Chapter 9 Chapter 7 Basic Substances

It is often said that chemistry as a serious and respected science began in 1661.At the time, Robert Boyle at Oxford published "The Doubting Chemist"—the first paper to distinguish chemists from alchemists—but the transition was slow and often indeterminate.Well into the eighteenth century, scholars of both camps felt in their place—the German Johann Becher, for example, wrote a serious and extraordinary work on mineralogy called Subterranean Physics Learning", but he is also sure that with the right materials, he can turn himself into an invisible person. The strange and often accidental nature of chemistry is best exemplified in its early years in a discovery in 1675 by the German Hennessy Brand.Brand was convinced that gold could somehow be distilled from human urine. (The similar color seemed to be a factor in his conclusion.) He collected 50 buckets of human urine, which he stored in a cellar for several months.By various ingenious processes, he first transformed urine into a poisonous paste, and then transformed the paste into a translucent wax.Of course, he didn't get the gold, but a strange and interesting thing happened.After a while, the thing started to glow.Also, when exposed to air, it often spontaneously ignites suddenly.

It soon became known as phosphorus, a name derived from Greek and Latin words meaning "shining".Foresighted industrialists have seen the potential commercial value of this substance, but it is very difficult to produce and the cost is too high to be developed.An ounce (about 28.35 grams) of phosphorus retails for as much as 6 guineas - probably equivalent to £300 today - in other words, more expensive than gold. At first, soldiers were called in to provide the raw materials, but this did little to help with industrial-scale production. In the 1750s, a Swedish chemist named Carl Kinler developed a way to mass-produce phosphorus without dirty, smelly urine.It is largely because of this method of producing phosphorus that Sweden became - and remains - a major producer of matches.

Kinler was both an extraordinary and an extremely unlucky man.A lowly pharmacist, he discovered eight elements—chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen—with little to no advanced equipment—but got no credit for it.In each case, his discoveries either went unnoticed or were not published until someone else had independently made the same discovery.He also discovered many useful compounds, among them ammonia, glycerin, and tannin; he also believed that chlorine could be used as a bleaching agent-the first person with potential commercial value-these major achievements have led others to make great achievements. fiscal.

Kinler has an obvious shortcoming. He is curious about everything used in the experiment and insists on tasting a little, including some unpleasant and poisonous substances, such as mercury and hydrocyanic acid (this is also one of his discoveries). ) and forminonitrile.Formaldehyde is a well-known poisonous compound that, 150 years later, Erwin Schrödinger chose as the best poison in a famous thought experiment.Kingler's reckless work methods ended up costing him his life. In 1786, at the age of 43, he was found dead at his workbench, surrounded by toxic chemicals, any of which could have caused the final stunned expression on his face.

If the world had been just, if everyone could speak Swedish, Kinler would have had a great reputation all over the world. Indeed, the praise tends to go to better-known chemists, most of them in English-speaking countries.Kingler discovered oxygen in 1772, but for a variety of poignant and complicated reasons could not publish his paper in time.Credit ultimately goes to Joseph Priestley, who independently discovered the same element, but much later, in the summer of 1774.Even more remarkably, Kingler does not get credit for discovering chlorine.Almost all textbooks still attribute the discovery of chlorine to Humphrey Davy.He did, but 36 years later than Kingler.

There is a century between Newton and Boyle, Kingler, Priestley and Henry Cavendish.Chemistry has come a long way in this century, but it still has a long way to go.Until the last years of the 18th century (and, in Priestley's case, a little later), scientists everywhere were looking for - and sometimes thinking they had found - something that wasn't there at all: metamorphic gases, No marine acid, phlox, calcium oxide lime, terrestrial scents, especially phlogiston, without phlogiston.At the time, phlogiston was considered the prime mover of combustion.In the midst of it all, they believed, lay a mysterious animus, the force that animates inanimate objects.No one knows where this elusive thing is, but two things are plausible: one, you can activate it with electricity (Mary Shelley in her novel "Frankenstein") make full use of this knowledge); secondly, it exists in some substances, but not in other substances.That's why chemistry ends up being divided into two main parts: organic (meaning substances that are thought to have that kind of thing) and inorganic (meaning things that are thought to not have that kind of thing).

