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Discovery: In Their Element: Phosphorus

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Phosphorus

05/03/2018 GMT

In Their Element

BBC World Service - Discovery, In Their Element, PhosphorusSearch BBC

How a discovery in boiled urine led to the trade union movement and chemical weapons.

How a discovery in boiled urine led to the trade union movement and chemical weapons. Chemist Professor Andrea Sella tells the story of the element phosphorus.

What links trade unions with urine, Syria with semiconductors, and bones and bombs? The answer is phosphorus, UCL Inorganic Chemistry Professor Andrea Sella, who is himself engaged in researching new phosphorus based materials, looks at this often rather frightening element. 
We hear how the health impact of phosphorus on a group of Irish girls changed politics, how the element has been used as a weapon of war and we peer into the future, as chemists break new ground on what might be possible with phosphorus and nanotechnology.

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Discovery: In Their Element

Professor Andrea Sella tells the stories of different elements.

Andrea Sella, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at University College London, celebrates the art and science of chemical elements. In this episode he admires two more elements that create visual treats.
 
At the time of Emperor Napoleon the Third aluminium was more valuable than gold and silver. The Emperor liked the metal so much he had his cutlery made out of it. But once a cheaper way was discovered to extract aluminium it began to be used for all kinds of objects, from aeroplanes to coffee pots. Andrea talks to Professor Mark Miodownik at the Institute of Making at UCL about why aluminium is such a useful material, from keeping crisps crisp to the tinsel on our Christmas trees. Andrea visits the Science Museum where he admires an aluminium plane of the class flown by Amelia Earhart. And he talks about the lightness of bicycles made from aluminium with Keith Noronha, of Reynolds Technology.
 
Strontium is the 15th most common element in the earth yet we really only come into contact with it in fireworks. It gives us the deep red colour we admire in a pyrotechnics display. Andrea Sella, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at UCL, meets Mike Sansom of Brighton Fireworks who explains how a firework is constructed and reveals the chemical mix that creates the bright red flashes.
Professor Thomas Klap�tke of the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich talks about his search for a substitute for strontium in fireworks and about how the element can get into our bones.
And Janet Montgomery, Professor of Archaeology at Durham University, explains how strontium traces have revealed that our Neolithic ancestors moved around much more than was previously thought. Nearly half the people buried around Stonehenge in Southern England were born in places with different rocks from those under Salisbury Plain.

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