Three elements were named after mischievous sprites. Two of them are real, while the third was just a mischievous trick played by Mother Nature herself. What are these elements, how did they get their names, and what was the trick?
Three elements were named after mischievous sprites. Two of them are real, while the third was just a mischievous trick played by Mother Nature herself. What are these elements, how did they get their names, and what was the trick?
Nickel and Cobalt are the real ones, and I assume the difficulty was the early difficulties with extracting them from ore?
Fun fact: One of them was responsible for “beer drinker’s cardiomyopathy”.
OK, that’s cobalt. How about Niobium? named after Niobe – and Palladium, named after Pallas Athena (although I don’t think she’d be amused at being called a “sprite”)?
Yes, one of the mischievous trio is cobalt.
In German a goblin is called a “Kobold”. Miners called certain minerals “Kobold ore”, or goblin ore, because they were poor in known metals and gave poisonous arsenic-containing fumes when smelted. In 1735, such ores were found to contain a new metal – the first discovered since antiquity – and this metal was called cobalt
I don’t think of either Niobe or Athena as a “mischievous sprite”.
From the Wikipedia article Kobold:
…and there is the Huck-Up known in my hometown Hildesheim, who jumps on the backs of thieves as a manifestation of a bad conscience (and just as a bad conscience he does not prevent the thievery itself, he only saddens the thief).
Interesting local mythology, Tim!
I just discovered that kobolds remain active in popular culture:
not to mention the Kobold Quaterly, or the ineffectual kobolds in D&D.
Oh, now I understand why in the classic AD&D computer game Baldur’s Gate there are Kobolds that poison the iron in the iron mines of Nashkel.
And of course I forgot to mention one of the most well known Kobolds, the Nachtmahr (English “nightmare”).
Unfortunately all this brainstorming did not help me to remember the third answer, I give up :-)
Palladium is named for Athena indirectly, via the asteroid Pallas. . . and on the subject of indirect naming, what are two stable chemical elements named (directly or otherwise) for non-mythological people?
Sorry, the asteroid Pallas was named for Pallas Athena, the Greek Goddess of wisdom, who was a virgin and whose temple was thus named the Parthenon, on Acropolis Hill in Athens… see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athena
Blake wrote:
Hmm. So you’re not asking about curium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium, lawrencium, rutherfordium, seaborgium, bohrium, meitnerium, roentgenium, or copernicium.
I hadn’t even heard of the last two until now!
By the way, digressing a bit further:
I’m actually sort of pleased that hahnium was renamed dubnium, given how shabbily Hahn seems to have treated Lise Meitner, who is one of my scientific heroes. And I’m very happy that meitnerium gives her some of the immortality she deserves!
I find her life story very moving, because she was so smart, worked so hard against so many obstacles, achieved so much, became head of an institute, became so absorbed in her work that she didn’t pay enough attention to the rise of the Nazis, then had to flee her country with only 10 marks in her purse, then managed to get a lousy job with a tiny lab and had to make her own experimental equipment… but then became the first to understand nuclear fission… but was then denied the Nobel prize for this discovery. Here’s a bit from my review of:
• Ruth Sime, Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics, University of California Press, 1997.
And from the Wikipedia article:
That’s a moving story, John.
On a different note, I’ve realized that the reason why I couldn’t solve your puzzle is that I was using the wrong periodic table.
Searching by atomic number … well, I’m pretty sure rhodium wasn’t named after Cecil Rhodes. Oh, it’s going to be one of the rare earths, isn’t it … samarium. *And* gadolinium, which makes two, so I don’t have to worry about Rhodes.
The puzzle remains what links cobalt, beer and cardiomypathy. Now I googled it out: There was once a heart failure epidemic among beer drinkers in parts of U.S., Canada, and Belgium. It turned out to be due to the addition of tiny amounts of cobalt chloride by some breweries to improve the foaming quality of their beer.
The one which turned out to be a trick on Nature’s part would have been close to the other two on the Periodic Table, until a better way of organising said Table made the need for the new element vanish….
Okay, so Blake has proved he could easily win this game if he wanted. Don’t let him intimidate you: I want someone to actually answer the puzzle!
