Metal

"Mercury doesnt contribute its valence electrons readily to the [electron] soup. The thinner soup cant bind the mercury atoms together very strongly. Mercury atoms easily slip past and away from each other. Heat easily overcomes the weak binding between mercury atoms, and mercury boils and melts at lower temperatures than any other metal. Because the valence electron soup is thinner for mercury, its electrical and thermal conductivity are poor."

"The Franklin sold at £4. 6s, each at the furnace, and at Philadelphia £18 per ton, the price varying with the metal."

"Nothing can vex the Devil more Than the name of him whom we adore. Therefore doth it delight me best To stand in the choir among the rest, With the great organ trumpeting Through its metallic tubes, and sing: Et verbum caro factum est! [And the Word was made flesh!] These words the devil cannot endure, For he knoweth their meaning well! Him they trouble and repel, Us they comfort and allure, And happy it were, if our delight Were as great as his affright!"

", The Story of the Chemical Elements (1897) pp. 16-19."

"Scheele discovered in 1781; and soon after a metal was extracted from it by Messrs. [Fausto & Juan José] D Elhuyars."

"Although no great stress can be laid on numbers so obtained, they serve to indicate that Davy had not yet obtained the pure metal."

"The relations of the common metals to the bases of the alkalies and earths, and the gradations of resemblance between the bases of the earths and s, point out as probable a similarity in the constitution of all inflammable bodies; and there are not wanting experiments, which render their possible decomposition far from a chimerical idea."

"The properties of , which was announced as a peculiar metal by Kaim in 1770, were minutely investigated by Scheele and Bergman a few years after."

"The "basis" of potash at 50° F. was a soft and malleable solid with the lustre of polished silver."

"Before me, stretching down to the river, was the factory where a score of workers, clad in helmets and gauntlets and swathed like so many Knights Templar, travel-stained and war-worn, their visages lit up by the yellow soda flames, and their ears half-deafened with the sound of exploding —a veritable inferno—were repeating on a Gargantuan scale the little experiment first made a century ago in the cellars of this building; turning out, day and night, hundredweights of the plastic metal in place of the little pin-heads which then burst upon the astonished and delighted gaze of Davy."

"The general properties and chemical activities of and sodium are so very similar that as a matter of commercial production that metal which can be most economically obtained is necessarily the one most largely manufactured, and of the two that metal is sodium. To-day, sodium is made by thousands of tons, and by a process which in principle is identical with that by which it was first made by Davy, i.e., by the of fused caustic soda."

"The processes supposed to relate to the transmutation of metals, and the , were probably first made known to the Europeans during the time of the ..."