Talk:Discovery of chemical elements

message: I took this out :Lead was first  purified and clearly differentiated from tin by medieval Middle Eastern chemists as lead and tin were purified and clearly differentiated  from at least Mesopotamian times. J8079s (talk) 02:57, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Here's a cite Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries: The Archaeological Evidence By Peter Roger Stuart Moorey Published by EISENBRAUNS, 1999  J8079s (talk) 03:09, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  lead and tin 

message: "The elements are listed generally in the order in which each was first defined as the pure element, as the exact date of discovery of most elements cannot be accurately defined."
What is this misconceived sentence supposed to mean?   What does "defined as the pure element" mean ??  There is a problem with the word "defined".   You can infer the existence of,  discover, extract, measure, determine the properties of a chemical element,  but you cannot "define" it.   And what is a "pure element" ?   All elements are "pure".   Is the sentence intended to mean,   the preparation of a sample of the element which is not mixed or compounded with any other element ?   To what degree of purity ?   For many elements,  preparation of "pure" ( uncontaminated ) samples occured decades after the existence of the element was scientifically conclusive.Eregli bob (talk) 04:09, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is this supposed to mean ? 

message: In the "Recorded discoveries" table is a column headed "Isolation (widely known)". I have no clue what this means. What is it that is "widely known"? The element? The person who isolated it? The fact that it was isolated? 86.160.83.63 (talk) 20:55, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "widely known" 

message: :"The discovery of smelting around 3000 BC led to the start of the iron age around 1200 BC"
It needs to be clarified whether "discovery of smelting" refer to the smelting of iron or to the general technique. If the former, then why was there a 1800 year gap? If the latter, then it contradicts the statement earlier that "lead smelting began at least 9000 years ago". 86.181.201.159 (talk) 13:43, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Smelting of iron / iron age 

message: When referring to Carbon, "Samaritans" are mentioned. This might be a mistake. Perhaps, Sumerians are meant.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.148.29.164 (talk) 10:57, 9 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I have improved the text.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.148.29.164 (talk) 15:14, 9 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible mistake 

message: "chemical elements discoveries" is not idiomatic English. I would say it requires an apostrophe ("chemical elements' discoveries", i.e. the discoveries of the elements) or, better, should be changed to "chemical element discoveries". 86.135.115.218 (talk) 10:57, 6 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not a good entry title 

message: Platinum was known to native Americans before Columbus; shouldn't it be placed in the first table with a note about European discovery? - Soerfm (talk) 14:40, 17 December 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: (unfortunately almost nine years late). Double sharp (talk) 13:56, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Platinum 

message: Why Bismuth is in the unrecorded list when it's clear steated that it was discovered in 1753?OTAVIO1981 (talk) 15:32, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I was wondering the same thing. I've moved it under recorded discoveries. Skydiver (talk) 18:42, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Probably because of this. It was identified as a distinct element in 1753 but was known and used well before that. In that respect it is a bit like Zn. Double sharp (talk) 09:42, 14 September 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I've added the Inca use of bismuth in the article. Double sharp (talk) 19:17, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bismuth 

message: When I typed in "When was Zinc discovered" in Google, it was discovered in 1746. But in the article, it was discovered before the Middle Ages. Should I change Zinc to "Discovered to Middle Ages?"  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Erbium Is Awesome (talk • contribs) 22:49, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Zinc 

message: He was not a person. This is the title of a book. Double sharp (talk) 04:22, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rasaratna Samuccaya 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I find the "in widespread use" for this element and the source given rather questionable. As far as I can gather, the sulfide (stibnite, Sb2S3), was used (in cosmetics) but not known as an element or metal until much later.Elementymology & Elements MultidictLANLChemistry explainedThe Antimony ArchiveAll manner of antimony, Nature The "in widespread use" bit implies the element, not a compound. Kleuske (talk) 23:06, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Antimony 

message: A lot of earlier sources (and even the Wikiepdia article on it) claim 2003, but why so recent here?
Same thing for the others. I'm sure flerovium was 1999 and livermorium was 2000.
Vandalism? Or something further?
8.40.151.110 (talk) 23:16, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: IUPAC. The 2003 discovery did not meet IUPAC's criteria; the 2010 discovery of 289,290Mc as daughters of 293,294Ts did. Same with Fl and Lv; the initial discoveries did not meet IUPAC's criteria, but the later experiments did. Double sharp (talk) 03:02, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I changed it on the element articles for Nh–Og, this time with hidden comments to deter others who might not be aware of this from changing it back. You can see all the IUPAC reports linked at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Elements/Links. Double sharp (talk) 03:07, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: What about, say, Ds, Rg, and Cn? Were those actually later or no? 8.40.151.110 (talk) 01:53, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: No; for those, the original discoveries were confirmed. The IUPAC technical reports are here: Ds, Rg, and Cn. (Although arguably since the 1966 date from IUPAC for nobelium is from the date of publication of the papers, Ds and Rg should really say 1995 instead of 1994; I will change that.) Double sharp (talk) 04:43, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

