118 elements, 118 names, 118 stories. The periodic table is full of secrets and surprises
and in this video, we’re going to uncover them. Which elements are named the stinker,
the frustrater, and the acid maker? Is it aluminium or aluminum?
I’ll explain that one later. What mythical beings lurk
among the periods and groups? And which places and people
are immortalised there too? Enough rhyming now. Also, Why do some of the chemical
symbols seem to make no sense? Find out now! In another RobWords. I’m going to be in my element with this one. Okay everybody, let’s take it from the
top, and keep it light, with Hydrogen the least dense element and atomic number 1. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to do
all 118 elements in numerical order. By the time I’d finished they’d probably
have discovered some more of them. But let’s start here, because it is one of the
elements we’re perhaps best acquainted with, but whose name we may never have stopped
to think about. Hydrogen breaks down into the Greek for water - hydro - and the Greek
for to form, or to generate - gen. That’s the same gen that gives us generate, but
also: gender, gene, genesis and generous. Why is hydrogen called that? Because you need it
to generate water. In fact, here in Germany, where I’m standing right now, it’s called Wasserstoff,
which means “water stuff” or “water material”. The other element of water is
Oxygen - and there’s that gen again. This time the oxy means “acid”, because it was
originally called that under the - it turns out, false - belief that you needed it
to make an acid. So, the name’s actually misleading, but it could be worse.
The first scientists to discover it in the 1700s originally named it “dephlogisticated air'!
So thank god that didn’t stick. They also called it fire air though, which is much cooler.
Or hotter, I suppose. Anyway, let’s generate another
of these -gen elements. Nitrogen is so called because of its
presence in nitre, which is a salt. Away from the periodic table, you
can see -gen in action in carcinogen, something that generates cancer, or pathogen,
something that generates a disease or suffering. Actually, I wish I hadn’t gone there.
That’s was a bit bleak so let’s lighten things up again with Helium.
It’s also at the top of the table so it is high time we talk about it.
It gets its name from the Greek god of the Sun, Helios. Why? Because it was first detected in
the corona of the sun. Corona itself means crown, and it’s the bit you see surrounding the sun
when there’s an eclipse. It’s that shiny aura. The -um at the end of Helium is something
we’re going to encounter a lot going forward. So let’s take a moment to look at it.
Both -um and -ium are just suffixes used to turn something into a substance - etymologically
speaking - or specifically into an element. For example, Lithium gets its name from the
Greek for stone. Stone is already a material, but the -ium gives us an element named after it. The fact there are two very
similar ways to do this, with um and ium, is the reason we have two names
for this element here. Now, I’ve always called it Aluminium, but it also gets called Aluminum.
You want me to tell you which is right, don’t you? If only it were so…
elementary. So Aluminium is recorded first
as the name for the element you get from alumina. That was in 1811. But
then Aluminum is seen being used in 1812. So neither one of them is the long-established
term, and the other an abominable mispronunciation. They’re both good.
For a while there was a third option: alumium. But let’s leave that
one buried safely in the ground. Instead, let’s look at some more of the
big hitters from the periodic table. Carbon gets its name from the Latin for coal. Coal
itself is composed mostly of carbon and today, the words for coal in the Latin languages
are something along the lines of “carbon”. Next up: Gold! [Spandau Ballet sing] Always
believe in your so-ul. [Rob speaks] Gold is a VERY old word.
We’ve been calling it something along those lines for as long as we can
trace the Germanic languages back. But it’s thought that its ultimate root is
in Proto-Indo-European hela meaning yellow. But hang on a second… What’s going on here?
Its symbol is Au. Neither of those letters is in the word
gold, so what is cracking off here? Well that’s actually short for
the Latin name for gold, Aurum. Coming in just behind gold - as it usually does -
is Silver. That’s another old Germanic word. But again, what’s going on for chemical symbol?
Well Ag is short for its Latin name as well, Argentum in this case, from which we get the
name of the country Argentina, because when the Spaniards rocked up in the Americas in
the 16th and 17th centuries they were rather excited about the large amounts of the precious
metal they were able to take back with them. They named Argentina using the Latin word
for silver. But there is an element named after the Spanish word for silver too:
Platinum comes from Spanish “Plata”. It means “little silver element”. Platina is
a cute little version of plata. Basically, the Spaniards basically thought it was an inferior
form of silver. How wrong they turned out to be. And there’s another element
named after silver too. Ready Freddy? It’s Mercury.
Okay so, our word Mercury comes from the name of the Roman god of that name.
But the chemical symbol is Hg, which is short for the Greek hydrargyrum. We’ve seen the elements of
that word before. The Hydr bit is water, like in Hydrogen, and the argyrum is silver. Hydrargyrum
means water silver. In fact, Mercury used to be called in English “quicksilver”, which means
liquid silver because that’s what it looks like. So Argentina may be named after an
element - but it’s actually far more common for elements to be named after places.
However, some of them are by no means obvious. One place has more elements named after it than any other and I’m willing to
bet you’ve never heard of it. It’s this place, just outside of
the Swedish capital Stockholm. Now I had no idea how to pronounce this.
Is it ee-terby? Yuh-terby? No clue. …but I did happen to be in Stockholm the
other day, so I took the opportunity to ask a Swede. And after pouring me a lovely
coffee, barista Isak kindly obliged. How’s it pronounced? Ytterby And again Y-tter-by Ooternboo… Ooterbi… I still can’t get it right. Now, back in 1789, the first rare earth metal
compound was found in a lump of rock taken from a mine at Ytterby and since then, a whole host
of brand new elements have been identified there. Among them - Yttrium and Ytterbium,
which are both obviously named after the place. But so, also, is Terbium,
and indeed Erbium. So a whole FOUR elements are named after that one tiny
town on the Baltic coast. Zero points for creativity though… I bet they wanted to
call the next one just Bium, but they didn’t. But other elements were found there.
