Throwback Thursday: Discovering Copper

Copper is a metal that we are all familiar with. We use it in everyday appliances and tools without much thought about it. Who first made use of this metal?

Ancient Mesopotamians (Sumerians and Chaldeans) are credited with using copper first and bringing it to the Egyptians who really innovated it.

Ancient Egyptians ined copper from Sinai and made tools such as hoes, sickles, cookware, dishes, chisels and even mirrors.

They even made blue and green make up from copper ores, azurite and malachite.

Egyptians improved the smelting process from Mesopotamia and appear to have independently developed the same method of molding and casting that we use today. This is known as "Lost Wax Casting".

Hope you enjoyed learning some of the history of copper use. Tune in tomorrow to learn about some cool fossils replaced by a mineral other than silica or calcite. Fossilize you later!

Clinton Joseph Davisson (22 October 1881 – 1 February 1958) and Lester Halbert Germer (10 October 1896 – 3 October 1971)

Both American physicists, Lester Halbert Germer was a junior assistant under Clinton Joseph Davisson when the two of them performed an experiment that led to discovering electron diffraction. Davisson would be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1937 for this discovery, shared with George Paget Thomson, who discovered the same thing independently. Germer, as an assistant, did not share in the Nobel Prize, but his name remains attached to the experiment itself. The Davisson–Germer experiment was conducted on a nickel surface; bombarding it with electrons with known momentum at an angle, a diffraction pattern emerged. It was the first demonstration of the wavelike nature of the electron predicted by de Broglie.

Sources/Further Reading: (Image source - Davisson Wikipedia) (Oxford Reference, Davisson) (IUCr, Davisson) (Davisson Biographical Memoir) (Germer Wikipedia) (Linda Hall Library, Germer)

Hermann Staudinger (23 March 1881 – 8 September 1965)

A German chemist, Hermann Staudinger is known as the man who first understood the molecular structure of high molecular weight polymers, giving birth to the field of polymer chemistry. His published work in 1920 was the first to state that natural polymers such as rubber, starch, and proteins are long chains of short repeating molecular units linked by covalent bonds, focusing particularly on high molecular weight polymers or macromolecules. For this work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1953.

Sources/Further Reading: (Image source - ACS) (Science History) (2020 article) (Wikipedia)

Gregor Mendel was born on July 20, 1822. A biologist, meteorologist, mathematician, Augustinian friar and abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey in Brünn (Brno), Margraviate of Moravia. He gained posthumous recognition as the founder of the modern science of genetics. Though farmers had known for millennia that crossbreeding of animals and plants could favor certain desirable traits, Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance.

Alloys: Wootz Steel

A high-carbon crucible steel, the history of wootz steel dates back to over 2,000 years ago in the south of India. Though the exact timeline of this alloys invention is unknown, historical records suggest it existed as early as 300-500 BCE. The word wootz is an anglicized version of ukku or urukku, what the steel was known as by the locals in the Dravidian languages.

Wootz steel is characterized by a banded microstructure. Higher carbon varieties contain carbides in a martensitic or pearlitic structure, while lower carbon varieties contain ferrite and pearlite bands (because of its age, there is no set composition for wootz steel). Distinct patterns known as wave, ladder, and rose patterns can be created based on processing. Damascus steel, meanwhile, is merely wootz steel that has been forged into sword blades, and acquired its name from wootz steel that was imported to the city of Damascus before being further processed.

India maintained secrecy around the production of wootz steel for centuries, and thus managed to maintain their status as the primary producer until the 19th century, when Europeans began to produce it as well. The crucible process used to create it involves heating the iron for several days in a clay crucible before slow cooling.

Sources/Further Reading: (Images 1 and 3 - Ancient Origins) (Image 2 - Wikipedia) (ThoughtCo.) (Noblie) (Indian Institute of Science) (Matthew Forde Military Antiques) (Ancient Science) (National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore)

Table of the Elements in an Irregular Spiral. 1940s.

"Rainbow-colored periodic table of the elements designed in the style of an irregular spiral. Per text accompanying the table, the colors and construction of the table are designed to express the relationship among elements in terms of the repetition of certain chemical properties, with elements whose chemistry is almost identical grouped together in blocks or connected by solid arrows. Additionally, all related elements are represented with different shades of the same color."

Science History Institute