The following is a review of Wonderful Life with the Elements: The Periodic Table Personified.
Remember dozing off in high school chemistry class? If you think that the Periodic Table of Elements is merely a boring compilation of chemical elements, you haven't read this book by Japanese artist Bunpei Yorifuji.
Bunpei's introduction to chemical elements wasn't a particularly good one. When he was an art student, he heard that inhaling helium could raise the pitch of his voice. So he decided to inhale the gas not from helium balloons, which contain small amount of gas, but from helium canisters:
"BUT I MIGHT BE ABLE TO PRODUCE SOME REALLY FUNKY NOISES WITH THESE."
So I exhaled with all my might, opened one of the canisters, and filled my lungs with as much helium as I could. And everything just went black. I tried to breathe, but all I could really do was gasp, as no air would grace my lungs. I could feel the warmth leaving my body as I started to lose consciousness. It was only after this experience that I learned that inhaling pure helium can lead to suffocation and death.
Since I was all alone in the lab, I decided it might be a good idea to call out for help.
IN SUPER SOPRANO: "help meee ..."
But that voice! Inhaling helium is dangerous in more than one way. The first is that it suffocates you, and the second is that even if you call for help, your cries will probably be dismissed as a bad practical joke.
We're surrounded with chemical compounds and elements - but how much do we really know about them? As Bunpei's experience tells us, it's probably a good idea to know something about the elements.
In Wonderful Life with the Elements, Bunpei draws every chemical element as a unique character whose properties are represented visually. Heavy elements are fat and man-made elements are robots. Even their hairstyles mean something: plain and boring alkali earth metals sport pudding bowl cuts, the noble gases have too-cool afros, and the rare lanthanides have astro hair.
Every detail is meticulously drawn: elements that have been known since ancient times have long beards whereas newly discovered ones have pacifiers. Even the clothes on the element's back signify its use by mankind.
(Click to embiggen)
Take a look at more from the book:
We're giving away one copy of Bunpei's awesome book to a lucky commenter - Tell us which chemical element is your favorite and why. Update: Congratulations to Kanga, who won the book!
GET
TO KNOW THE ELEMENTS
From the brilliant mind of Japanese artist Bunpei Yorifuji comes Wonderful Life with the Elements, an illustrated guide to the periodic table
that gives chemistry a friendly face.
Why bother trudging through a traditional periodic table? In this periodic paradise, the elements are people too. And once you've met them, you'll never forget them.
About the Artist
Born in 1973 in Nagano, Japan, Bunpei Yorifuji is a Musashino Art University
dropout. His other books include The Catalog of Death (Shi ni Katarogu)
and The Scale of Mind (Suuji no Monosashi). He has also co-authored
Uncocoro and The Earthquake Checklist (Jishin Itsumonooto),
among others. Find out more about Bunpei and his works at his website.
Wonderful Life with the Elements is published by No Starch Press and is available from Amazon and at bookstores near you.
Authors and publishers: Want to feature your book on Neatorama for free? Email info AT neatorama DOT com for details on Neatorama's Book Excerpt feature.
Its role in the story of the term "Mad Hatter" is really interesting, although I do find the story very sad.
Mercury is so awesome that it has its own nickname, quicksilver, which has permeated the general lexicon, as a quick search of the term will show. How many other elements can say that?
Another plus side to it, it's significantly cheaper than gold, and I think it looks just as good!
I'd love to see how this book describes sodium!
And this is from a high school chemistry teacher.
Cesium also has a wonderfully low melting point (like gallium, my second favorite element), and although it's a solid at room temperature, it melts if you hold it in your hand.
But cesium's not done yet! It has the good fortune to be part of the alkali metals group. That means that it (along with sodium, mentioned above) explodes when put into contact with water. Because it's so far down in the group, it offers a bigger boom per gram than sodium does, though. (The product of this explosion is a a strong enough base that you can use it to etch glass - presumably the safety glass you were standing behind before you dropped it in water.)
And for all that, it's got one of the prettiest names in the table - it comes from the Latin for "sky blue", because when it burns, it emits sky blue light in the visible spectrum, among things.
(P.S. - in case my sales pitch convinced anyone to go and buy some cesium for their DIY atomic clock, let me warn you - just one gram costs about the same as my rent for a month. But happy sales hunting!)