The Elements: A Visual History of Their Discovery - Hardcover

Ball, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0500024537 ISBN 13: 9780500024539

Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2021

Synopsis

Award-winning science writer Philip Ball traces how the chemical elements were discovered in this brilliant visual history

About this title

About the Author

Philip Ball has written more than 20 books on scientific topics, including Elegant Solutions: Ten Beautiful Experiments in Chemistry (which was awarded the Dingle Prize for books by the British Society for the History of Science), Critical Mass (which won the Aventis Science Books award in 2005), and A Very Short Introduction to The Elements, one of the VSI series from Oxford University Press. Philip is a presenter of the science history series Science Stories on BBC Radio 4. He holds a BA in Chemistry from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Physics from the University of Bristol, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a board member of its magazine Chemistry World, in which he writes a regular column.

From the Back Cover

This book offers a largely chronological illustrated guide to how the chemical elements were discovered over the past three millennia. It provides a view not just of how we came to understand what everything is made of but also of how chemistry developed from a trial-and-error craft of making and transforming substances into a rational modern science that provides us with new materials, drugs, and much else.

While other books have described the properties of the chemical elements and often delved into their histories, none has done so in this highly visual manner. The closest comparison is Theodore GrayÆs illustrated book The Elements - but this does not take a historical approach as this does here. The pictorial material for this subject is very rich, including some gorgeous alchemical documents as well as portraits, colour charts, woodcuts of mining, artefacts such as John DaltonÆs wooden balls, advertisements (for example, for radium 'cures') and postage stamps.

The book conta

Edition details

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0500024537
• ISBN 13: 9780500024539
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224