The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
I had the worst chemistry teacher in high school, and have found it less than interesting ever since; this book changed that.
For a fun read, I love The Disappearing Spoon.
For a while, I've been meaning to read Salt which is another fun read.
I also just love the Periodic Table of Videos YouTube channel for other fun stuff.
Textbook-wise, you can't beat Stumm and Morgan or Metcalf and Eddy for your water chemistry/water treatment needs.
My favorite science-related leisure reading is Derek Lowe's blog In The Pipeline. He covers new developments in chemistry/biology, the drug discovery industry, and occasionally some other stuff. He writes it in a way would be interesting to anyone that like chemistry and biology regardless of their level of education. I always look forward to reading it over lunch.
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If you are looking for a book, The Disappearing Spoon is a great set of true short stories about chemistry that is a really fun read.
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
You may choose some more pedestrian reading, like The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean https://www.amazon.com/Disappearing-Spoon-Madness-Periodic-Elements/dp/0316051632 .
I would honestly start with some online lectures for a go-at-your-own-pace.
You can also look at lower-than-college intro understanding, and see if you can find a standard high-school course (NY, for example, has state regents exams that Chem students have to pass) that may be more your speed.
https://www.amazon.com/Disappearing-Spoon-Madness-Periodic-Elements/dp/0316051632 has every thing you listed in a single book. It is a fantastic read that covers the usage of elements and stories of their discoveries and the scientists behind them. I love it and going to finish it while overseeing exams in the coming weeks.
Reddit's acting wonky and showing me some comments, then removing them. But I thought I would answer your question as best I could.
Basically, they had figured out spectroscopy. If you put a gas in a tube with metal plates at each end you can sent an electric current through it and the gass will glow. You get different colors based on what is glowing. My 7th grade science teacher did this and it was cool as hell. Here's a cool video that shows some gases (it uses a Tesla coil to excite the gas). If you send the light through a prism, you can separate out the colors. Depending how you do it, you either get a rainbow with some parts missing, or just the missing colors. Here's a wikipedia article with the spectral lines of a bunch of elements. Apparently a guy named Fraunhofer did this in 1802.
There was a solar eclipse in 1868 and they did a spectral analysis of the sun. They found some lines that didn't correspond to anything. Meanwhile, Mendelev didn't publish his periodic table until 1869. His table didn't include Helium. There were a decent number of elements and the periodic table went through several revisions. In addition, Helium is a noble gas so it doesn't really react with other elements. It's also pretty rare on earth (although common in the universe). So it took scientist a while to find it on Earth.
Although I don't remember it covering the discovery of Helium, I'd recommend The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean that is a fun, but informative, book on the elements.
If anyone is looking more elemental oddities, The Disappearing Spoon is a great read for all ages.
Argyria is discussed in The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean. He writes:
> [The previous discussion is about scams and quackery that are proliferating online, as you can now find most non-toxic chemical elements sold as alternative supplements, including silver.]
> There is an ostensible scientific basis for using silver, since it has the same self-sterilizing effects as copper. The difference between silver and copper is that silver, if ingested, colors the skin blue. Permanently. And it's actually worse than that sounds. Calling silvered skin "blue" is easy shorthand. But there's the fun electric blue in people's imaginations when they hear this, and then there's the ghastly gray zombie-Smurf blue people actually turn.
> Thankfully, this condition, called argyria, isn't fatal and causes no internal damage. A man in the early 1900s even made a living as "the Blue Man" in a freak show after overdosing on silver nitrate to cure his syphilis. (It didn't work.) In our own times, a survivalist and fierce Libertarian from Montana, the doughty and doughy Stan Jones, ran for the U.S. Senate in 2002 and 2006 despite being startlingly blue. To his credit, Jones had as much fun with himself as the media did. When asked what he told children and adults who pointed at him on the street, he deadpanned, "I just tell them I'm practicing my Halloween costume."
> Jones also gladly explained how he contracted argyria. Having his ear to the tin can about conspiracy theories, Jones became obsessed in 1995 with the Y2K computer crash, and especially with the potential lack of antibiotics in the coming apocalypse. His immune system, he decided, had better get ready. So he began to distill a heavy-metal moonshine in his backyard by dipping silver wires attached to 9-volt batteries into tubs of watter---a method not even hard-core silver evangelists recommend, since electric currents that strong dissolve far too many silver ions in the bath. Jones drank his stash faithfully for four and a half years, right until Y2K fizzled out in January 2000.
Here's a photo of Stan Jones for context of what argyria looks like.
Disappearing spoon. But I'm more excited about reading The Silenced, should be here tomorrow.