Discovering the Elements: No Simple Stories

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.