From time to time, people ask me how to put together an element collection, or how much it would cost if they wanted me to make another table for them. To the latter question my answer is that I'm in the software business, not the furniture business, but hey, start writing zeros on the napkin and I'll tell you when to stop.

To the former question, I have several answers. One nice thing about collecting elements is that there isn't a company constantly manufacturing more of them for you to collect, like there is with Beany Babies and the like. You can actually finish at some point, if you stop at elements with a halflife of at least a year.

For well over a hundred years the world has failed to take proper notice of the word "Table" clearly contained in the name of the famous Periodic Table of the Elements.
One evening while reading Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks, I became momentarily confused. He begins a chapter with a description of a periodic table display he loved to visit in the Kensington Science Museum, and in mis-reading the paragraph, I thought it was a table, not the wall display it actually is. While my confusion only lasted a few seconds, when I found out there wasn't a Periodic Table in the British Museum, it left a hole I felt I had to fill.

Actually I would never had had this confusion, or built the table, if I hadn't been thinking for the previous month about the need for a new conference table in my group's common office area. I had already built the Triangle Table to be our coffee table, but we needed a conference table too, and I certainly wasn't going to buy one of those expensive ugly ones from the office supply catalogs.

And I would never have built the table if I didn't happen to have a nice pantograph engraving machine with a complete set of fonts from the closing out auction of a local hospital (new $1700, mine for $50 with fonts).

So really the table is a result of three unlikely and totally unrelated factors coming together at the same time, which probably explains why, to the best of my knowledge, no one else has ever built one like it.

Having decided to make a table, the details fell quickly into place. One thing was immediately obvious: Each element group (e.g. alkali metals, noble gases, etc) would be represented by a different type of wood, with suitably clever analogies made between wood grain and chemical properties. Equally obvious was that the basic matrix of the table would be made of two-inch-thick Walnut boards, because I have two-inch-thick Walnut boards up the wazu on account of a fortuitous auction purchase some years ago. //

Then of course there's the whole question of collecting elements! I won't even begin to get into that, other than to give you one example, the isolation of zinc from roof flashing. It's done by melting.

You start with a bucket of junk from the local scrap metal dealer:

Melt it down in something that gets hot (for zinc a good stove will do, but this dandy is handy for many of the others):

Pour it into something that won't melt, crack, or explode (plaster is nice), and you'll get some metal samples:

and some more of that entropy:

This technique works well for the isolation of copper and aluminum from electrical wire, tin from fishing weights, lead from plumbing lead, etc. You'd be surprised how many elements are available at Walmart, and the isolation is far easier than from the ores.

While many element collectors (is there a society I should know about?) seem to concentrate on authentic mineral samples, I've decided to go with a theme of manufactured objects that use pure elements for their intrinsic properties. I think it's absolutely amazing how many of the elements actually are used straight up in by and large pure form, in common objects you'd find around the house, farm, shop, or battleship. (By the way, if you have any depleted Uranium from Afghanistan, I could use it.)

A great time was had by all, and the speeches were all really quite interesting.

I learned from the doctor at HMO-NO that throwing sodium into the Charles River really is an MIT tradition, as I speculated it must be during my talk. This only serves to reinforce my point that while many have thrown sodium, few have documented or video taped it, and fewer still have been willing to submit their work to the judgement of the public in the form of a web publication with video and an admission of guilt. I seem to be the first, in fact. Odd really.

Perhaps my example will prompt someone to video tape the Harvard tradition next time. (Should such a person wish to have the video posted, with attribution or anonymously, I would be quite happy to provide the service.)

I'd read about, and heard stories about, throwing sodium into water. It's a classic thing chemistry students do in college, and based on the reports I have been able to find on the internet, they are often drunk at the time.

While anecdotal evidence would suggest that many people have thrown sodium into the lakes and streams of the world, they have been reprehensibly lax in documenting the results. I could find no reliable, and I stress the word reliable, reports on what actually happens. What reports I did find were contradictory: As you will see, I now know why.

I decided I should produce a comprehensive online reference on sodium dropping, with documentation on the size and shape of the chunks, how thrown, and most importantly with videos of the resulting explosions. To do this, I held a Sodium Party. People brought chips and soda and we had a cookout.

The first step was the procurement, through eBay, of three and half pounds of solid sodium metal for about a hundred dollars. This is a decent price for a small quantity like this. Small being a relative term: It's used by the ton in industry, but anything more than a few grams is a dangerous quantity if found in your home. Three and a half pounds is enough, for example, to blow your home to bits under the right conditions.