text: The articles for Ds and Rg need to be updated as well. I see how Lu and Ac could be controversial. 8.40.151.110 (talk) 22:15, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moscovium - 2010? Really? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This article claims that "Hafnium was the last stable element to be discovered." The article on Hafnium calls it the penultimate stable element to be discovered. The article on Rhenium claims it to be the last stable one. I have no idea what's correct, just trying to point out the inconsistencies.--37.201.181.76 (talk) 12:52, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Re was discovered in 1908 by Ogawa, but at the time the discovery was not recognised. In the meantime Hf was discovered, and so when Re was rediscovered in 1925 it looked like it was the last. I'll fix the Hf and Re articles. Double sharp (talk) 23:31, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Last stable element to be discovered 

message: They seem to have been discovered after classical times (or else why wouldn't they be "planetary metals"?) but before phosphorus. Since the discovery of phosphorus is famous as the first one recorded I would imagine arsenic, antimony, zinc, and bismuth as "unrecorded medieval discoveries" but I can't find a source that really makes sense of that...  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:18C:8601:8448:71BA:CFD0:BDF2:8137 (talk) 16:55, 8 March 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: It is hard to define what a discovery is before the the modern conception of a chemical element was in force. Zinc, antimony, and bismuth were known for a long time but were not recognised as distinct metals until later. Double sharp (talk) 16:01, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: It's murky, yeah. I hope I have done justice to the antimony and arsenic entries. -165.234.252.11 (talk) 18:49, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question about As, Sb, Zn, Bi 

message: Should its discovery and isolation be the same date? Would that be 1797 or 1798? I can't tell from looking at the paper...  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:18C:8601:8448:4D19:7809:37F:4C7D (talk) 17:55, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cr 

message: Antoine Lavoiser named Hydrogen in 1783 while reproducing the 1781 Cavendish experiment not 1793. The Hydrogen wiki page reports it correctly. The website cited (http://elements.vanderkrogt.net/element.php?sym=h) does say 1793 in its header, but if you read the explanatory text below, it references the correct naming year twice.  That 1793 in the header appears to be a typo.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by MC152 (talk • contribs) 14:19, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Error in Hydrogen section 

message: What do you make of what's said here? https://books.google.com/books?id=EFzuCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA41&lpg=PA41&dq=beryllium+1828+yttrium+1828&source=bl&ots=-xmLzhddbd&sig=dDPDYLMsN8WQ_5VHTM2Hj-zM23c&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjH75bin8TaAhWDesAKHRcPBms4ChDoATABegQIABA0#v=onepage&q&f=false If it's not true, I feel we can consider Wöhler the isolator of Y since we're considering Ørsted the isolator of Al. Squee3 (talk) 18:31, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Why exactly would it not be true? Indeed this means that Rose (1843) should likely be considered the isolator of yttrium, since he postdates Mosander's removal of terbium and erbium. Double sharp (talk) 13:38, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Yttrium 

message: Wouldn't helium be the first noble gas discovered technically? I know that they found out that the noble gases were a thing when they discovered argon, but helium is a noble gas. So can you please fix it?Porygon-Z 03:53, 26 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The article says Argon in 1894 was the first noble gas to be *isolated* on Earth. Helium was observed/discovered in 1868 in the Sun, so it could not be isolated at that time. So the article was not strictly wrong, but I have now clarified the helium entry a little. Dirac66 (talk) 18:38, 26 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Noble gases 

message: Five trace radioactives actually have two significant discovery years: the year they were first made in a lab, and the year they were first found to be natural after all. (A sixth and seventh might be possible if live 247Cm is ever found.) These are already in the article, but maybe they could be clarified a bit more.
Element        	Synthesis                                   	Discovery in nature
Technetium (43)	1937, Perrier and Segrè                     	1962, Kenna and Kuroda
Promethium (61)	1945, Coryell, Marinsky, and Glendenin      	1965, Erämetsä
Astatine (85)  	1940, Corson, MacKenzie, and Segrè          	1943, Karlik and Bernert
Neptunium (93) 	1940, McMillan and Abelson                  	1952, Peppard, Mason, Gray, and Mech
Plutonium (94) 	1940-1, Seaborg, Wahl, Kennedy, and McMillan	1941-2, Seaborg and Perlman
Double sharp (talk) 20:10, 6 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Double births" 

message: The SD you have added is pointless.  The page title is already sufficiently explanatory so WP:SDNONE applies.  The only additional information is that there are 118 elements which, beside being superfluous and open to change, causes the SD to exceed the recommended 40 characters. SpinningSpark 22:12, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Short description 

