Learn Chemistry, periodically, with Dan Jack!

Welcome back to Metallurgy Monday!

Rusty and I decided to focus for a few weeks on some basic Chemistry, to give you a stronger foundation that Rusty can build more complex metallurgical concepts on top of without getting all us lost! For some of you, this will be a trip down memory lane all the way back to junior high, hopefully without the acne and awkward social skills... but no guarantees!

First - Do you need to know basic Chemistry to be a blacksmith? The short answer is, yes. I mean anyone can beat a hot piece of steel with a hammer into a new shape, but is that all there is to being a blacksmith? Blacksmiths are modern day wizards - Alchemists of the first order! We can create metal with noting but fire and dirt. We don't just shape metal, we transform it, imbue it with new properties, coax it to new life as beautiful art and useful tools; and we do all that with the knowledge passed down, and refined, for thousands of years. We can do it because we know what's happening in the heart of the steel, where the changes are occurring at the molecular level with every hammer blow. Honestly, if we weren't so damn useful, we'd have all been burned at the stake alongside our witchier sistren.

Alright, let's jump in! Today we look at our Wizard's spell book... er... I mean, the Periodic Table of Elements! Elements are the materials that make up every single thing in the universe in their simplest form. These 118 unique materials can be combined in an almost infinite number of ways to become everything in existence, including you! Everything, from the stars to that taco you had for lunch, is made from these building blocks. At the atomic level, elements themselves are made up of subatomic particles - protons, neutrons, and electrons. Keep them in mind, but for now, lets focus on the elements.

The period table we know and love today was created by a wild looking Russian Chemist named Dmitri Mendeleev. He classified the elements into periods, hence the name of the table. A period is a row on the table. Each period has the same number of electron shells, but don't worry about that for now... Mendeleev noticed that when arranged this way, the vertical rows on the table formed elemental families, called groups, of elements with similar attributes - like chemical reactivity. This allowed Mendeleev, back in the 1800s, to accurately predict what characteristics unknown elements would have when they were eventually discovered. Cool, eh? Generally speaking, the properties that characterize a group become more apparent the further down you go. For example, Group I elements (the alkali metals) on the far left of the table, all react with water, producing hydrogen gas. If you drop Sodium into water it fizzes, pops and burns. Francium, at the bottom of Group I, violently explodes when exposed to water, and cannot even exist in its elemental form in nature because it reacts with the moisture in the air.

Every square on the periodic table represents one element. The elements are each given a two or three letter abbreviation that appears in the square. You will also always see a number - the Atomic Number - of that element. This number represents the number of protons in one atom of the element. The elements are listed on the table in rising order by their atomic number. You may also see other information in some periodic tables, such as atomic mass, radioactivity, density, etc. Some tables cram in a lot of data.

The periodic table is mostly a metallic table. In fact, 89 of the known elements are metallic. The non-metals are found n the right side of the table (shown in dark blue and purple in the table above). The elements in light blue, that form a sort of staircase, are the semi-metallic elements, sometimes called the metalloids. They display some, but not all the properties of metal. Most of the metallic elements you're familiar with - like Iron, Tungsten, Cobalt, Chromium, Vanadium, and more - will be found in the middle of the periodic table in a group called the transition metals, and along with the alkali and alkaline metals - like Sodium and Calcium, and basic metals like Aluminum and Lead - they all share similar properties.

Common metal properties:

• They are malleable - They can be hammered into thin sheets

• They are ductile - They can be drawn into wires

• They are a good conductor of heat and electricity

• They are lustrous, which means they have a shiny appearance

• They have a high tensile strength, which means they can hold heavy weights

• They are sonorous - when struck they make a ringing sounds

• They are hard - it means they cannot be cut easily

• They react with oxygen to form oxides

I don't want to slag the non-metals just because we're blacksmiths. They are important too! Noble gases like Argon and Krypton can be very important to welders and in medical imaging equipment like MRIs. Take Carbon for example, without it we couldn't make steel or grow the vegetables for those tacos you enjoyed so much... oh, right, and all life on Earth wouldn't exist!

So there you have it - 118 elements fixed in a magical table with predictable patterns that allows us to select the best materials for the work we do. Study it, learn it, love it. In future weeks, it will all start to make more sense as we tie it all together.