iridium / osmium

Cluster of osmium crystals

24 November 2023

The elements iridium and osmium were discovered together by chemist Smithson Tennant in 1803. Iridium, atomic number 77 and symbol Ir, is a hard, brittle, silvery-white metal. It is the second densest naturally occurring metal. Only osmium, atomic number 76 and symbol Os is denser. That metal is also hard and brittle but bluish-white in color. Both elements are primarily found in platinum ores, and both are rare—osmium is the rarest stable element in the earth’s crust.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, it was discovered that when platinum was dissolved in aqua regia (a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acid), a black residue resulted. A number of chemists speculated on what the residue might contain, but the amount of residue produced was insufficient for further study. In 1803, chemist Smithson Tennant managed to obtain a larger sample of the residue and discovered it contained the two new elements. The following year he read a paper to the Royal Society of London in which he announced his discovery and named the two metals.

He named one iridium, from the Latin iris (rainbow) + -ium:

As it is necessary to give some name to bodies which have not been known before, and most convenient to indicate by it some characteristic property, I should incline to call this metal Iridium, from the striking variety of colours which it gives, while dissolving in marine acid.

The other he named osmium, from the Greek ὀσμή (osme, odor) +-ium:

When the alkaline solution is first formed, by adding water to the dry alkaline mass in the crucible, a pungent and peculiar smell is immediately perceived. This smell, as I afterwards discovered, arises from the extrication of a very volatile metallic oxide; and, as this smell is one of its most distinguishing characters, I should on that account incline to call the metal Osmium.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. iridium, n.; third edition, September 2004, osmium, n.

Tennant, Smithson. “On Two Metals, Found in the Black Powder Remaining after the Solution of Platina” (21 June 1804). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 94, 1804, 411–18 at 414 and 416. JSTOR.

Photo credit: Periodictable.ru. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

my work here is done

Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger on his horse Silver

22 November 2023

A recent post on Languagehat.com takes a look at the phrase my work here is done. The cliché is a good example of how difficult it is to determine when a simple collocation of words becomes a catchphrase and when a catchphrase starts to be used ironically.

In current usage, the phrase is often used in jest, either taking undue credit for some accomplishment or after fomenting some state of chaos. But when did this serious phrase become comic? Simply doing a search for the string of words does not help in sussing out the transition points from collocation to cliché to irony.

The earliest use of the collocation of the words my work here is done that I have found is in a 1652 pamphlet by Thomas Tany, a.k.a. Theaurau John Tany, an apocalyptic preacher and religious visionary:

Now I hope I shall offend none that now sits, for I speak in the truth of the Nations, true birth-right linially discending, duely conjoyned, and of right chosen, Magna Charta being their foundation stone or Center. Now if yee be offended by thar [sic], I know you to be but shaddows, for if ye be trve, then no offence; for it is a shadoe or weakness that is jeolous or offended, for truth is strong standing Centered in the main rock, which is God, for God is Truth who hath been made a Colour to colour all your false, falices under, & for his glory alone I contest with this Nation only to charge it with the works wrought in it, then my work here is done, for judgement follows the sound, but men by the sound shall be left without excuse.

But the words of an obscure seventeenth-century preacher hardly constitute a likely source of inspiration for a present-day catchphrase. And a search of the databases Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Nineteenth Century Collections Online fail to turn up a single instance of the phrase my work here is done. Of course, there are undoubtedly instances of the collocation from those centuries that didn’t make it into those collections, but its absence from the databases is strong evidence that it wasn’t a stock phrase.

Also from the seventeenth century is the use of my work is done, reportedly uttered in 1658 by Oliver Cromwell on his deathbed:

Again, hee said, I would bee willing to live to bee further serviceable to God and his People, but my work is done, yet God will bee with his People.

Cromwell was not an obscure preacher, and his words might realistically be taken up as a catchphrase, but I doubt this is the origin of the modern cliché. First, it is missing the here. There are, of course, older uses of my work is done, and it is a rather pedestrian phrase. It is the here that elevates it from the pedestrian to the memorable.

If the cliché is not from the nineteenth century or earlier, we must look to the twentieth, and the source that most people point to is the Lone Ranger, the western hero who reportedly frequently used my work here is done as a sign-off. The Lone Ranger began as a radio show in 1933, and the television series ran from 1949–57. The shows are certainly well known enough to have spawned the catchphrase.