At this time, it takes someone with a sharp eye to advance chemistry into the modern age.Such a man came out of France.His name was Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier.Lavoisier was born in 1743 into a minor noble family (for which his father paid for a title). In 1768 he bought an opening stock in a deeply hated institution.That agency is called the "General Taxation Corporation" and is responsible for collecting taxes and fees on behalf of the government.According to various accounts, Lavoisier himself was moderate and just, but the company he worked for was neither.On the one hand, it only taxes the poor and not the rich; on the other hand, it is often arbitrary.For Lavoisier, that institution was attractive because it offered him a lot of money to pursue his main job, which was science.At his peak, he earned as much as 150,000 livres a year—roughly the equivalent of 100,000 livres today.

£2 million. Three years after embarking on this lucrative career path, he married a 14-year-old daughter of his boss.This is a marriage that matches heart and head.Mrs. Lavoisier has a quick mind and outstanding talent, and soon made many achievements around her husband.Despite a stressful job and a hectic social life, they spend five hours on most days -- two in the morning and three in the evening -- and all of Sunday (which they call their "jolly day") Do scientific work.Somehow, Lavoisier also managed to find time to serve as commissioner of gunpowder, oversee the construction of a section of Parisian walls to keep smugglers out, help establish the metric system, and co-author a handbook called Chemical Nomenclature.This book became the "bible" of unified element names.

As a leading member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, he had to know and take an active part in whatever was of interest at the moment—hypnotism research, prison reform, insect respiration, the water supply of Paris, etc. Wait. In 1870, a promising young scientist presented a paper to the Academy of Sciences setting forth a new theory of combustion; it was in that post that Lavoisier made a few disparaging remarks.The theory was indeed wrong, but the scientist never forgave him again. His name was Jean-Paul Marat. There was only one thing Lavoisier never did, and that was to discover an element.In an age when it seemed that anyone with a beaker, a fire, and some interesting powder in their hand could discover something new—and in particular, an age when about two-thirds of the elements had yet to be discovered— Lavoisier did not discover an element.The reason is certainly not due to the lack of beakers.He had the best private laboratory in the world, almost ridiculously good, with 13,000 beakers in it.

On the contrary, he took the discoveries of others and explained their significance.He abandoned phlogiston and harmful gases. He determined what oxygen and hydrogen really were, and gave them their present-day names.In short, he contributed to the rigor, clarity, and orderliness of chemistry. His imagination was practically effortless.For many years he and Madame Lavoisier had been occupied with painstaking studies which required the most delicate calculations.For example, they determined that rusty objects don't get lighter, as long thought, but get heavier -- a remarkable discovery.Objects somehow attract elementary particles from the air as they rust.For the first time, it is realized that matter can only deform, not disappear.If you burn this book now, its matter will turn into ash and smoke, but the total amount of matter in the universe will not change.Later, this became known as the immortality of matter, and it was a revolutionary idea.Unfortunately, it coincided with another revolution - the French Revolution - in which Lavoisier was completely on the wrong side.