message: I check pages listed in :Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of :Timeline of chemical element discoveries's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.
Reference named "CRC":
From Bismuth: 
From Didymium: 
From Lithium: 
From Platinum: 
From Synthetic element: 
I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 17:16, 6 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Orphaned references in [[:Timeline of chemical element discoveries]] 

message: Should we split the list of modern discoveries? I feel it's a bit unwieldy, since it has roughly 100 rows.
We could simply split it by century: 1700s (ca. 25 entries), 1800s (ca. 40 entries), 1900 until present (ca. 35 entries).
(A less arbitrary / more scientific criterion would be nice, but the only one I can think of is the switch from discovery to synthesis, around 1940. Were there simliar fundamental changes in earlier times?)
The downside of separate lists would be that one cannot sort the whole table (e.g. by atomic number), but since we've already split the pre-modern elements from the rest, I guess that's OK.
— Chrisahn (talk) 19:31, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: There's a fairly natural gap between Ru (1844) and Cs (1860) when all the common elements were found and it was impossible to go further without spectroscopy. Unfortunately, the noble gases were discovered extremely late, so what would've been another natural gap is only one day between Xe (12 July 1898) and Po (13 July 1898). Double sharp (talk) 03:02, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Split list of modern discoveries? 

message: From the Wikipedia article Antimony:
An artifact, said to be part of a vase, made of antimony dating to about 3000 BC was found at Telloh, Chaldea (part of present-day Iraq), and a copper object plated with antimony dating between 2500 BC and 2200 BC has been found in Egypt. Austen, at a lecture by Herbert Gladstone in 1892, commented that "we only know of antimony at the present day as a highly brittle and crystalline metal, which could hardly be fashioned into a useful vase, and therefore this remarkable 'find' (artifact mentioned above) must represent the lost art of rendering antimony malleable."
The British archaeologist Roger Moorey was unconvinced the artifact was indeed a vase, mentioning that Selimkhanov, after his analysis of the Tello object (published in 1975), "attempted to relate the metal to Transcaucasian natural antimony" (i.e. native metal) and that "the antimony objects from Transcaucasia are all small personal ornaments." This weakens the evidence for a lost art "of rendering antimony malleable."
The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder described several ways of preparing antimony sulfide for medical purposes in his treatise Natural History, around 77 AD. Pliny the Elder also made a distinction between "male" and "female" forms of antimony; the male form is probably the sulfide, while the female form, which is superior, heavier, and less friable, has been suspected to be native metallic antimony.
The Greek naturalist Pedanius Dioscorides mentioned that antimony sulfide could be roasted by heating by a current of air. It is thought that this produced metallic antimony. Burzuchius (talk) 19:58, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Wouldn't Zosimos then have to be credited for As? Double sharp (talk) 05:15, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

text: OK, made the changes. As well as putting carbon as first, from ancient charcoal paintings. Yes, I was inspired by the Sodium Lamp blog, but Miśkowiec essentially also makes this point, and somehow it feels right for the king of organic chemistry to be the first discovered by life. :D There's also a difficulty with noble Cu, Ag, and Au (and arguably Fe from meteorites) whose discovery really belongs to prehistory. Double sharp (talk) 08:05, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

text: P.S. That blog also makes me realise that our claim for Hg is not very well backed up by sources. ? Double sharp (talk) 08:18, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, I think I've addressed the Hg entry. Double sharp (talk) 09:22, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Antimony 

message: Per this AfD discussion—looking at this article, I don't necessarily see why it needs to be a "timeline" article. There's certainly enough connective tissue to write a full prose article, and many of the entries are prose anyway. A question is whether this article should be kept and trimmed, or whether it should just be moved and reworked into a proper prose article. Thoughts? Remsense留 09:46, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: A sizeable amount of prose is definitely necessary to make the entries clear. For example, what is meant by the discovery of Na and K? Finding compounds of them? In that case soda and potash were known since ancient times. Or is it necessary to distinguish them first? In that case Georg Ernst Stahl probably deserves credit for realising that there are two different kinds of alkali, but even decades later Lavoisier was still not sure enough to include Na and K as elements. Or is it necessary to actually isolate the metals? Then we have to wait for Humphry Davy to use electrolysis. So I think reworking into a prose article is the best possible solution. Double sharp (talk) 09:51, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Expansion to [[Discovery of chemical elements]] 

message: :The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The result of the move request was: Moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) Adumbrativus (talk) 02:54, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Timeline of chemical element discoveries →  – This is almost a prose article already, and I think there's enough connective material historically to simply make it one. See above. Remsense留 21:18, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

text: Note: WikiProject History of Science has been notified of this discussion. Remsense留 21:19, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

text: Note: WikiProject Chemistry has been notified of this discussion. Remsense留 21:19, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested move 10 January 2024