The trouble is that I have been unable to find an actual example of the phrase from an episode of the Lone Ranger. I’ve gone through a number of the radio and television episodes that are available online (but by no means all), and the line my work is done here simply does not appear. There are, however, a number of episodes where the Lone Ranger says things like, “Tonto, our work here is finished” or “Tonto, our job is done here.” And in one case, another character says, “He never stays around once his work is done. He’s the best friend we’ve ever had. He’s the Lone Ranger.”

These similar lines hardly constitute anything like a routine signoff to the show; most episodes end with nothing like the phrase being said. Attributing my work is done here to the Lone Ranger is a misquotation along the lines of Casablanca’s “Play it again, Sam,” or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’s “Badges, we don’t need no stinking badges.” But whether or not he actually said it doesn’t really matter for our purposes. Since something akin to the phrase was said often enough to make people think the Lone Ranger said it, then it is the likely inspiration for the catchphrase.

And as to when the phrase started to be used ironically, that is an even more difficult question to answer. Undoubtedly there are multiple people who independently used the phrase ironically. But my vote for the likely turning point, when the catchphrase gained traction as irony, is Mel Brook’s 1973 movie Blazing Saddles. A portion of the closing scene has Sheriff Bart saying farewell to the townspeople Rock Ridge:

HOWARD JOHNSON: Sheriff, you can’t go now. We need you.

(Townsfolk ad lib)

BART: My work here is done. I’m needed elsewhere now. (MUSIC: BEGINS POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE.) I’m needed wherever outlaws rule the West, wherever innocent women and children are afraid to walk on the streets, wherever a man cannot live in simple dignity and wherever a people cry out for justice.

TOWNSPEOPLE (in unison): BULLSHIT!!!

BART: All right, ya caught me.

Of course, Brooks and his fellow screenwriters (which included comedian Richard Pryor) were clearly evoking the belief that the Lone Ranger used the phrase when they had Bart say, my work here is done.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Thanks to Ben Zimmer for pointing me to the recordings of the Lone Ranger radio show and to Stephen Goranson for helping me find episodes of the television series.

Brooks, Mel, et al. Blazing Saddles (screenplay), 6 February 1973 (revised 22 February 1973), 122. The Script Lab (pdf).

Languagehat. “My Work Here Is Done” (blog), 29 September 2023, Languagehat.com.

Tany, Thomas. Theavrau Iohn His Epitah and Evrops Looking-Glass. London, 1652, 7. Early English Books Online.

Walker, Henry, Ironmonger. A Collection of Several Passages Concerning His Late Highnesse Oliver, Cromwell, in the Time of His Sickness. London: Robert Ibbitson, 1659, 12. Early English Books Online.

Photo credit: ABC Television, 1956. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

---

A selection (by no means complete) of the relevant lines from the Lone Ranger radio and television shows:

“Along the Oregon Trail” (radio show). The Lone Ranger, 10 April 1942, 26:50. Archive.org.

“Our work here is done, Tonto.”

“Outlaw Point” (radio show). The Lone Ranger, 6 May 1942, 26:00. Archive.org.

“Now that his work is done, he’s on his way.”

“The Gunpowder” (radio show). The Lone Ranger, 17 September 1954, 22:00. Archive.org.

“Then our work is done, here, Colonel.”

“White Hawk’s Decision.” The Lone Ranger, S5.E6, 8 October 1956, 21:09. ABC Television. YouTube.com.

“Yes, Tonto. Our work here is finished.”

“Two Against Two.” The Lone Ranger, S5.E28, 21 March, 1957, 20:36. ABC Television. YouTube.com.

“Come on, Tonto. Our job is done here. Adios.”

“The Law and Miss Aggie.” The Lone Ranger, S5.E31, 11 April, 1957, 20:33. ABC Television. YouTube.com.

“Well, Tonto, our work is finished here.”

Unidentified episode. The Lone Ranger, 41:43. ABC Television. YouTube.com.

“He’s gone, Dad. He never stays around once his work is done. He’s the best friend we’ve ever had. He’s the Lone Ranger.”