Not only was he a member of the General Taxation Office, but he had vigorously built the walls of Paris--the building which the insurrectionary townspeople hated so much that it was the first thing they attacked. In 1791, Marat, by this time an important figure in the National Assembly, took advantage of this and condemned Lavoisier, arguing that he should have been hanged long ago.Not long after, Marat was murdered in the bath by a persecuted young woman named Charlotte Corday, but it was too late for Lavoisier. In 1793, the already tense "Reign of Terror" reached new heights. In October, Marie Antoinette was guillotined. In November, while Lavoisier and his wife were procrastinatingly making plans to flee to Scotland, he was arrested.In May of the following year, he was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal (in a courtroom with a bust of Marat) along with 31 colleagues from the General Tax Office.Eight of them were acquitted, but Lavoisier and several others were taken directly to the Place de la Revolution (now the Place de la Concorde), where the busiest guillotine in France was set up.Lavoisier watched his father-in-law hit the head before stepping forward to accept the same fate.In less than 3 months, on July 27, Robespierre was sent to the west in the same way and at the same place.The reign of terror was soon over. 100 years after his death, a statue of Lavoisier was erected in Paris and was admired by many, until someone pointed out that it didn't look like him at all.Under cross-examination, the engraver confessed that he had used the head of the mathematician and philosopher Condorcet—he apparently had one—and hoped that no one would notice, or care if they did.His latter thinking is correct.The Lavoisier-Condorcet statue was allowed to remain in place for another half century until the outbreak of the Second World War.One morning it was taken away and melted down for scrap iron. In the early 19th century, inhalation of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, became popular in Britain because some people found that using this gas "gives a high degree of pleasure and stimulation".In the half-century that followed, it became a high-end drug used by young people.An academic group called the Usk Society, which for a time was not working on anything else, held a special "laughing gas evening", where volunteers could take a deep breath, lift their spirits, and then swayed in a funny pose Amuse the audience. It wasn't until 1846 that someone had time to find a practical way for nitrous oxide: as an anesthetic.The thing is obvious, no one thought of it in the past, God knows how many thousands of people have suffered needlessly under the surgeon's knife. I mention this to show that chemistry, so developed in the eighteenth century, lost its way somewhat in the first decades of the nineteenth century, just as geology did in the first decades of the twentieth century.Part of the reason had to do with instrumental limitations—centrifuges, for example, weren't available until late in the century, greatly limiting many kinds of experimental work.And part of it is society.In general, chemistry is the science of the merchant, of the man who deals with coal, potash, and dyes, not of the gentleman.Gentlemen tended to be interested in geology, natural history and physics. (Continental Europe is a bit different than Britain, but only a bit.) One thing may be telling.The most important observation of that century, Brownian motion, which determined the nature of molecular motion, was made not by a chemist but by the Scottish botanist Robert Brown. (Brown noticed in 1827 that particles of pollen suspended in water are in perpetual motion, no matter how long it lasts. The reason for this constant motion—the action of invisible molecules—had long been a mystery. ) would have been worse had it not been for a distinguished man named the Earl of Rumford.Despite his dignified title, he was just plain Benjamin Thompson, born in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1753.Thompson was handsome, energetic, ambitious, occasionally courageous, brilliant, and without scruples. At the age of 19, he married a rich widow who was 14 years older than him.But when the revolution broke out in the colonies, he foolishly sided with the Royalists, for a time spying for them.In the disastrous year 1776, he was in danger of being arrested for "not being zealous for the cause of liberty," overrun by a group of anti-rebels who were carrying buckets of hot tar and bags of chicken feathers with which to spruce him up. In front of the royalists, he abandoned his wife and children and fled in a hurry. He fled first to England and then to Germany, where he served as military adviser to the Bavarian government.He so impressed the authorities that in 1791 he was awarded the title of "Count of Rumford, Holy Roman Empire".While in Munich, he also designed and planned the famous park called the English Garden. During this period, he found time to do a lot of pure scientific work.He became the world's most famous authority on thermodynamics, and became the first person to explain the principles of liquid convection and ocean current circulation.He also invented several useful items, including a drip coffee maker, thermal underwear and a stove still called the Rumford Stove. During his stay in France in 1805, he wooed Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's widow, Madame Lavoisier, and married her as his wife.The marriage was unsuccessful and they soon parted ways. Rumford remained in France until his death in 1814.He is universally revered by the French, apart from several of his ex-wives. We mention him here because he founded the Royal Institute of Science during his brief stay in London in 1799. It was another member of a number of learned societies that sprung up across Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.For