U And The Atomic Mass Of Uranium example essay topic
406 words
Uranium Uranium was discovered in the 1700's in the coal mines of bohemia and Jachlovikna. Uranium's atomic number is 92, its Symbol is U and the atomic mass of uranium is 238.0289. Miners called it Pechblende meaning, Pechblende, from the German words p ech, which means either pitch or bad luck, and blende, meaning mineral Uranium's first full analysis was done on 1789 by Martin Klaproth, a self-taught well educated german chemist. Klaproth, having extracted from pitchblende what he called 'a strange kind of half metal' (he had only isolated its oxide), he resisted the temptation to give his own name to the new element, which was quite customary at the time. William Herschel gave uranium its name from the last planet founded in are solar system at the time, he named it Urban, which in its final form became uranium, a name which today is known worldwide while klaproth's own fame has faded. Uranium is as dense as gold. Uranium, was first prepared with some difficulty, in 1841 by the french chemist Eugene Peli got, using thermal reaction of tetrachloride with potassium. Later in 1870, an important fact was established: uranium is the last and heaviest element present on earth. This was demonstrated by Dimitri Mendeleev in his famous periodical classification of the elements by chemical properties and increasing atomic mass. Experimentation with uranium lead to many discoveries such as the X-ray by Wilhelm Rntgen, on November 8, 1895.
Wilhelm Rntgen, was awarded the first Nobel prize in 1901 for the development of the X-ray. Uranium is weakly radioactive, decaying slowly but inexorably at the rate of one milligram per tonne per year. It is transformed into inactive lead through a chain of radioelement or daughters, each of which has a characteristic disintegration rate, a constant of nature that man has never been able to alter. The proportion of each radioelement in the ore is inversely proportional to its rate of disintegration. Radium is the fifth radioactive descendant in the chain from uranium to lead, its daughter is the gas radon, and polonium is the last radioelement before lead.
The discovery of Uranium changed the world as we knew it, from its physical and chemical properties we came about the X-ray, following down the line, chemists and scientists used Uranium to make weapons of mass destruction, (i.e. the Atom bomb).
Bibliography
1. Compton's Online Encyclopedia 2. Websters Dictionary 3. Me rill, Physical Science book.