Black Friday / Cyber Monday

Black Friday, 28 November 2013, Laramie, Wyoming

21 November 2023

In the United States, the Friday after Thanksgiving is known as Black Friday. The day is the traditional start of the holiday shopping season and is the busiest shopping day of the year, with many stores offering sales and discounts. And Black Friday sales have spread beyond the borders of the United States. When I lived in Toronto, there were Black Friday sales on the day after American Thanksgiving, despite it not being a holiday in Canada. (Canadian Thanksgiving is in October.)

Use of Black Friday to refer to the day following Thanksgiving got its start in the 1950s in the Philadelphia police department, whose traffic division referred to the day as such because of its unusually high volume of traffic. In addition to it being a heavy shopping day, the annual Army-Navy football game was held on next day—the city being neutral ground, roughly equidistant between West Point and Annapolis—and out-of-town crowds would stream into the city on that Friday.

The first use of the term in print that anyone has found is in Women’s Wear Daily of 28 November 1960. In an article describing sales forecasts for that Christmas season, the paper had this to say about Philadelphia:

All sources were bitter about newspaper and, particularly, repeated radio news bulletins reiterating Mayor Dilworth’s plea for people to leave their cars at home and take public transportation, and reports from police officials forecasting record traffic jams, both vehicular and pedestrian, for “black Friday.”

And there is this from the newsletter Public Relations News of 18 December of the following year:

Santa has brought Philadelphia stores a present in the form of “one of the biggest shopping weekends in recent history.” At the same time, it has again been proven that there is a direct relationship between sales and public relations.

For downtown merchants throughout the nation, the biggest shopping days normally are the two following Thanksgiving Day. Resulting traffic jams are an irksome problem to the police and, in Philadelphia, it became customary for officers to refer to the post-Thanksgiving days as Black Friday and Black Saturday. Hardly a stimulus for good business, the problem was discussed by the merchants with their Deputy City Representative, Abe S. Rosen, one of the country's most experienced municipal PR executives. He recommended adoption of a positive approach which would convert Black Friday and Black Saturday to Big Friday and Big Saturday. The media cooperated in spreading the news of the beauty of Christmas-decorated downtown Philadelphia, the popularity of a “family-day outing” to the department stores during the Thanksgiving weekend, the increased parking facilities, and the use of additional police officers for guaranteeing a free flow of traffic ... Rosen reports that business over the weekend was so good that merchants are giving downtown Philadelphia "a starry-eyed new look."

In November 1994, long-time Philadelphia newspaperman Joseph Barrett wrote of his recollections about the origin of the term for the Philadelphia Daily News:

The term “Black Friday” came out of the old Philadelphia Police Department’s traffic squad. The cops used it to describe the worst traffic jams which annually occurred in Center City on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

It was the day that Santa Claus took his chair in the department stores and every kid in the city wanted to see him. It was the first day of the Christmas shopping season.

Schools were closed. Late in the day, out-of-town visitors began arriving for the Army-Navy football game.

Every “Black Friday,” no traffic policeman was permitted to take the day off. The division was place on 12 hours of duty, and even the police band was ordered to Center City. It was not unusual to see a trombone player directing traffic.

[…]

In 1959, the old Evening Bulletin assigned me to police administration, working out of City Hall. Nathan Kleger was the police reporter who covered Center City for the Bulleting.

In the early 1960s, Kleger and I put together a front-page story for Thanksgiving and we appropriated the police term “Black Friday” to describe the terrible traffic conditions.

Center City merchants complained loudly to Police Commissioner Albert N. Brown that drawing attention to traffic deterred customers from coming downtown. […]

The following year, Brown put out a press release describing the day as “Big Friday.” But Kleger and I held our ground, and once more said it was “Black Friday.” And of course we used it year after year. Then television picked it up.

Unfortunately, his old paper, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, has not been digitized, so I can’t search for what he wrote at the time.

It is often said that the day is so called because it is the date when retailers’ annual sales figures become profitable, that is move from the red into the black. But this is a post hoc rationalization dating to the 1980s and is not the original metaphor underlying the phrase.

There is an earlier, apparently one-off, use of Black Friday to refer to the day after Thanksgiving, but this is a reference to worker absenteeism on that day, not shopping. Since Thanksgiving falls on a Thursday, workers would typically take the next day off to create a long weekend. Nowadays, of course, most non-retail businesses simply close on that Friday. Editor M. J. Murphy wrote the following in the November 1951 issue of Factory Management & Maintenance:

WHAT TO DO ABOUT “FRIDAY AFTER THANKSGIVING”

“Friday-after-Thanksgiving-it is” is a disease second only to the bubonic plague in its effects. At least that's the feeling of those who have to get production out, when the “Black Friday” comes along. The shop may be half empty, but every absentee was sick—and can prove it.

