Something About the Periodic Table

You’re out of element, Broty.

I’ve been told this week that I'm out of my element,  and it being National Periodic Table Day, I wonder which one I should pick to be out of. Conversely, what if I wanted to be in all of my elements – or have examples of every element? Randall Munroe writes in What If? (2014) about some people actually gathering physical samples of as many elements as possible (and likening this fad to collecting Pokémon). Collecting samples of all 118 elements would be a bad idea, Munroe further notes.

How many elements have appeared in the Bellairs Corpus? There’s uranium, in Saint Fidgeta (1966), as part of a comical story about stopping a plane in midair. Johnny Dixon finds an apostle spoon with Sn (for tin), Cu (for copper) and Sb (antimony) written on a tag in The Secret of the Underground Room (1990). Rose Rita, in The Specter of the Magician’s Museum (1998), find a book in the National Museum of Magic titled Chemical Magic with Everyday Ingredients, which I think Don Herbert would get a kick out of.

Selenium (Se) is an element not mentioned in any books. It was discovered in 1817 by Jöns Jacob Berzelius and Johan Gottlieb Gahn. The two owned a chemistry plant near Gripsholm, Sweden, producing sulfuric acid. The pyrite from the nearby Falun Mine created a red precipitate in the lead chambers which was presumed to be an arsenic compound. Berzelius and Gahn observed the red precipitate gave off a smell like horseradish when burned. This smell was not typical of arsenic, but a similar odor was known from tellurium compounds. However, the lack of tellurium compounds in the Falun Mine minerals eventually led Berzelius to describe a newly found element similar to sulfur and tellurium. Because of its similarity to tellurium, named after the Earth, Berzelius named the new element after the Moon.

The names Selenium and Selenna—the latter being Mrs. Izard's —seem to have a similar origin in the Greek mythologic figure Selene, the goddess of the Moon.