Women in their element

On the evening of 12 November, Dr Brigitte van Tiggelen gave a virtual talk to the section on 'Women in Science' and in particular their contribution to the chemical sciences. Brigitte is joint editor of a recent significant book on the subject -'Women in their Element' - that traces the contributions of many women to shaping the chemical sciences and the evolution of the Periodic Table.

When telling the history of the periodic system, it often seems that only (white and often bearded) men contributed. Women however are far from absent. Brigitte’s talk focused on a number of significant female contributions, beyond the well-known personalities such as Marie Curie or Lise Meitner, with the aim of making historical women chemists more visible, and also to shed light on the multifaceted character of their work on the chemical elements and their periodic relationships. Her stories of female contributions looked to create new stories that may contribute to a better understanding of the collaborative nature of science as opposed to the traditional depiction of the lone genius.

The stories of female scientific input illustrated by Dr van Tiggelen also provided a spectrum of 'recognition' covering the full range from universal fame to invisibility. For instance, Marie Skłodowska-Curie and her discovery of polonium and radium in collaboration with her husband Pierre Curie are well celebrated by the general public: she rose to fame, even during her lifetime, as the awardee of two Nobel prizes, among other achievements. The same goes, to a lesser extent, for Lise Meitner or Irène Joliot-Curie. But others, like Harriet Brooks, Stefanie Horovitz, Erika Cremer or Yvette Cauchois are known only to specialised circles of scholars despite their important contributions. Indeed many female contributions have remained almost invisible, for example Toshiko Mayeda or Maria Del Carmen Brugger and Trinidad Salinas, even though they spent most of their life working at the laboratory bench, and participating actively to their field of interest.

Biography

Brigitte Van Tiggelen is Director for European Operations at the Science History Institute, Philadelphia, USA and member of the Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium.

Her latest book is devoted to Women’s contribution to the Periodic System: Women in Their Element, ed. with Annette Lykknes, published in August 2019.

Elements in Danger!

On the evening of Thursday 24 September from 19h30 RSC Belgium presented its first ever webinar event. The subject was ‘Elements in Danger’ and our speaker was Professor David Cole-Hamilton, Past President of the European Chemical Society and Irvine Professor of Chemistry at the University of St. Andrews. The webinar was also the occasion for the announcement of our prizewinners in our 2020 Chemistry Challenge and this year’s winner of the coveted Keith Price Award.

The webinar was run via Microsoft Teams with our Chairman and master of ceremonies Bob Crichton in a seminar room at Universite Catholique Louvain with technical maestro Fabio Lucaccioni and Prof Cole-Hamilton (pictured below at a previous RSC Belgium event) 'broadcasting' from his home in St. Andrews.

A couple of rehearsals were arranged before the event itself to iron out any technical glitches and the systems worked well on the night. 

Elemental

As part of their contribution to the International Year of the Periodic Table, the European Chemical Society produced a new Periodic Table (see below).

It is an amazing thought that everything we see, touch, and smell is made up of only 90 building blocks: the 90 naturally occurring chemical elements. The new periodic table only displays those 90 elements + technetium and promethium.

The area occupied by each element relates to its abundance in the earth’s crust and in the atmosphere (on a log scale) and the colour indicates how long we shall be able to use these elements if we carry on as we are. Four elements are coloured black because they can come from mines where wars are fought over mineral rights.

31 of the elements are used in making smartphones (indicated by a phone symbol). All four conflict minerals are included amongst the elements in a phone and six will be dissipated within less than 100 years unless we do something.

Prof Cole-Hamilton presented the new Periodic Table and discussed selected elements with a view to understanding how we can continue to have the lifestyle we have and protect the 90 vital elements that make up our beautiful and diverse planet.

More details on the new Periodic Table including notes for teachers and learners, translations into most European languages and a link to a new Video Game 'Elemental Escapades - A Periodic Table Adventure' can be found at on the EuCheMS website.  

Revisit the webinar

The webinar was recorded using the Teams software and is now available to view whenever you want.

You can also access a copy of the powerpoint presentation used by Prof Cole-Hamilton here. 

The Periodic System of the Chemical Elements

2019 has been designated by the United Nations and UNESCO as the International Year of the Periodic Table (IYPT2019), so on the evening of 7 November the section was delighted to welcome Prof Brigitte van Tiggelen from the Science History Institute (Philadelphia, USA and Paris) and le Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences (UCLouvain, Belgium) to the British School of Brussels to talk to us about the origins of the Periodic System of the Chemical Elements.

The International Year of the Periodic Table (IYPT2019) coincides with the celebration of the anniversary of the first publication of the Periodic System by the Russian chemist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev. However, Mendeleev was not the only one to propose a classification of all the elements then known, and he shared with Lothar Meyer the idea of making it a periodic system.

Brigitte's talk was entitled 'A work in progress: the Genesis and Development of the Periodic System' and covered the genesis of the periodic system including the significant contributions of scholars other than Mendeleev, such as Lothar Meyer; the question of the true significance of the predictions made by Mendeleev in the acceptance of the system by contemporaries, and the gradual but relatively slow dissemination of this tool within chemistry education. 

