Description: "The Elements is a stunning visual history of how the chemical elements were discovered. By piecing together the Periodic Table, science writer Philip Ball explores not only how we came to understand what everything is made of but also how chemistry developed into a modern science. He groups the elements into chronological eras of discovery, covering three millennia from the first known to the last named. As he moves deliberately from classical antiquity to the age of atomic bombs and particle accelerators, Ball highlights images and stories from around the world and sheds needed light on those who struggled for their ideas to gain inclusion. By featuring some elements that aren't true elements but were thought to be, such as phlogiston and caloric, Elements makes bold choices in order to tell the full history of this important science. To order the book's sequence into eras of element discovery, separate short sections for each element or groups of related elements are gathered into larger parts. Short interludes (or feature spreads) are interspersed that convey important intellectual milestones in how we think about the elements"--
Brief description: Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water, The Music Instinct, and Alchemy. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also the 2022 recipient of the Royal Society's Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy, or social roles of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol, and he was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He lives in London.
Review Quotes: "Ball has once again produced a terrific book, one that presents a tremendous amount of the history of chemistry in a manner that is engagingly written, beautifully illustrated, and conscientious about avoiding the usual traps of popular science: triumphalism, a Eurocentric and male bias, and a reliance on just-so stories that are inadequately supported by the evidence. I cannot think of another popular history of chemistry I have so enjoyed reading."--Michael D. Gordin, author of "On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience"