THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA · 1807–1808
A battery takes elements out of their compounds
Within two years a new electrical method released six elements that chemical reagents had never freed, because the compounds holding them were too stable to break by chemistry alone.
Explore the supporting references at the foot of this article.
01
Compounds that would not give up their metal
Potash and soda had been worked with for centuries as alkalis. They were suspected of containing metals, but no furnace or agent then available would release one: the bond between the metal and oxygen in these compounds is strong enough that heating with carbon, which works for iron , does not. The obstacle was not that the metals were rare. It was that the chemistry available could not supply enough of the right kind of driving force.
02
Electricity as a chemical reagent
A voltaic pile supplies a sustained electrical potential, and passing that current through a molten or moistened compound drives a reaction that will not happen on its own. Applied to potash, the method deposited a soft, extremely reactive metal at one . The same approach then worked on soda, and on the alkaline earths. What had changed was not the analyst's chemical skill but the availability of a tool that could push a reaction uphill.
03
Reactivity explains the delay
The elements released this way tarnish immediately in air and react vigorously with water, which is precisely why they had never been found as metals in nature and why they were hard to isolate. Their position in the table is the modern shorthand for this: elements that give up an outer readily form the most stable compounds and therefore need the most work to reduce. The order in which elements were discovered follows the tools available as much as it follows their .
What followed
remains how several of these metals are produced industrially, and the principle generalized: aluminum, chlorine and magnesium are all made by driving reactions with electricity rather than with a chemical reducing agent.
RSC Periodic Table — PotassiumLANL Periodic Table — PotassiumRSC Periodic Table — PotassiumLANL Periodic Table — PotassiumRSC Periodic Table — Potassium
Sources & further reading
- RSC Periodic Table — Potassium ↗Royal Society of ChemistryReference explanation · Source checked
- LANL Periodic Table — Potassium ↗Los Alamos National LaboratoryReference explanation · Source checked
- RSC Periodic Table — Potassium ↗Royal Society of ChemistryReference explanation · Source checked
- LANL Periodic Table — Potassium ↗Los Alamos National LaboratoryReference explanation · Source checked
- RSC Periodic Table — Potassium ↗Royal Society of ChemistryReference explanation · Source checked
Sources and further reading. What the review labels mean