a time it was almost the only institution of repute aimed at actively developing the young science of chemistry, and this was almost entirely due to a brilliant young man named Humphrey Davy.Shortly after the establishment of this institution, David was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the Institute, and soon made a name for himself as an excellent lecturer and prolific experimenter. Soon after taking office, David began announcing the discovery of one new element after another: potassium, sodium, manganese, calcium, strontium, and aluminum.He discovered so many elements not so much because he figured out the arrangement of elements, but because he invented an ingenious technique: passing an electric current through a substance in a molten state-what is now called electrolysis.In all, he discovered 12 elements, accounting for one-fifth of the total known in his time.David would have done more, but unfortunately, he was a young man who had grown addicted to the high-pitched pleasures of nitrous oxide.He couldn't live without that gas, inhaling it three or four times a day.Finally, in 1829, the gas is believed to have killed him. Thankfully there are other serious people doing the work elsewhere. In 1808, a young and recalcitrant Quaker named John Dalton became the first to announce the nature of the atom (we shall discuss this development more fully in a moment); The Italian of the handsome name - Lorenzo Romano Amadeo Carlo Avogadro - has made a discovery that will prove to be significant in the long run - the volume Any two gases that are equal, at equal pressure and equal temperature, possess the same number of atoms. It came to be known as Avogadro's Law.This simple and interesting law is noteworthy in two respects.First, it lays the groundwork for more precise determinations of the size and weight of atoms.Using Avogadro's number, chemists eventually determined, for example, that a typical atom has a diameter of 0.00000008 centimeters.This number is indeed very small.Second, for almost 50 years, almost no one knew about it. On the one hand, it was because Avogadro was a reclusive person—he did his research alone and never attended conferences; on the other hand, it was also because there were no conferences to attend, and few chemical journals could publish articles.This is a very strange thing.The industrial revolution was driven in large part by the development of chemistry, which for decades hardly existed on its own as a systematic science. It was not until 1841 that the Chemical Society of London was formed; it was not until 1848 that the society published a regular journal.And by that time, most of Britain's learned societies—the Geological Society, the Geographical Society, the Zoological Society, the Horticultural Society, and the Linnean Society (of naturalists and botanists)—had been in existence for at least 20 years, Some are much longer.Its rival Institute of Chemistry didn't come out until 1877, a year after the founding of the American Chemical Society.Because the chemical community was so slow to organize, news of Avogadro's momentous discovery of 1811 did not begin to spread until the first International Congress of Chemistry in Karlsruhe in 1860. Because chemists worked in isolation for a long time, the speed of forming a common language was very slow.Until the late 19th century, H2O meant water to one chemist and hydrogen peroxide to another. C2H2 can refer to ethylene or biogas.Few molecular symbols are uniform everywhere. Chemists also use a variety of confusing symbols and abbreviations, often of their own invention.JJ Berzelius of Sweden invented a much-needed arrangement by specifying that elements should be abbreviated according to their Greek or Latin names.This is why the abbreviation for iron is Fe (from the Latin ferrum) and silver is Ag (from the Latin argentum). Many other abbreviations coincide with the English names (nitrogen is N, oxygen is O, hydrogen is H, etc.), which reflects the Latin-branch nature of English, not because of its high status.To indicate the number of atoms in a molecule, Berzelius used a superscript, such as H2O.Later, for no particular reason, it became popular to change numbers to subscripts, such as H2O. Despite occasional tidying up, chemistry remained somewhat disorganized until the late nineteenth century.So everyone was delighted when an odd-looking and slovenly professor at Russia's St. Petersburg University rose to prominence.The professor's name was Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev. In 1834, in Tobolsk in western Siberia, far away in Russia, Mendeleev was born into a well-educated and relatively wealthy family.This family is so big that it is not clear how many people surnamed Mendeleev there are in the history books: some sources say that there are 14 children, some say 17.Anyway, everyone thought Dmitry was the youngest of them all.Lucky stars didn't always shine for the Mendeleev family.When Dmitry was very young, his father - the principal of a local elementary school - lost his sight and his mother had to go to work.Undoubtedly a remarkable woman, she ended up as manager of a very successful glass factory.All was well until a fire in 1848 burned the factory to the ground and left the family impoverished.The strong Mrs. Mendeleev was determined to let her youngest son receive an education, so she hitchhiked Dmitry over 6,000 kilometers (equivalent to the distance from London to Equatorial Guinea) to St. Petersburg to send him to the Institute of Education.She was exhausted and died not long after. Mendeleev completed his studies conscientiously and ended up working at a local university.There he was a competent but unremarkable chemist, more known for his shaggy hair and beard than for his laboratory brilliance.His hair and beard are only trimmed once a year. However, in 1869, at the age of 35, he began to