all of them – there is a lot of good chemistry-related stuff in that channel, and a lot of interesting details about ‘how stuff works’ and/or ‘how we know something’. Even videos about obscure elements you didn’t even know existed may contain fascinating details that turn out to be really quite relevant to your every-day life; did you for example know that due to the material properties of niobium, by adding perhaps 200 grams of this material to a car, a car manufacturer might save in the order of 100 kilograms of steel? Well, I didn’t.

…

Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Neutron radiation
Involute
Triuranium octoxide
Californium
(See also this one for more footage from ORNL)
…

John Newlands (chemist)
William Odling
History of the periodic table
Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois.

Does Mendeleev get too much credit? An interesting ‘walk through the archives’. I agree with the overall assessment; other people came close/had similar ideas, but it’s quite natural for Mendeleev to be associated strongly with the Table; he pushed the idea very hard, and he was not afraid to make detailed predictions which might turn out to be wrong. As noted in (one of) Scerri’s book(/s) on the topic, “it has been estimated that within one hundred years of the introduction of Mendeleev’s famous table of 1869, approximately 700 different versions of the periodic table had been published” – so although the video seems to cover a lot of different versions, it’s really only scratching the surface.

…

…

1858 Bradford sweets poisoning.
Death of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Realgar.
Scheele’s Green.

…