Name: Berzelius Day - Periodic Table of Videos
Uploaded: 2020-03-27T18:15:53.000Z
Duration: 7 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm Brady and I'm the guy who makes the periodic videos.

Future continuous

Now, I'm not a scientist, but next Monday, I'm going to be performing bit of an experiment through the day, from midnight to midnight, I'm gonna be releasing a new video every hour on the hour.

They're not gonna be a usual periodic videos.

Just little snippets off our favorite reactions.

Explosions, color changes, all the things we like most here on periodic videos.

Now, if you already subscribed a periodic videos, you're gonna notice a bit more activity than usual in your fades.

I apologize for that, but I hope it's something you enjoy.

If you're not subscribed, a periodic videos, when now's your chance, go unsubscribe and enjoy all the action we show on Monday.

Now you're probably wondering why we chose Monday for this little celebration of chemistry.

And the reason is it's the birthday of a chemist called Baz alias.

He was an 18th century chemist, and you probably haven't heard of him.

He's not famous like an Einstein or Newton or Rutherford, but he's really important.

He's one of the real grandfathers of chemistry.

And that's what the rest of this film is gonna be dedicated to, telling you more about this amazing man called Baz alias.

We're here in the Library of the Royal Society again, and I wanted to tell you about the Swedish chemist called Baz alias whose role in the history of chemistry is really very important.

But lots of people have never heard of him.

The reason why his importance is that not only did it discover four elements Silicon, Selenia, Magorium and CIRI Um, but he also invented several of the terms that we use every day in chemistry.

For example, he invented the word Potala sis hand to describe how some substances can make chemical reactions go faster without being changed themselves.

He also invented the word polymer, which we now used to mean plastic.

But in those days he used to describe organic compounds on dhe.

There are some letters that he wrote to people in England and also a paper that he submitted to be published in the journal that's published by the Royal Society.

Here is his signature, saying azaleas on DDE.

It would appear from these letters that he either didn't know any English or he was much happier writing in French because the letter here is in French on There's another letter over here from him in French.

You've got to understand it's really exciting for me to see the handwriting of the famous chemist because people like him died long before there were videos or tape recordings.

So this is the closest that you can get to the voice of one of the masters of chemistry.

But in some ways, I suppose the one that's most interesting to me is the manuscript here of a paper that he published.

This is a photo copy so I can hold it without damage.

They're interesting, the first thing that it's in English.

The second thing that I think is very interesting is that even in 18 13 azaleas who lived in stock home Waas working together and doing joint experiments with somebody who was working in a hospital in London, so we tend to think of international collaboration in science is being quite modern.

But here, 199 years ago, it was already going on.

This is what they actually wrote and sent to the journal.

There were no typewriters in those days, and then the printers work from this.

And what's really quite exciting is here.

Think itself for on getting a reaction to take place and collecting a guess.

Here went says h this Is that what they actually drew and put in their manuscript?

I can No, I can fold the paper so you can see more easily.

Here is the same diagram as it was printed.

And I think if you look carefully, this one looks neater than that one.

I have another connection with Baze Alias, which is quite an exciting one.

When I did my doctorate, I was supervised by a professor and I learned from him, and in my turn, I've had students and they've had students.

So if you take me and then my PhD supervisor Jim Turner and then go to his PhD supervisor, Norman Shepherd.

You can go back through one supervisor after another on Dhe.

IUs So, in fact, Baz Alias is my six times great grandfather.

Great, great, great, great, great and lost count.

We're not related in any way, but he taught his students how to do science, and they taught their students.

So I have learned how to do science indirectly from Pa's alias.

It's not very often that people trace back there the scientific family tree, but I was really lucky.

I had a colleague, Herold Booth, who some years ago about 20 years ago took all the staff at Nottingham and traced back their family trees.

And so I didn't have to do anything at all except copy it down afterwards.

I don't think I would have had the patients to do it myself.

But what it means is that because in bas aliases time, there were so few scientists.

In fact, the word scientist didn't exist until late in bas aliases life that probably many of the people in chemistry are also related from Baz, alias on dhe.

They may all be my cousin's Baz, alias is one of the people that laid the foundations for chemistry.

He's not somebody who is famous in the way that people use his name every day, like Michael Faraday, who have units named after them.

But he was one of the real founders of the subject, and there's another reason why I'm quite fond of Azalea ce, a rather trivial one.

But his birthday, the 20th of August, was the same day as my father's birthday.

Some of you know, my father was Russian, and when my father was born, they had a different calendar on Dhe.

 So my father was born on the calendar that's used in the West on August 20th but on the Russian calendar on August, the seventh on by a strange coincidence, August the seventh was azaleas date of death. 