Mercury Introducing itself as a book mentioning about various chemical substances, The Disappearing Spoon, focuses on the history of the periodic table by collaborating all the various information about the chemical substances into stories. These stories reveal how each of these element affect the people who discovered them, in ways that are both positive and negative to the discoverer. At the beginning of the book, the author mentions about this element named Mercury. As stated in the book, the chemical name of Mercury is Hydragyrm (HG) which is a Latin-word meaning watery silver. Beside just giving information about the chemical substance, the author provides the reader some background knowledge as to how he came to know about Mercury. The …show more content…
To provide the readers with some background knowledge as to how this substance was known, The Disappearing Spoon, introduces scientists who are part of discovering this chemical substance. There names are William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain. William Shockley, an electrical engineer and physicist, was working on improving an amplifier using another chemical substance named Silicon. After two unproductive years, he relinquished the project to his fellow scientists Walter Brattain and John Bardeen. Without Shockley, the first solid state amplifier was created in 1947 using Germanium (Ge). Then in Paris, France, William Shockley, rushed to postulate credit for the invention of Germanium. Due to this claim by William Shockley, Bardeen capitulated all semiconductor research, and the use of Germanium (Ge) in conductors suffocated before 1960 in favor of Silicon. However, Germanium (Ge) made one audacious exception with an electrical engineer named Jack Kilby who would use this chemical substance to make the integrated circuit while working for the Texas Instrument company. Later he would be awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in December 10, 2000. Germanium today is very useful in the semiconductor industry. It is also used for making transistors for use in electronic devices. When this substance is intoxicated with meager quantities of the chemical substances Arsenic, Phosphorous, Gallium, Indium, and Antimony, Germanium can be really helpful for making transistors as mentioned before. Germanium is also useful for designing alloys as well as a phosphor in fluorescent lamps. Silicon today is used in computers and calculators, as well as many other electronic devices. Germanium is not as commonly used as