• Question: what was the first element to be found?

    Asked by akankipati to Amy, Drew, Julia, Kimberley, Sara on 20 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Amy MacQueen

      Amy MacQueen answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      Gold, silver, copper, iron, lead and tin have been known about for yonks. So they were among the first to be “discovered” as such! Although people didn’t call them elements till much later! 🙂

    • Photo: Julia Griffen

      Julia Griffen answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      1680 phosphorus was discovered as scientists were looking for the Philosopher’s Stone… Harry Potter!!! 🙂

      that cant have been the first tho.. They must have come across different material but not classified them as elements.
      Dimitri Mendeleev is the guy that created the modern day period table… wiki hasd alot of cool facts! so does web of elements.

    • Photo: Sara Imari Walker

      Sara Imari Walker answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      Hello akankipati! The word ‘element’ derives from the Greek for fundamental component (i.e. cannot be broken down further). Back in the day, the Greeks though the elements were fire, air, water and earth (and sometime a fifth essence referred to as aether). These are known as the classical elements. Later we learned that these really aren’t fundamental. Here’s the latter history from wikipedia:

      In 1661, Robert Boyle showed that there were more than just four classical elements as the ancients had assumed. The first modern list of chemical elements was given in Antoine Lavoisier’s 1789 Elements of Chemistry, which contained thirty-three elements, including light and caloric. By 1818, Jöns Jakob Berzelius had determined atomic weights for forty-five of the forty-nine accepted elements. Dmitri Mendeleev had sixty-six elements in his periodic table of 1869.

      Turns out even elements really are elements by the exact meaning of the word! Each element is decomposable into elementary parts like neutrons, protons, and electrons. I bet the ancient Greeks couldn’t have dreamed that one up!

    • Photo: Drew Rae

      Drew Rae answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      Hi there Akankipati. I think you’re going to start an argument here. Sara is quoting from the Wikipedia page for element, which is not fully correct. If you have a look at Robert Boyle’s book, “The Skeptical Chemist”
      (http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/sceti/printedbooksNew/index.cfm?TextID=boyle_chymist)

      you’ll see that he was well versed in two Greeks called Leuccippus and Democrites, who came up with the modern idea of atoms. It’s been described as “Deserving the prize for best guess in antiquity”. The answer to your question then is whichever example they used first, but we only have secondary sources for what this might be. They certainly knew about gold, silver and sulfur, and believed that air earth fire and water were combinations of elements not elements.

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