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Platinum and the Periodic Table of Death and Mystery over a steel bank vault door

Mad Hatter – “Why is a RAVEN like a writing desk? Have you guessed the riddle yet?” Alice – “No, I give it up. What’s the answer?” Mad Hatter – “I haven’t the slightest idea.” We might NEVAR know. (1) Let’s get the dry details out of the way so we can get to the good stuff. Mercury (Hg for the Greek hydrargyrumwhich means liquid silver) is a slippery silvery substance with an atomic number of 80. It’s also liquid at room temperature (quicksilver), and I remember a kid in grade school bringing some Hg in a glass vial and pouring …

Gallium (Ga) was discovered by the French scientist Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1875, who also discovered two other elements, samarium (Sa), and dysprosium (Dy)—which means difficult to obtain in Greek. All you Francophiles might have noticed that Lecoq (French) and Gallus (Latin) sort-of-kind-of mean the same thing. But in an 1877 article Lecoq de Boisbaudran protested he named the element after Gaul, from Gallia (Latin for France) (2). It was a nice coincidence, though. Right, Paul-Émile? Ga has an atomic weight of 31 and sits just to the right of zinc and right below aluminum on the Periodic Table. It’s a silvery white metallic element which can be …

FYI, I just completed a fairy tale course and will attempt to write this article in that style. And remember, Disney fairy tales have happy endings, but the original folk and fairy tales tended to be, Hans (1, 2) down, more Grimm (3, 4). What to look for in a fairy tale: ‘flatness’ of tone, repetition—especially of numbers, and everyday magic. Once upon 1909, outside of Paris, a girl—Marguerite—was born into a relatively affluent family. Her father owned a flour mill, and her mother took care of their five children. But when the young girl was five, tragedy struck with a stock market crash, …