Editorial pubs.acs.org/ac
Cite This: Anal. Chem. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
The Periodic Table of Elements at 150
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Gray received the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry; as he states, “...it is without doubt the highest honor for which the Periodic Table Table is eligible.” He has also created a striking Periodic Table poster as well as a beautiful virtual book appropriately titled “The Elements.” If you are more into music than a visual representation of the Periodic Table, you can listen to the immortal lyrics of Tom Lehrer in one of many versions of his song The Elements as well as a unique Japanese version, almost understandable to all chemists. If you have a few minutes, take time to reflect on the impact the Periodic Table has had on all analytical chemists and marvel at the creative and esoteric designs now available as the table turns 150.
n case you have not noticed the myriad of tweets, social media posts, blogs, and editorials, this year marks the 150th Anniversary of the 1869 publication of The Principles of Chemistry by Dmitri Mendeleev, in which he introduced his periodic system of classification of inorganic chemical elements. In recognition of Mendeleev’s discovery, the United Nations has declared 2019 as the International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements (IYPT2019). You may want to take a look at the official IYPT2019 Web site, including their Links & videos page, for more information. Perhaps there is no symbol of chemistry as ubiquitously displayed in science classrooms around the world as the Periodic Table. Of course, the table of elements has not remained static; for example, the column for the noble gases was added. Bringing analytical chemists into the mix, along with other disciplines such as geology, the quest to discover new elements greatly expanded the table in the last part of the 19th century; and the expansion has continued with the addition of the actinides throughout the 20th century. Given that I grew up in Livermore, CA, I was excited when my home town was honored with the discovery of element 116, Livermorium. The table will likely continue to grow as the search for element 119 is ongoing, with the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions in Dubna, Russia, creating the Superheavy Element Factory to uncover it. For more than 200 years, elements have been determined using a series of reactions to purify, precipitate, and characterize them.1 During much of the last century, Analytical Chemistry has published papers allowing an ever-increasing range of elements to be characterized, such as the series of articles by Lyman Porter, who added rarer elements to these schemes.2,3 Over the past 50 years, the journal has published instrumental methods for elemental analysis. Among the first was an “A-page” article on the topic of “ultra-sensitive trace element determinations” involving neutron activation analysis offered by the General Atomic Division of General Dynamics;4 they provided parts per billion to parts per million detectability for some trace elements in 1962! Ranging from elementsensitive detectors and atomic emission spectrometry to modern inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, instrumentation enabling elemental analysis exploded over the next decades, so that today, one can obtain elemental composition from almost any sample. A clever combination involves inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry and antibodies labeled with rare earth elements, the approach of mass cytometry, which provides the capability to analyze large populations of individual cells.5 The field certainly has evolved. Getting back to the periodic table, there have been many table designs, some more striking than others. Here is a fun but perhaps irrelevant observation; the Periodic Table itself is very rarely a piece of furniture, unless you are Theodore Gray, who created The Wooden Periodic Table Table, with sample containers that hold a number of the elements. Located a mile from the University of Illinois, I have personally enjoyed exploring this table of the Periodic Table. As another fun point, © XXXX American Chemical Society
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Jonathan V. Sweedler AUTHOR INFORMATION
ORCID
Jonathan V. Sweedler: 0000-0003-3107-9922 Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) Rose, H. A Manual of Analytical Chemistry; translated by Griffin, J.; Thomas Tegg: London, 1831. (2) Porter, L. E. Ind. Eng. Chem., Anal. Ed. 1934, 6 (2), 138−13. (3) Porter, L. E. Ind. Eng. Chem., Anal. Ed. 1934, 6 (6), 448−449. (4) General Atomic Division of General Dynamics. Anal. Chem. 1962, 34 (2), 130A−130A. (5) Arnaud, C. H. Chem. Eng. News 2011, 89 (20), 36. https://cen. acs.org/articles/89/i20/Giant-Leap-Cell-Analysis.html
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.9b01714 Anal. Chem. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
