Discovering The Elements: No Simple Stories (Analysis: Historical Cases in Chemistry)

What constitutes a scientific discovery, how do stories about them emerge and what aspects of science are communicated through these accounts? Discovery histories fascinate and are often used as windows into the practice of science, past and present. As these stories are shared in popular media and in the classroom, they inevitably tell simplified stories that might give a distorted picture of how science works and how its now well-established results came about. How can we negotiate enthusiasm for heroic tales of scientific breakthroughs with a respect for historical scholarship?

This volume challenges some aspects characteristic of many discovery histories, namely a pinpointing of events in time and space and the reduction of scientific processes to simple strings of linear events, by providing research-based case stories of element discoveries along with didactic materials that can be used in teaching to reflect on scientific progress. Charlotte A Abney Salomon, Gisela Boek, Carmen Giunta, Pere Grapi, Sarah N Hijmans, Helge Kragh, Annette Lykknes, Ann E Robinson, and Brigitte Van Tiggelen dive deep into the discovery stories of gadolinum and rare earths, germanium and the periodic system, noble gases, chlorine, aluminum, hydrogen's heavier isotopes, radium and polonium, nobelium, technetium and rhenium, respectively, offering new perspectives on how these chemical elements were acknowledged as such and how their discovery histories were created.

Brigitte Van Tiggelen is Director for International Affairs and Resident Scholar at the Science History Institute, Philadelphia, USA. She chaired the Working Party on the History of Chemistry (now Division of History of Chemistry, EuChemS) between 2013 and 2021 and the Commission for the History of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences (International Union for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology) between 2017 and 2025. After she graduated in physics and history, she devoted her PhD dissertation to chemistry in 18th-century Belgium. Her research interests include topics such as couples and women in science, domestic science, the heritage of chemical and molecular sciences, philosophy of chemistry, and Belgian chemistry.

Annette Lykknes is a historian of chemistry and professor of chemistry education at NTNU-University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. She is chair of the Division of History of Chemistry (DHC) of the European Chemical Society (EuChemS), the History of Chemistry group of the Norwegian Chemical Society, and the Norwegian Association for History of Science. Her research interests include, among other things, the history of 19th and 20th-century chemistry and university history, the history of women and couples in science, and the nature of science in chemistry textbooks. She is the book series editor (with Brigitte Van Tiggelen) of Analysis: Historical Cases in Chemistry (World Scientific), topic editor (history of chemistry) of ChemTexts: The Textbook Journal of Chemistry, and has co-edited several collective volumes in the history of science.