Talk:Discoveries of the chemical elements
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I've been sporadically adding bits to this for a while; it's way incomplete, but there's enough to show what I have in mind. Ideally, it ends up as a long essay on the discovery of the elements, and gives us another route into the history of chmistry... but it needs a lot more yet. --Malcom Farmer
Whether Priestley was the first to isolate oxygen may be debatable. The Danish polyhistor Ole Borch (Olaus Borrichius; 1626-1690) seems to have anticipated him; see http://pearl1.lanl.gov/periodic/elements/8.html
S.
"... Bayen and Borch, but they did not know how to collect it, did not study its properties, and did not recognize it as an elementary substance."
- Stumbling onto something and not knowing its significance is not the type of thing awards are given for. Credit is given to those that understand the importance of what they have found. --mav 13:07 Dec 1, 2002 (UTC)
This article is not about the discovery of the fact that there are such things of chemical elements, but rather about the separate discoveries of the separate chemical elements separately. Therefore I have moved it, so that "discoveries" --- the plural --- appears where the singular appeared before. Michael Hardy 21:56 Mar 4, 2003 (UTC)
- An article should be written on the Discovery of Oxygen because it is a rather controversial historical issue that is often used as a way to talk about the difficulties in assigning historical priority in scientific discoveries (Thomas Kuhn uses it as one of his examples for just this problem in SSR). There's no easy answer to it, even among professional historians of science. --Fastfission 03:28, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
There seem to be two entries for Beryllium, which should be there? -- Bruce Gallop
- According to Beryllium, "This element was discovered by Louis Vauquelin in 1798 as the oxide in beryl and in emeralds. Friedrich Wöhler and A. A. Bussy independently isolatated the metal in 1828 by reacting potassium on beryllium chloride." I'm not sure whether there is debate as to which of these, if not both, to give precedent to (such as with Oxygen), but maybe there ought to be a note? --Fastfission 16:00, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Layout
I would suggest putting the date as the left-hand most field - given that it is the primary field of the table. Ian Cairns 22:44, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)