Elementary, My Dear Watson

Sorry to disappoint any fans of Sherlock Holmes (or as Sigerson calls his brother "Sheer luck") but this doesn't have anything to do with THAT ICONIC DETECTIVE.

Actually, this has to do with another American icon, Tom Lehrer. & in particular a specific song that he wrong called The Elements. The song is exactly what you think, a song about the elements, at least the 102 known at the time he wrote it. It is a parody of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Major-General's Song from The Pirates of Penzance. Since he wrote it the news has "come to Harvard" about the 15 more since "discavard".

What this is leading up to is that I was doing a bit of checking up on where the Periodic Table was currently at & saw a link to the song. So via YouTube I eventually got to a selection of video versions & thought it might be fun ot be a wee bit educational. So here it is, all 102 elements at the time:

If you want to sing along here are the lyrics:

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,

And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,

And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,

And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,

Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,

And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,

And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium,

And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,

And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,

And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,

And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.

There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,

And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,

And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,

Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.

And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium,

Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,

And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,

And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There's sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium,

And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,

And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium,

And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha'vard,

And there may be many others, but they haven't been discavard.

Here are the since discovered 15 (& actually in order from 103 0n): lawrencium, rutherfordium, dubnium, seaborgium, bohrium, hassium, meitnerium, darmstadtium, and roentgenium. But you say that only take us up to element 111`. That's because the others, elements 112-116 & 118 have yet to be given an official name.

(The above periodic table is 1 designed by Theodore W. Gray. It is a creative way of showing the actual elements as far as possible. For the recent discoveries where there is no sizable quantity available to photograph he used pictures of the elements namesake if it was named after a person. Or the coat of arms/city seal in the other cases.. It is available for sale by the creator as a poster of various sizes. This poster is copyrighted (2006) & is used under fair use without any prejudice to the creator's rights.)