Gremlinium? Impium?
Was the reorganization of the periodic table due to the discovery of Nature’s trick?
Could it be masurium? No, masurs don’t seem to be minor evil spirits.
Near in the periodic table … how near?
Close! Much closer than you probably realize!
Nickel was also named after a sprite.
Wikipedia says:
Not sure about the third trickster. Fun puzzle!
The only stories of the Erzgebirge that I have been told revolve around the sprite “Rübezahl”, who got his nickname after he was tricked into counting turnips by a cunning princess he had held captive, who used this distraction to flee his realm. (The turnips were scheduled to be used in a magic trick that would create playfellows for the princess, and the princess claimed that she would need the exact number of turnips to plan ahead what friends she would like to have the turnips turned into).
But I have never heard of “Nickel”.
Another one is nickel… Nickel was named after a mischevious German sprite, Nickel, after miners blamed him for being unable to extract any copper from what they thought was copper ore, but which actually contained nickel.
Nickel seems to be named for a sprite which prevented copper emerging from what miners took to be its ore.
Yes, kupfernickel, which means roughly ‘goblin copper’, was revealed in 1751 to contain a new element: nickel.
Johann L and John C beat you to it, David, but their comments hadn’t gone through moderation by the time you posted yours. So, all three of you get an equal share of glory.
How about vanadium (named after the Scandinavian goddess of beauty and fertility, Vanadis (Freya))?
Sprite, or not a sprite?
Physicalist wrote:
Interesting! I’d say goddess, not sprite.
In any event, vanadium is not the third element I had in mind for this puzzle. Nor is it titanium! My wife Lisa was wondering if that element was named after Titania, queen of the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But no, it was named after the titans, in 1795, by Klaproth—the same guy who named ‘uranium’.
And while we’re talking gods, I also don’t mean uranium, neptunium or plutonium!
After nickel and cobalt were discovered, a third element was postulated, with a closely related name. But later, scientists realized this element does not exist! It turned out they’d been fooled by a mischievous trick of Mother Nature. For more clues, ponder the words of Blake Stacey.
We have now reached the heart of the puzzle:
What was this third element, and what was the mischievous trick?
This was difficult, but gnomium and the atomic weight not being monotonic w.r.t. atomic number is the trick.
Was the element postulated by Mendeleev? Is the trick that increasing atomic numbers don’t always mean increasing atomic weights, as with cobalt and nickel?
The only “element” I can find that was on Mendeleev’s original table is didymium, which was later found to consist of two seperate elements neodymium and praseodymium. But I don’t see how that can be the correct answer as the root of didymium seems to be the Greek word for ‘twin’.
Oops, by ‘”element”‘ I meant a thing that was later found to be not an element.
It seems with some lucium I googled my way out of the nebulium: Now methinks the puzzle wasium about GNOMIUM!
So I had to grow quite old to learn that chemistry could be fun… Apropos Mendeleev’s table and Hund’s rules: I hated this stuff at school and university. And I found out why: There’s a totally unknown but very pretty alternative periodic table drawn by Helmut Lindner, e.g. in his excellent book Grundriss der Atom- und Kernphysik (Leipzig, GDR, 1984). (Just needed to mention it lest this jewel gets lost. (Someone tell wikipedia))
Thorbear and Florifulgurator solved the puzzle! I guess it takes a mythological being to find a nonexistent element named after a mischievous sprite!
After nickel and cobalt, the third element named after a mischievous underground sprite is gnomium!
The problem is that while:
• iron has 26 protons,
• cobalt has 27 and
• nickel has 28,
the atomic weights of these elements don’t rise along with the number of protons:
• the atomic weight of iron is 55.845,
• the atomic weight of cobalt is 58.9331,
• that nickel of is 58.6934.
As far as I know, this is the only place in the periodic table where such a ‘glitch’ occurs!
What causes it? Since the weight comes from both protons and neutrons, you’ll want to know how many protons and neutrons these elements have. This depends on which isotope we’re talking about:
• the most common isotope of iron has 56 protons and neutrons. (About 92% of iron on Earth is iron-56.)
• the only stable isotope of cobalt has 59 protons and neutrons. (All the cobalt on Earth is cobalt-59.)
