50, 100 & 150 Years Ago: Abusing Coal, Creating Diamond and Calculating Wood
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JULY 1955
NEW ELEMENT--"For a few days early this year there was something new under the sun, but not much of it. Chemists at the University of California had made 17 atoms of element 101. The substance, named mendelevium (abbreviated Mv) [now Md] after the father of the periodic table, was produced by bombarding element 99 with energetic alpha particles from a cyclotron. The isotope thereby obtained, the atomic weight of which is 256, decays by spontaneous fission with a half-life somewhere between half an hour and several hours."
COAL--"The analysis of coal into its elemental constituents tells us almost nothing about it as a chemical substance. For this we must know the chemical structure of coal, the way in which its atoms are linked to form molecules. The effort is worthwhile because the more that is known about how coal is put together, the more precisely can it be taken apart to yield desirable chemical substances. Already one improved process has made from coal over 200 basic chemicals, some entirely new or in quantities never before achieved. It is this fact that leads chemists and conservationists to conclude that the most wasteful thing to do with coal is merely to burn it."
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