A few weeks ago, I read again a bit in the highly interesting book “Periodic Tales” from Hugh Aldersey-Williams where the author describes “the curious lives of the elements” (as the cover says). Somewhere in the book, the author notes that he made a map of the discovery places of the chemical elements and found some interesting patterns. I also wanted to see those patterns, but could not find such a map on the internet.1
Thus, I decided to do it myself using the list Timeline of chemical element discoveries from Wikipedia. Somehow, I thought that who isolated it first was more interesting than who observed or predicted it first, hence I took that column of the list (if there was an entry). However, the map won’t change much if I’d chosen the other column, just a few of the elements would be shifted around.
For making the map, I wanted to write my own code with bubbles that have sizes depending on how many elements were found at a place, but then I found the amazing Interactive Geo Maps WordPress plugin. Not exactly what I wanted, but close enough and far too comfortable to not use it.
Note: I was reasonably careful in finding the places, but sometimes I had to guess a little. Some elements were discovered or isolated in more than one place, so they can appear twice. Elements that were known for a long time were excluded. 2
World map:
Europe
What are the patterns? Many elements were discovered in Berlin, Paris, and London, because those were the locations of the scientific societies. A lot of the metals were discovered in Sweden because of the mines. And almost all the heavy unstable elements were produced at accelerators in Berkeley, Dubna and Darmstadt.