One of them was named Holmium, after nearby Stockholm. Another one
was called Scandium from Scandia: the Latin name for Scandinavia. And there’s also
Thulium, which comes from Thule: an ancient Greek and Latin word for what they believed to
be the most northerly region of the world. Tantalum was also found at Ytterby and - in a
bit of a sidestep - was named after the Greek mythological character Tantalus. That poor fella
was doomed to an eternity of hunger and thirst, standing under a tree of fruit he couldn’t
reach, and in a pool of water he couldn’t drink. We get the word tantalising from him, to
express a desire that is just beyond our grasp. Tantalum is named after him because it’s
really difficult to separate from its ore. Another element, Niobium, is named
after King Tantalus’s daughter, Niobe, because tantalum and niobium
are always found together. More on Greek mythology to come, but let’s look
at some more elements named after places first. France gets two elements named after
it: Francium, which is obvious, but also Gallium, which gets its name
from the Latin name for France, Gallia. Other elements named after
places include Polonium, named after Marie Curie’s homeland,
which was not France, but Poland. Copper is ultimately named
after the island of Cyprus, from where the Romans sourced most of theirs. And some other examples are out of this world. Selenium gets its name from the
Greek word for the moon, selene. And Uranium, Neptunium and Plutonium
are all named after planets. There are loads of others named after places too. I won’t go through them all,
but you can see them all there. Now, the planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto,
get their names from Greek and Roman gods. And there are plenty of more mythical
figures hidden within the periodic table. Titanium is named after the Titans, the
fearsome Greek deities who preceded the Olympian gods before being banished
to the depths of the underworld. Promethium is named after one of the
Titans in particular: Prometheus, who according to the Greeks stole fire
from the other gods and gave it to humans. He was punished by having an eagle
peck out his liver every day for eternity. The name of the element is
a nod to the excruciating difficulty scientists experienced trying
to synthesise promethium. Cadmium gets its name from the Greek
mythological King, Cadmus, who Greek historian Herodotus claims was responsible for
handing the Phoenecian alphabet to the Greeks: a lovely little cross-over fact if you watched
my video about the origins of our alphabet. Norse mythology is also represented in the
form of Thorium named after thunder god Thor, and Vanadium, which comes from one of
many Old Norse name for the goddess Freya. There are a couple of other mischievous
mythical fellows hiding within the table of elements. They’re disguised in
the forms of Cobalt and Nickel. Cobalt comes from a German word
meaning a pixie or a goblin, Kobold. And Nickel is actually a shortening of the German word “Kupfernickel”.
Kupfer means copper and Nickel is another mischievous demon
so Kupfernickel is a sort of “copper imp”. Cobalt and Nickel get their impish names
because of the ways they confounded miners who tried to dig them up.
Nickel fooled them into thinking they were mining copper, and cobalt made
them ill! Or so the miners thought. It was actually more likely the arsenic
and sulphur that was mixed in with it. Actually, a fair few elements get their
names simply from the fact that they’re hard to extract. It’s as if the scientists
were so livid about the trouble they’d had to go to to isolate or synthesise them, that
they took it out on the elements themselves. Krypton is not named after Superman’s home planet, but the Greek word for “hidden”.
Lanthanum is also named for its shyness, I suppose.
And so is Dysprosium. Xenon comes from the same root as Xenophobia.
It’s from the Greek for strange or foreign. Xenon gets called the “stranger gas”. Not
because it’s antisocial, but because it’s uncharacteristically reactive for a noble gas. They’re called noble because of their reluctance
to be associated with other, lesser elements. THESE elements are also named after
their specific characteristics. My favourite is Argon, which gets
its name from the Greek for lazy. Just because it can’t be
arsed to react with anything. And also, poor old Osmium, which gets its name
from the Greek for stink because… it smells. Or at least the compound the scientist
who named it was working with did. Often scientists themselves end up being
immortalized in the names of elements. Curium is named after Pierre and Marie Curie, Einsteinium is… well do I really need to tell you?
There’s also Nobelium and Copernicium, named for Alfred Nobel of dynamite and Nobel prize fame,
and Renaissance brainbox Nicolaus Copernicus. All these other elements are also named
after people too. Some you may have heard of, others maybe not. I want to mention some more confusing
name:chemical symbol combinations. We already talked about Mercury, Gold and Silver…
So what about Lead? Lead gets its chemical symbol from the
Latin for lead, plumbum. We get our word plumber from the same root because
water pipes were often made of lead. Tin, Potassium and Iron also get their apparently nonsensical chemical symbols from
Latin names for the same metals. And special mention goes to Tungsten, which has
the chemical symbol W. Tung sten comes from the Swedish for heavy stone. Simple and descriptive.
But the old name for Tungsten was W-w-wolframite, which comes from the German
Wolf Rahm, meaning wolf’s cream. Hallo. Okay, so in an ideal world I would not be
finishing my video with the words “wolf’s cream”. But those are all the elements that
I’m going to go into with this one. Any that I haven’t mentioned, it’s because
their explanation is extremely simple, very similar to another one, or I just found
their origins a bit… how shall I put it… Boron. Thanks a lot for watching. This
actually took quite a lot of work, so if you’ve enjoyed it, please
do hit the subscribe button. Next, I recommend you watch my video about
the origins of our words for colours. If you’ve already seen it though, why not try
this one out instead. I’ll see you there.
