Berzelius Day - Periodic Table of Videos

Hi there everyone, I'm Brady, and I'm the guy who makes the periodic videos. Now I'm not a scientist, but next Monday I'm going to be performing a bit of an experiment. Through the day, from midnight to midnight, I'm going to be releasing a new video every hour, on the hour. They're not going to be our usual periodic videos, they're going to be very short, just little snippets of our favourite reactions, explosions, colour changes, all the things we like most here on periodic videos. It should be a lot of fun. Now if you're already subscribed to periodic videos, you're going to notice a bit more activity than usual in your feeds. I apologise for that, but I hope it's something you enjoy. If you're not subscribed to periodic videos, well now's your chance. Go on, subscribe, and enjoy all the action we show on Monday. Now you're probably wondering why we chose Monday for this little celebration of chemistry, and the reason is it's the birthday of a chemist called Berzelius. He was an 18th century chemist, and you probably haven't heard of him. He's not famous like an Einstein, or a Newton, or a Rutherford, but he's really important. He's one of the real grandfathers of chemistry, and that's what the rest of this film is going to be dedicated to. Telling you more about this amazing man called Berzelius. We're here in the library of the Royal Society again, and I wanted to tell you about a Swedish chemist called Berzelius, whose role in the history of chemistry is really very important, but a lot of people have never heard of him. The reason why he's important is that not only did he discover four elements, silicon, selenium, thorium, and cerium, but he also invented several of the terms that we use every day in chemistry. For example, he invented the word catalysis, and to describe how some substances can make chemical reactions go faster without being changed themselves. He also invented the word polymer, which we now use to mean plastic, but in those days he used to describe organic compounds, and here in the library there are some letters that he wrote to people in England, and also a paper that he submitted to be published in the journal that's published by the Royal Society. So let's look at a few of them. This is a letter from him. Here's his signature saying Berzelius, and it would appear from these letters that he either didn't know any English, or he was much happier writing in French, because the letter here is in French, and there's another letter over here from him in French. You've got to understand, it's really exciting for me to see the handwriting of a famous chemist, because people like him died long before there were videos or tape recordings. So this is the closest that you can get to the voice of one of the masters of chemistry, but in some ways I suppose the one that's most interesting to me is the manuscript here of a paper that he published. Here's a printed page of the paper. This is a photocopy, so I can hold it without damage, and there are several things that are interesting. The first thing is that it's in English. The second thing that I think is very interesting is that even in 1813, Berzelius, who lived in Stockholm, was working together and doing joint experiments with somebody who was working in a hospital in London. So we tend to think of international collaboration in science as being quite modern, but here, 199 years ago, it was already going on. So this is the printed version, and here is the manuscript. This is what they actually wrote and sent to the journal. There were no typewriters in those days, and then the printers worked from this, and what's really quite exciting is here is their diagram that they drew. You're heating something up here. I think it's sulphur and getting a reaction to take place and collecting a gas here where it says H. This is what they actually drew and put in their manuscript, and here is the... I can fold the paper so you can see it more easily. Here is the same diagram as it was printed, and I think, if you look carefully, this one looks neater than that one. I have another connection with Berzelius, which is quite an exciting one. When I did my doctorate, I was supervised by a professor, and I learned from him, and in my turn, I've had students and they've had students. So if you take me and then my PhD supervisor, Jim Turner, and then go to his PhD supervisor, Norman Shepard, you can go back through one supervisor after another, and it leads back to Berzelius. So in fact, Berzelius is my six times great-grandfather. Great, great, great, great, great. I've lost count. We're not related in any way, but he taught his students how to do science, and they taught their students. So I have learned how to do science indirectly from Berzelius. It's not very often that people trace back their scientific family tree, but I was really lucky. I had a colleague, Harold Booth, who some years ago, about 20 years ago, took all the staff at Nottingham and traced back their family trees, and so I didn't have to do anything at all except copy it down afterwards. I don't think I would have had the patience to do it myself, but what it means is that because in Berzelius's time there were so few scientists, in fact the word scientist didn't exist until late in Berzelius's life, that probably many of the people in chemistry are also related from Berzelius, and they may all be my cousins. Berzelius is one of the people that laid the foundations for chemistry. He's not somebody who is famous in the way that people use his name every day, like Michael Faraday, who have units named after them, but he was one of the real founders of the subject. And there's another reason why I'm quite fond of Berzelius, a rather trivial one, but his birthday, the 20th of August, was the same day as my father's birthday. As some of you know, my father was Russian, and when my father was born they had a different calendar, and so my father was born by the calendar that's used in the West on August the 20th, but on the Russian calendar on August the 7th, and by a strange coincidence August the 7th was Berzelius's date of death. So there's a double connection with my father, which I think is quite intriguing.