Element 80 got me started with the periodic table. I explain how in my response to the first question on page 2.
I admit I didn’t know much about element 42 before I started writing the book. I might not have recognized it as an element, and I sure didn’t know how to pronounce it! But I found that it had such a great back story—it played a crucial role in World War I for the Germans, and they sent people halfway across the world, to the Rocky Mountains in the United States, to secure a ready supply. And as far as wars and battles over elements go, this one at least had a comic side: no death or large-scale destruction, and the defeated side actually came back and made millions off the element in the end.
The story behind element 13 is sort of the opposite of the story behind molybdenum. It’s an element you thought you knew so well, but it has a secret life. Aluminium is common in the earth’s crust but very hard to separate from other elements. So when scientists started to obtain pure samples of it in the 1800s, they were considered miracles, a shiny, attractive, and strong metal that ounce for ounce was worth far more than gold. Kings and emperors coveted it for sixty years. Suddenly, a few chemists came along and crashed the market by making aluminium cheap, and it became the metal we use today in pop cans and baseball bats. I really think it depends on your temperament whether you think it was better off as the worst most precious or most passé metal.
Element 117 is the newest addition to the table as of this writing, joining the table in 2010; and even though the name’s a temporary placeholder, I love its Latin roots (for 1-1-7). And I’ll still be fond of this element long after we’ve created more new elements and it gets an official name. Ununseptium filled in a gap in the seventh and lowest row of the periodic table, and it completed that row. Given the haphazard discoveries of all the rest of the elements, we’ve never had a periodic table where every single row was filled in before. So beyond just its row, ununseptium completed the entire table, squared it off handsomely. And given how fragile new elements beyond 117 will likely be, scientists probably will never be able to fill in an eighth full row, either. So this element gave us, right now, probably the only “complete” periodic table humankind will ever get to see.
Element 83 sits in the middle of what I call poisoners’ corridor, a number of ugly mug shots of dangerous elements. To the left of and above bismuth sit the conventional retching-and-deep-pain poisons of mystery novels; to its right and below it sit scarily radioactive poisons. But somehow bismuth itself is totally benign, even medicinal: it’s the “bis” in hot pink Pepto-Bismol. I also enjoy the fact that, of all the elements that will decay by the end of the time, bismuth will hold on longer than any of them, twenty billion billion years, over a billion times longer than the current age of the universe.