Element Quick Facts Flashcards
Hydrogen
discoverer,
discovery date,
and name origin
Discoverer: Henry Cavendish
Discovery date: 1766
Name origin: derived from the Greek “hydro” and “genes” meaning water forming.
Colorless and odorless, this element has the lowest density of any gas.
Hydrogen
Which is the most abundant element in the universe?
Hydrogen
Hydrogen history
In the early 1500s the alchemist Paracelsus noted that the bubbles given off when iron filings were added to sulfuric acid were flammable. In 1671 Robert Boyle made the same observation. Neither followed up their discovery of hydrogen, and so Henry Cavendish gets the credit. In 1766 he collected the bubbles and showed that they were different from other gases. He later showed that when hydrogen burns it forms water, thereby ending the belief that water was an element. The gas was given its name hydro-gen, meaning water-former, by Antoine Lavoisier.
https://www.rsc.org/periodic-table/element/1/Hydrogen
In 1931, Harold Urey and his colleagues at Columbia University in the US detected a second, rarer, form of hydrogen. This has twice the mass of normal hydrogen, and they named it deuterium.
Hydrogen picture description
The image is based on the iconic atomic model first proposed by Niels Bohr in 1913.
https://www.rsc.org/periodic-table/element/1/Hydrogen
What are primordial elements?
Primordial elements are those that have existed in their current state since before the Earth was formed. In other words their half-life is greater than about 108 years. All stable elements are primordial, as are many radioactive elements.
There are 251 stable primordial nuclides and 35 radioactive primordial nuclides, but only 80 primordial stable elements—hydrogen through lead, atomic numbers 1 to 82, with the exceptions of technetium (43) and promethium (61)—and three radioactive primordial elements—bismuth (83), thorium (90), and uranium (92).
