One small problem: Poland didn’t actually exist. It’s named for Poland, yes? Marie Curie (née Maria Skłodowska) was Polish born of course she would name an element she discovered after her home country. Take polonium, one of the radioactive elements discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie. Wothers also provides surprises about what we assume we know. Some of the vignettes, such as that of cobalt, point us to stories we likely would never have discovered on our own. Wothers on video comes across as engaging, exciting, and enthusiastic, and it’s a missed opportunity that none of those qualities come across in this book.

But textbooks aren’t great picks for leisure reading. They’re comprehensive on their given subject, which can also be said of Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf. Textbooks have their strong points don’t get me wrong. Old habits die hard, though, and this volume is more instruction than entertainment. He frequently appears on science shows and is also the author of several popular college-level textbooks, but this represents his first foray into writing books for the public. Wothers, a British chemist active in promoting chemistry to the wider public, has won awards for his contributions to public outreach. This is just one of the stories Wothers includes in Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf: How the Elements Were Named. Imagine what that would have been like when heated: no wonder miners thought it came straight from hell. As a metal, cobalt is safe enough to hold, but the German miners were digging out cobaltite, which includes arsenic and sulfur. Today we recognize the name as cobalt, number 27 on the periodic table of elements. It could not be smelted to extract the metal, and, as John Beckman relates in his 1797 History of Inventions and Discoveries, “Miners had an aversion to it, not only because it gave them much fruitless labor, but because it often proved prejudicial to their health.” Agricola wrote that “very often it possesses an extraordinary corrosive quality so that it will eat into the hands and feet of workmen unless they take careful precautions against it.” The miners called it kobolt after the wily, wicked kobolds. Science History InstituteĪround the end of the 15th century, German miners pulled a new, seemingly worthless mineral from the ground. Mining towns prayed for deliverance from the kobolds’ destructive ways.Ī kobold terrorizes a crew of German miners in this illustration from The Playbook of Metals, 1862. They were blamed for accidents, cave-ins, and rockslides and for replacing precious metals with worthless ones.

Sometimes they throw pebbles at the workmen, but they rarely injure them unless the workers first ridicule or curse them.” Different regions of Germany believed different things about the kobolds, though, and some people thought they were quite evil. Agricola writes that kobolds do “not often trouble miners, but they idle about in shafts and tunnels and really do nothing, although they pretend to be busy in all kinds of labour, sometimes digging ore, and sometimes putting into buckets that which has been dug. Dwarfish in stature and dressed like miners, kobolds were thought to be expert miners and metalworkers who could be heard constantly drilling, hammering, and shoveling. Not all of the supernatural entities in Agricola’s book were as intimidating as poisonous demon horses. “ mentions one called Annebergius, ‘who only with his breath killed more than twelve labourers in a cave. . . .’ Apparently the demon appeared as a horse with the poisonous gas issuing from his mouth.” “Some are cruel and terrible to behold, and these annoy and hurt the miners,” explains Peter Wothers in his new book, Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf. In 1549 Georgius Agricola-best known for his iconic On the Nature of Metals-published a book on subterranean animals, including the various demons thought to be found in mines. You’d forgive miners for being a little superstitious. And if we’re thinking about mines slighting, there is literally no place on earth darker: it is total, all-encompassing, relentless darkness. You’re far underground and frequently at the mercy of what you cannot see or anticipate-falling rocks, poisonous gases.

Mines are spooky places: dark, echoing, labyrinthine, home to unfamiliar sounds and smells. Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf: How the Elements Were Named.

Chemistry periodic table names