figure out how to arrange the elements.At the time, elements were usually arranged in two ways—either by atomic weight (using Avogadro's law) or by ordinary properties (for example, whether they were metals or gases).Mendeleev's innovation was that he found that the two could be combined on one watch. In fact, Mendeleev's method, which was proposed three years ago by an English amateur chemist named John Newlands, is a common occurrence in science.Newlands argued that if the elements were arranged according to their atomic weight, they seemed to repeat certain characteristics every eighth in sequence—in a sense, in harmony.Somewhat unwisely—because it was premature to do so—Newlands christened it "the law of octaves," comparing the arrangement to the octaves on a piano keyboard.There may have been some truth to Newlands' claim, but the practice was dismissed as utterly absurd and ridiculed by the crowd. At rallies, he is sometimes asked by the playful audience if he can play a little tune with his elements.Discouraged, Newlands did not study any further, and soon disappeared. Mendeleev took a slightly different approach, grouping every seven elements into groups, but using exactly the same premise.All of a sudden, the approach seemed brilliant, the perspective was clear.Because those features repeated periodically, the invention was called the "Periodic Table". It is said that Mendeleev got his inspiration from North American solitaire and his patience elsewhere.In that game, the cards are arranged in rows by suit and columns by rank.Using a very similar concept, he calls the rows periods and the columns families.If you look up and down, you can immediately see one set of relationships; if you look left and right, you can see another set of relationships.Specifically, columns group elements of a similar nature together.So copper sits on top of silver, which sits on top of gold, because they all have a chemical affinity for the metals; and helium, neon, and argon are in the same column, because they're all gases. (It's actually their electron valence that determines the order. To understand valence, you'd have to go to night school.) At the same time, elements are ordered by the number of protons in their nuclei -- called atomic numbers -- from less to lesser. Arranged in rows in many places. The structure of the atom and the significance of the proton will be described in the next chapter.For now, let's just get acquainted with the ordering principle: Hydrogen has only one proton, so its atomic number is 1, and it's first on the list; Uranium has 92 protons, so it's near the end, and its atomic number is 92 .In this sense, as Philip Ball pointed out, chemistry is really just a matter of counting. (By the way, don't confuse atomic number with atomic weight. Atomic weight is the number of protons plus neutrons in an element.) There is still a huge amount of stuff that people don't know or understand.The most common element in the universe is hydrogen; however, in the ensuing 30 years, its knowledge came to an end.Helium, the second most abundant element, had only been discovered a year before—no one had thought of its existence before—and if it had been discovered, it was not on the earth, but in the sun.It was discovered using a spectroscope during a solar eclipse and was thus named after the Greek god of the sun, Helios.Helium was not isolated until 1895.Even then, thanks to Mendeleev's inventions, chemistry is now firmly established. To most of us the periodic table is a beautiful abstraction, but to a chemist it immediately makes chemistry coherent, clear, and cannot be overstated. "The Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements is without a doubt the most elegant and systematic diagram ever devised by man," writes Robert E. Krebs in The Chemical Elements of Our Planet: History and Applications- - In fact, you can see similar comments in every history of chemistry. Today, there are "120 or so" known elements -- 92 occur naturally and more than 20 are created in laboratories.The actual number is slightly controversial, and those synthetic heavy elements can only exist for a few millionths of a second. Chemists sometimes disagree on whether they have really been measured.In Mendeleev's time, only 63 elements were known.The reason why he is said to be smart is partly because he realized that not all elements were known at the time, and many elements had not yet been discovered.His periodic table accurately predicted that new elements would fall into place as soon as they were discovered. By the way, no one knows what the maximum number of elements will be, although anything with an atomic mass above 168 is considered "pure conjecture"; however, it is certain that any element found fits neatly into Mendeleev's That great chart. The nineteenth century gave chemists one last major surprise.The affair began in 1896.Henri Becquerel accidentally left a pack of uranium salts on a photosensitive plate wrapped in a drawer in Paris.Some time later, when he took out the plate, he was surprised to find that the uranium salt had burned an impression on it, as if the plate had been exposed to light.The uranium salts are emitting some sort of radiation. Given the importance of the discovery, Becquerel did the odd thing: He turned the matter over to a graduate student for investigation.As luck would have it, the student happened to be a recent Polish immigrant named Marie Curie.Curie, working with her new husband, Pierre, discovered that there are rocks that release large amounts of energy continuously without shrinking or measurably changing in size.What she and her husband couldn't have known—and nobody could have known until Einstein explained it next century—was that rocks were extremely efficient at converting mass into energy.Marie Curie called it "radiation".In the process of cooperation, the Curies also discovered two new