Next I constructed a patented Sodium Release-o-tron:

What is this thing anyway?
This website documents, in great depth, a large collection of chemical elements and examples of their applications, common and uncommon. Click any element tile above and you will find probably more than you ever wanted to know about that element. All these samples (well, at least the ones that fit) are stored in a wooden periodic table, by which I mean a physical table you can actually sit at, in my office at Wolfram Research.

I decided to build this table by accident in early 2002, as a result of a misunderstanding while reading Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks. I won't bore you with the details here (see the Complete Pictorial History of the Wooden Periodic Table Table), but once it was finished I felt obligated to start finding elements to go in it (because under the name of each element in my table there is a sample area).

Then I started building a website to document all my samples, and that's when things really got out of hand. A few months later my little table won the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry, clearly the highest honor for which it is eligible.

Sensing an audience, I began to take the website more seriously, which led to my being asked to write a monthly column for Popular Science magazine, which I've now been doing continuously since the July 2003 issue.

Later I formed a most satisfying partnership with Max Whitby building high-end museum displays, selling element samples and sets, and filming video demonstrations of the chemical properties of the elements.

This website now contains the largest, most complete library of stock photographs of the elements and their applications available anywhere, as well as a large and growing collection of 3D images documenting hundreds of samples rotated through 360 degrees. Try clicking on some elements in the table above: I think you'll be surprised what's lurking behind those little tiles.

Argon is the most common and cheapest of the noble gases. It can be extracted from air by cooling the air down to the point where it liquefies, then doing a fractional distillation of the resulting liquid to isolate the argon fraction. I've seen machines that do this for sale on eBay for a few thousand dollars: Buy you own private argon factory!

This is a short story by Theodore Gray about the installation of the Periodic Table Display at DePauw University.

Max Whitby and I recently built a periodic table display for the fancy new Julian Science and Mathematics Center at DePauw University in Indiana. //

The display is 10 feet wide and 7 feet tall and boy is it beautiful. //

Each element has its own six inch cube, and one of the most remarkable things about the display is the lighting: Five super-bright LEDs per cube, mounted on circuit boards designed by Max and individually aimed to highlight the particular samples.

As we had hoped, up close this gives very much the impression of a hundred separate displays, rather than one display with a hundred parts.

Three things make these displays more than just a collection of elements. First, we have gone to some lengths to include, along with the samples themselves, interesting examples of each element's application in the world. If you click on any of the element cubes in the large photo-mosiac below, you can explore the range of exhibits we have included.

Secondly, we have designed the installation to be interactive with built-in touch sensors. Selecting any of the element symbols calls up detailed text and photographic information about the selected substance on a computer (an Apple iMac) built into the cabinet. In many cases this information includes video footage showing spectacular experiments and industrial uses of the element in question. We plan to make these video available here on this website in due course.

The third significant feature of these large displays is quite simply that they are beautiful objects in their own right. It has been a delight at DePauw to see how people are drawn in to the tableaux of the cubes, where the story of each element unfolds. The cabinet is crafted in beautiful cherry hardwood (other finishes are available) and the glowing noble gas symbols are a beacon that attract people from a distance.

A noble gas, argon is inert and colorless until an electric current excites it to a rich sky-blue glow. As one of the least expensive noble gases, dense argon is often used as a shield gas to protect against oxidation.

Scroll down to see examples of Argon.

My book The Elements is based on photographs I've been collecting at my website periodictable.com for many years. The website includes not just pictures, but also more detailed descriptions than we could fit in the book, and most importantly, it includes full 360-degree rotating videos of almost all the objects. You really won't find this kind of resources anywhere else for any other subject, so please enjoy.

After many unworkable suggestions for proving whether the gasses were still in there, several people came up with the idea of using a high voltage transformer, such as one finds in those now inexpensive plasma ball novelty lights, to try to set up an arc inside the flask, and identify the gas from the color of the discharge. Whether this is possible is sensitive to the pressure of the gas, which is not known.

Fortunately, it worked beautifully on three out of the five, and proved beyond a reasonable doubt that those three at least contain the gas claimed. The others almost certainly failed because the type and pressure of gas in them does not support an arc, not because they are empty. In fact, if they were empty, I would have gotten an arc, because the arc works through up to about half an inch of ordinary air.

You can see the arcs from each of the five flasks on the right.