The periodic table turns 150
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are chemical elements critical for the modern economy in dangerously short supply? It's a question that Justin Rowlatt poses a century and a half after the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev published the original periodic table.
Justin speaks to two chemists - Andrea Sella of University College London explains the significance of Mendeleev's scheme to the modern world, while David Cole-Hamilton talks us through an updated version of the table he has just published that highlights chemical elements that could run out within the next century unless we learn to make better use of them.
However, perhaps we don't need to worry just yet, at least not for two of those red-flagged elements. Thomas Abraham-Jones describes how he happened across the world's biggest reserve of helium in the African savannah, while Rick Short of Indium Corporation explains why the metallic element his company is named after is in abundant supply, so long as you don't mind sifting an awful lot of dirt for it.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Manuscript of Mendeleev's first periodic system of elements; Credit: Science & Society Picture Library/SSPL/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It is a birthday special today on Business Daily and what a birthday. |
| 0:05.6 | The periodic table, the foundation stone of modern chemistry, is 150 years old today. |
| 0:12.8 | Hydrogen. |
| 0:13.3 | Helene. Lithium, barilium. Boron. |
| 0:15.1 | Carbon. Nitrogen. Oxygen. Floreen. |
| 0:17.3 | Neon. Sodium. |
| 0:18.5 | Of course, Business Daily has a long association with the chemical elements, |
| 0:21.7 | those irreducible building blocks of, well, everything. |
| 0:25.4 | I'm Justin Rowlett, and together with producer Lawrence Knight, |
| 0:28.4 | we have made 65 programs exploring how the elements have shaped the world economy. |
| 0:34.4 | And today's anniversary gives us an opportunity to make another. |
| 0:37.6 | We'll be discovering what the periodic table is and why it's so important, and we'll be |
| 0:43.6 | meeting a young geologist who's set to make a fortune from one of the rarest naturally occurring |
| 0:48.9 | elements of them all. That is all on Business Daily here on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:55.0 | Atinium, thorium, protactinium, uranium, the uranium, neptunium, plutonium. |
| 1:01.7 | So we're at the Science Museum in London with Professor Andrea Sala, |
| 1:06.3 | Professor of Chemistry at UCL. |
| 1:08.3 | Very good to see you, Andrea, because we haven't done one of these programmes for a while. It's been a long time. Let me take you around here, because I've got something |
| 1:14.0 | to show you. Now, it's March the 18th, 2019, 150th anniversary of the publication of the world's |
| 1:21.2 | first periodic table, and Andrea. And here it is. At long last, because the Science Museum |
| 1:26.4 | hasn't actually had a periodic table on display |
| 1:29.9 | for about 30 years. |
... |
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