Dating the Elements Trivia Quiz

Items made from copper and dating from 9000 BCE prove that our very early ancestors were aware of its existence. The majority of sources agree that copper is one of the elements which man first knew about and used.

Copper has the atomic number 29 and its symbol, Cu, comes from the Latin word cuprum. As it is found as a metallic element in nature, it could be used as it was. Its use in smelting came rather later although China was using this method as early as 2800 BCE.

Although arsenic was known in both Egypt and Greece, it was the German friar known as Albert the Great, and later canonised as Saint Albert who is credited with identifying arsenic in 1250. Albertus had a huge influence on the Middle Ages - he taught Thomas Aquinas - and had interests in philosophy, music, religion and many other subjects, as well as science.

The name of arsenic is believed to derive from Greek and its symbol is As, with atomic number 33.

Hennig Brand (or Brandt) discovered phosphorus by chance while looking for the elusive 'philosopher's stone', the magical formula which was believed to turn common metals into the valuable gold. Brand worked as an alchemist in Hamburg, Germany, in the seventeenth century with phosphorus being his most important discovery.

Brand managed to create the new element from human urine, boiled to produce fumes and a liquid which he managed to collect. This gave off a glow so Brand came up with the name of phosphorus, meaning 'bearer of light'. The details were eventually sold to a fellow German, who demonstrated it around Europe thus allowing other scientists, such as Robert Boyle, to learn the secret.

Englishman Joseph Priestley is often credited as being the man to discover what was later named oxygen because he published his findings so promptly, in 1774. In Sweden, the chemist Carl Scheele had isolated the gas even earlier, in around 1771 or 1772, independently but his work had not been published. The French chemist Antoine Lavoisier recognised the importance of oxygen in combustion and was responsible for naming the element oxygen in 1778. Credit is now given to all three pioneers for their contributions.

The method used by both Priestley and Scheele involved heating oxides, particularly mercuric oxide, which enabled them to isolate the gas. Priestley experimented on mice and found that they could survive by breathing the gas. All three men were pioneers of science, although Lavoisier was destined to meet his end on the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Potassium, as a metallic element, was isolated by Sir Humphrey Davy in 1807, before he went on to use the same techniques to find sodium, calcium and strontium among other elements. Potash had long been known to contain what is now called potassium, but it wasn't until Davy used electrolysis on potash that the element was isolated. He named it potassium after potash, a mixture of burned wood and leaves.

Potassium has the symbol K, for kalium - P had already been claimed for phosphorus - and is classed as an alkali metal, atomic number 19.

Although aluminium was known to exist as a metal in the early eighteenth century, isolating it proved more challenging. Davy's method of electrolysis did not work, and the first success didn't come until 1825. The Danish scientist Hans Oersted managed to isolate an impure sample by heating potassium and aluminium chloride. Two years later, pure aluminium was extracted by Friedrich Wöhle by using sodium instead of potassium.

Mass production of aluminium became available when Carl Josef Bayer created the process which bears his name in 1892.. Aluminium is widely used in various forms of transport, especially aircraft, and is the most widely produced metal after iron.

As both the name of the element and its discoverer indicate, gallium was identified in France, in 1875. Dmitri Mendeleev, creator of the Periodic Table, had predicted the existence of gallium in 1871 and that the use of spectroscopy was the likely means of finding it. Lecoq de Boisbaudran used this method on sphalerite, the ore in which zinc is found, to confirm the existence of gallium before being able to extract the metal by the use of electrolysis on potassium hydroxide. Both advances took place in the same year.

Gallium is named for the Latin name for France, Gaul, and is widely used in semiconductors and in alloys with other metals.

Glenn Seaborg and his associates at Berkeley, California, managed to discover plutonium in 1940 by creating neptunium-238 which decayed into plutonium. The discovery was confirmed in 1941, but kept secret due to the ongoing war, and was named plutonium to continue the use of the names of planets (as Pluto then was) for radioactive substances. Plutonium was given the symbol Pu with its atomic number being 94.

Plutonium was used for the first atomic bomb test, with the code name 'Trinity', in 1945 and was used for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in August of that year. That brought WW2 to a rapid end but ushered in the nuclear age and the Cold War.

Discovered in 1981, bohrium is named for Niels Bohr, from Denmark and a renowned nuclear physicist. Credit for the discovery is not clear cut, as scientists in Russia (Dubna) are generally agreed to have created the element in 1975. Scientists at Darmstadt, in Germany, led by Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Münzenberg, were given the accolade for its discovery as their claim was considered more credible for the work carried out in 1981.

Bohrium is highly radioactive and only a small amount has been created. It is of use only for ongoing research.

Named for the American state of Tennessee, tennessine has the atomic number 177 and symbol Ts. It is a synthetic element, with credit for its discovery shared between four institutes, three in the USA and one in Russia. The discovery was announced in 2010, in Dubna in Russia, home to the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. Naming was not confirmed until 2017.

At the time of writing, tennessine has no known uses and is used only for research purposes.