She also focused on the unique feature of Mendeleev's approach in his desire to produce a law of nature, the Periodic Law, that could be used to make predictions about the existence and sometimes even the properties of elements still to be discovered.

Brigitte described the development of the ideas behind the periodic system and the multiplicity of different periodic tables that have been generated over the century and half of its existence. In particular how it has adapted to successive new discoveries relating to the constitution of matter and its interpretation in terms of quantum mechanics. Not only could Mendeleev not have foreseen these developments, but he had a very hard time accepting the discovery of radioactivity and unstable elements, not to mention the isotopes of the elements, or the disruption of the atom and the atomic nucleus. 

Today, it is not possible to imagine the teaching or publication of a chemistry textbook that did not include a Periodic Table. But research conducted by historians of science show that the table did not enter the educational syllabus until quite late, demonstrating that what we now consider to be the indispensable and universal tool was absent from chemical training for many generations.

We hope to invite Prof Van Tiggelen back in 2020 to talk on the subject of 'Women in Science'. She has recently been the joint editor of an important book on the contribution of women to shaping the chemical sciences - 'Women in their Element' - that provides ample evidence of the female contributions to the iconic table of chemistry. The book shows how women contributed to the building and understanding of the periodic system and to the discovery of  many elements.

Chemistry and the Future of Life on Earth

On Thursday 20 September RSC Belgium welcomed Prof David Cole-Hamilton of St Andrews University and current vice-president of EuChemS, the European Chemical Society, to the British School of Brussels to give us his view on 'Chemistry and the Future of Life on Earth'. David also helped had out the prizes for our 2018 Chemistry Challenge competition and gave the audience one of the first public views of EuChemS new version of the periodic table of the elements. Next year, 2019, will be the United Nations / IUPAC Year of the Periodic Table.

David (pictured below) described some of the major problems facing the world and what Chemistry can do and is doing to alleviate them.

The future of life on earth is threatened by a whole range of potential problems, many of them man-made. They range from ones that have been around since biblical times such as famine, pestilence, disease and war to the more modern ones of pollution of the land seas and sky, depletion of natural resources and the population explosion. In his lecture David examined the role of chemistry in combating all of these problems.

New periodic table

2019 will be the UN/ IUPAC Year of the  Periodic Table (IYPT2019) and EuChemS has devised a unique Periodic Table (see below) that highlights the issue of element scarcity and was officially launched on 19 September. The new Periodic Table is available for free download now and a video game based on it will be available from 22 January 2019.

Scholarships

During a networking reception after the awards and lecture, a collection for our Norman Lloyd Scholarship Fund was taken that yielded over EUR 110. This will enable us to top up the fund to just over £ 2 000 and ensured that we can fund two more scholars in academic years 2018-2019 and 2019-2020. The fund will have supported six first year chemistry students at Cardiff University by the end of the 2019-2020 academic year.

Res Metallica on Mendeleev

RSC Belgium treasurer, Rita Woodward, reports for RSC Belgium News on the Res Metallica Symposium on ‘The Periodic Table of Mendeleev’ that took place on Wednesday May 4 at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven(KULeuven).

In 2011, scientists from every corner of the world are celebrating the International Year of Chemistry. Moreover 2011 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, awarded to Maria Sklodowska Curie for her groundbreaking discovery of radium and polonium.

So it was very appropriate that this year’s theme for the Res Metallica Symposium was the Periodic Table of Mendeleev. The meeting was held in the historic ‘Aula van ode Tweede Hoofdwet’ KU Leuven, Thermo-technisch Instituut on the Heverlee campus. This interdisciplinary symposium, introduced by chairman, Prof Patrick Wollants (Dept. of Materials Science, MTM) proved to be of great interest with over 500 people from academia and industry gathered together to hear about Mendeleev's periodic system and its relevance for material science.


A significant highlight of the symposium was when, amidst a shower of sparks, a life-sized 'Table of Mendeleev’ in an up-to-date 3-D format was unveiled. The table (see above - photo (c) K.U.Leuven - Rob Stevens) consists of a total of 112 boxes containing the elements displayed as simple substances in their pure elementary state.

Keynote speakers
Keynote speakers at the symposium included Prof. Peter Atkins of Oxford University (left) the well-known physical chemist and author of numerous popular science tomes such as 'The Elements 'and chemical textbooks such as his classical 'Physical Chemistry'. He offered participants a seat at the periodic table and explored mathematically and visually the underlying role of symmetry as applied to hydrogenic systems in one to four dimensions. Atkins' talk was followed by the unvieling of the new periodic table.

Following this excitement Prof Eric Scerri from UCLA in California gave a talk encapsulating the twists and turns of history to reveal the story and the significance of the Periodic Table.

Following on, Dr Jürgen Gieshoff of Umicore presented an industrial insight into the use of certain elements of the Periodic Table as catalysts, promoters and storage agents in the quest for ‘clean’ technologies for the automotive industry. Maurits Van Camp also from Umicore addressed issues involved in exploiting ‘the urban goldmine’ to achieve a sustainable future based on metals that can be almost indefinitely recycled and reused.