Oxygen, Radon, and Lead

Paper Summary:

This paper provides a scholarly examination of the elements oxygen, radon, and lead, including who discovered them and when, how they are isolated from the environment, and some of their commercial applications. An analysis of what the impact of the loss of these elements on life and society is also provided.

From the Paper:

"Dmitri Mendeleyev's discovery of the Periodic System can be traced to when he first began his scientific work in 1855. At this time, the central axiomatic assumption of chemistry was the notion of a chemical "element." Tennebaum says that this notion was associated with the idea that researchers cannot differentiate or divide substance down indefinitely, without encountering some kind of a limit, boundary or, "singularity" (Tennenbaum, 1994, p. 3). In the specific practice of chemistry up to the time of Mendeleyev, the exploration of this area took the form mainly of what are called chemical separation methods as distillation, precipitation, electrolysis, centrifugation, and so forth (Tennenbaum, 1994, p. 4). It was through this type of exploration that chemists that chemists had discovered about 64 elements at the time of Mendeleyev's initial research. The French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, on the other hand, adopted the view that these chemical elements are "singularities" (moments of change, in a search not for ultimate building blocks, but for what he called the "principles'' of matter."

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