1828

Beryllium

Nicolas-Louis Vauquelin (1763–1829), Antoine Bussy (1794–1882), Friedrich Wöhler (1800–1882)

Beryllium is a strange element. With the atomic number of 4, it sits among all the well-known, lighter members of the periodic table, yet it’s unfamiliar to most non-chemists. It has never been cheap or easy to obtain and is surprisingly toxic. So why bother with it? In fact, beryllium is extremely mechanically stable under heating and transparent to most useful wavelengths of X-rays (which is important when an X-ray source has to be sealed). It scatters and slows high-energy neutrons very efficiently, so it has long been used in nuclear physics and may well be a key shielding material for the walls of fusion power plants (which would give off dangerous amounts of neutrons). Copper-beryllium alloys are known for their strength and nonsparking behavior, making them valuable for wrenches and screwdrivers in rooms full of hydrogen tanks or other explosives.

Isolating the pure element took a lot of work, though. Beryllium has a very strong tendency to react with oxygen, especially when heated, which is exactly what you don’t want when refining or working a metal. It’s not a particularly common element, either. French chemist Nicolas Vauquelin first identified it as an unknown substance in 1798—naming it glucine because some of the element’s salts have a sweet taste—after extracting its oxide from beryl (the gemstones emerald and aquamarine are both varieties of this mineral). It wasn’t made in any semi-pure form until 1828, when Friedrich Wöhler and Antoine Bussy independently used another newly isolated element, potassium, to yield small grains of it. Pure beryllium took even longer to be produced, and it wasn’t until the late 1950s that really high-grade material became available (zone refining helped).

Beryllium might have become an important industrial material during the 1930s and 1940s, as it was a component of early fluorescent light designs. However, it became clear that people working with it were coming down with a variety of health problems, especially from breathing the metallic dust. Its use has been severely restricted since then—with the exceptions of X-ray equipment and the high-performance alloys mentioned above. If fusion power is ever made practical, though, we might see more of the element.

Beryllium is found in a variety of gemstones, such as this aquamarine specimen from Nepal.