• the most common isotope of nickel has 58 protons and neutrons. (68% of nickel on Earth is nickel-58, but 26% is nickel-62, and other isotopes are also present.)
As you can see, the most common isotope of nickel has fewer protons and neutrons than the most common isotope of cobalt! That’s part of the explanation, but it’s more complicated than that.
First, the atomic weight is the average weight, averaged over different isotopes according to how common they are: so, nickel’s atomic weight is pushed up by the large amount of nickel-62 on Earth.
Second, the atomic weight is not just the sum of the weights of the protons and electrons; thanks to E = mc2, we must also subtract the binding energy divided by the square of the speed of light. The binding energy is how much energy it takes to pull the nucleus apart into separate nucleons (protons and neutrons). Iron, cobalt and nickel have among the highest binding energies per nucleon of all elements:
Here’s a deeper puzzle: Is it a coincidence that the glitch in atomic weights happens near the peak of the binding energy curve, or not?
I honestly don’t know.
Anyway, in the late 1800’s, scientists noticed this glitch in the periodic table. At first they blamed the problem on errors in the measured atomic weights. But after the atomic weights of cobalt and nickel were established more precisely, the contradiction remained.
To understand the situation, you should remember that neutrons and protons were not known at this time, nor even the fact that atoms have nuclei: atomic weight was a mystery.
In 1889, Gerhard Krüss and F. W. Schmidt proposed a solution to the problem: an element, very similar and very hard to separate from cobalt, but with a lower atomic weight, so that its mixture with cobalt would be lighter than nickel. For reasons that should be obvious by now, they named this proposed element gnomium!
• Gerhard Krüss and F. W. Schmidt, Ein neues Element, welches neben Kobalt und Nickel vorkommt, Zeitschrift für Analytische Chemie 28 (1889), 340.
Alas, it turned out not to exist.
(And another small puzzle: what portion of what I just said doesn’t make sense? I got it from a Wikipedia article.)
John wrote:
Since nobody seems to be trying this puzzle, I think I’ll answer it before I forget to fix the Wikipedia article!
There’s a ‘glitch’: the atomic weight of cobalt is higher than that of nickel. And I said:
That doesn’t make sense! Either we need gnomium to be very similar to cobalt but heavier than nickel,… or very similar to nickel but lighter than cobalt.
It took me surprisingly long to notice this mistake. I got it from Wikipedia:
Is gnomium like cobalt but heavier, or like nickel but lighter? Luckily, Wordnik breaks the tie:
So, now I’ve fixed the Wikipedia entry…
So, I’ll fix the Wikipedia entry now.
What about:
Argon 18 39.948
Potassium 19 39.098?
And tellurium-iodine.
Oh, okay!
(This is not the thing I said that does not make sense.)
Maybe I once knew about the potassium-argon glitch, or maybe I’m just vaguely remembering the fact that radioactive potassium decays into argon.
I wonder if the glitches you mention created as much puzzlement as the cobalt-nickel glitch. A curious extra twist in that glitch lies in the fact that cobalt and nickel are chemically similar, unlike the pairs you mention.
The argon-potassium glitch must have been discovered later. Argon was only isolated in 1894 (by Lord Rayleigh and Sir William Ramsay), though its existence had been suspected for a long time.
I see that tellurium was discovered in the 1780s, and iodine in 1811, but I have no idea when their atomic weights were measured with enough accuracy to note a glitch.
Tellurium was sufficiently confusing that its discoverer called it aurum paradoxium and metallum problematicum.
Ah, for the good old days, when there were plenty of elements left to discover. And plenty of false ones, too. I’d known about nebulium and coronium as a kid, and my beloved CRC handbook included charmingly obsolete isotope names like mesothorium, radiothorium, brevium and thoron. But only now, thanks to Wikipedia, did I learn about carolinium, pelopium, hesperium, sequanium…
It turns out that the tellurium-iodine glitched caused quite a lot of hand-wringing! Here’s a quote from:
• Joseph William Mellor, A Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, Vol. 1, page 45.
which is part of a 16-volume book published perhaps sometime around 1922. Emphasis mine:
And of course the answer was to understand nuclear physics.