elements - polonium and uranium.Polonium is named after her native Poland. In 1903, the Curies and Becquerel won the Nobel Prize in Physics together. (Marie Curie went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911; she was the only person to win both chemistry and physics.) At McGill University in Montreal, a young New Zealand-born Ernest Rutherford became interested in new radioactive materials.Together with a colleague named Frederick Soddy, he discovered that there is a huge reserve of energy in a very small amount of matter, and that most of the Earth's heat comes from the radioactive decay of this reserve.They also discovered that radioactive elements decay into other elements -- for example, one day you have an atom of uranium in your hand, and tomorrow it becomes an atom of lead.This is indeed extraordinary.It was pure alchemy; no one had imagined that such a thing could happen naturally and spontaneously. Rutherford has always been a pragmatist, the first to see the valuable practical value.He noticed that it always took the same amount of time for half of any radioactive substance to decay into other elements—the famous half-life—and that this steady and reliable rate of decay could be used as a sort of clock.Just by calculating how much radioactivity a substance has now, and how fast it is decaying, you can work out its age.He tested a piece of pitchblende -- the main ore of uranium -- and found it to be 700 million years old -- older than most people think the Earth is. In the spring of 1904, Rutherford came to London to give a lecture at the Royal Institute of Science - the institute, founded by the Earl of Rumford, was only 150 years old, although in those Victorian eras when they rolled up their sleeves and were ready to go big From the perspective of people at the end of the period, the era of white powder and wigs seems so far away.Rutherford was going to lecture on his theory of metamorphosis, a newly discovered radioactive phenomenon; as part of his lecture, he produced the pitchblende ore.Rutherford was astute to point out—because of the elderly Kelvin's presence, though not always fully awake—that Kelvin himself had said that the discovery of some other source of heat would have disproved his calculations.Rutherford had already discovered that other source of heat.Thanks to radioactivity, it can be calculated that the Earth is likely--it goes without saying--than Kelvin finally calculated 2 4 million years is much older. Hearing Rutherford's statement with respect, Kelvin looked happy, but was actually indifferent.He rejected that revised figure, and to his deathbed considered his calculation of the age of the Earth to be the most discerning and important contribution to science—much more important than his work on thermodynamics. As with most scientific revolutions, Rutherford's new discoveries were not universally popular.John Jolly of Dublin insisted that the age of the earth should not exceed 89 million years until the 1930s, and he persisted until his death.Others began to worry whether Rutherford's time to speak was too long.But even with radiometric dating, later known as decay calculation, it would take decades before we could conclude that the Earth's true age was within a billion years or so.Science is on the right track, but there is still a long way to go. Kelvin died in 1907.Dmitry Mendeleev also died that year.Like Kelvin, his prolific work will live on forever, but his later years are clearly not peaceful.As he got older, Mendeleev became more eccentric - he denied the existence of radiation, electrons, and many other novelties - and more difficult to live with.In his final decades, he mostly stormed out of laboratories and classrooms, wherever he was in Europe. In 1955, element 101 was named mendelenium in his honor. "Very fittingly," says Paul Strassen, "it is an element of instability." Of course, radiation phenomena are actually happening constantly, in ways that no one can predict. In the early 1900s, Pierre Curie began to experience the unmistakable symptoms of radiation sickness—a dull ache in the bones, a constant feeling of discomfort—that would have surely intensified.We'll never know for sure, though, because he was hit and killed by a carriage while crossing a road in Paris in 1906. Marie Curie did well for the rest of her life, helping to found the famous Uranium Institute of the University of Paris in 1914.Although she won the Nobel Prize twice, she was never elected to the Academy of Sciences.In large part, this is because, after Pierre's death, she had an affair with a married physicist.She behaved so indiscreetly that even the French were ashamed--at least the old men who ran the Academy of Sciences.Of course, this matter may not be relevant to this book. For a long time, it was thought that any phenomenon with a lot of energy like radioactivity must be useful.For several years, makers of toothpaste and laxatives included radioactive thorium in their products; at least until the 1920s, the Glen Springs Hotel in Finger Lakes, N.Y. (and certainly others hotel) also proudly features the curative properties of its "radioactive mineral springs".It wasn't until 1938 that radioactivity was banned in consumer products.By this time, it was too late for Madame Curie.She died of leukemia in 1934.In fact, the radiation was so dangerous and lasted so long that, even now, it was dangerous to touch her literature—even her cookbooks.Her lab books are kept in lead-lined boxes, and anyone who wants to read them has to don a protective suit. Thanks to the dedication and high-risk work of the first generation of atomic scientists, it became increasingly clear at the beginning of the 20th century that the Earth was undeniably ancient, although it would take half a century of scientific effort Safe to say how old it is.At the same time, science will soon enter a new era - the age of the atom.