What to do? Many companies have tried the standard device of denying Thanksgiving Day pay to employees absent the day before and after the holiday. Trouble is, you can't deny pay to those legitimately ill. But what's legitimate? Tough to decide these days of often miraculously easy doctors' certificates.

Glenn L. Martin, Baltimore aircraft manufacturer has another solution: When you decide you want to sweeten up the holiday kitty, pick Black Friday to add to the list. That's just what Martin has done. Friday after Thanksgiving is the company's seventh paid holiday.

We’re not suggesting more paid holidays just to get out of a hole. But, if you can make a good trade in bargaining, there are lots of worse things than having a holiday on a day that was half holiday anyhow. Shouldn’t cost too much for that reason, either.

The next February Murphy used Black Friday again in the same context:

MORE ABOUT “FRIDAY-AFTER-THANKSGIVING”

November FACTORY (page 137) told of one company’s solution to heavy Friday-after-Thanksgiving absenteeism. The company added “Black Friday” to its list of paid holidays.

Murphy appears to have been the only one to use Black Friday in the context of worker absenteeism, but he is hardly the first to give that label to a day. The day after Thanksgiving is not the only Black Friday in history. Friday the thirteenth, regardless of when it happens, is often referred to as black Friday. Specific dates that have been christened black Friday include: 6 December 1745, the day when Bonnie Prince Charlie’s arrival in Britain was announced in London; 11 May 1866, a day of a stock market panic in London; and 24 September 1869, a day of a financial panic on Wall Street over falling gold prices.

The use of black + day-of-the-week to designate a date on which something bad happened is even older, dating to at least 1576 when Black Saturday was used to denote 10 December 1547, when the Scottish army was defeated by the English at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh during the conflict known as the Rough Wooing.

Perhaps the most famous of the black days is Black Thursday of 24 October 1929, the date of the Wall Street stock market crash that precipitated the Great Depression. That name appeared by the next day. From an Associated Press report of 25 October 1929:

Berlin financial circles yesterday decided that “black Thursday” on the New York Stock exchange had brought forth a sigh of relief throughout Europe, which suffered from the exaggerated speculation that had been going on in Wall Street.

Back to the topic of post-Thanksgiving shopping, the Monday after the holiday has been christened Cyber Monday. This term first appears in 2005, at a time when high-speed home internet connections were rare, and most people connected to the web via work computers. The Monday following Thanksgiving, when office workers returned to work, thus became a heavy online shopping day. Cyber Monday first appears in print in the New York Times on 19 November 2005 (although the reporter plumps for the myth about the Black Friday’s origin):

CYBER MONDAY Because the world needs another Officially Named shopping day, the people who dreamed up Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving, when retailers hope to turn a profit) have created a nickname for the following Monday.

Hence the catchy Cyber Monday, so called because millions of productive Americans, fresh off a weekend at the mall, are expected to return to work and their high-speed Internet connections on Nov. 28 and spend the day buying what they liked in all those stores.

Though it sounds like slick marketing, Cyber Monday, it turns out, is a legitimate trend. According to Shop.org, a trade group, 77 percent of online retailers reported a substantial sales increase on the Monday after Thanksgiving last year. “Not good for employers,” observed Ed Bussey, senior vice president for marketing at the online lingerie retailer Figeaves.com.

Cyber Monday continues to be used in marketing copy, advertising post-Thanksgiving online sales, even though the original rationale for why that Monday would be an especially heavy online shopping day no longer applies. And both Black Friday and Cyber Monday have burst their original temporal confines and are now applied as labels for sales that occur anytime within close proximity, before or after, Thanksgiving.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Associated Press. “Berlin See Benefit to Europe in Break.” Seattle Daily Times, 25 October 1929, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Barbero, Michael. “Ready, Aim, Shop: Five Trends to Watch This Holiday Shopping Season.” New York Times, 19 November 2005, C4/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Barrett, Joseph P. “This Friday Was Black with Traffic.” Philadelphia Daily News, 25 November 1994, 80. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Fairchild News Service. “Initial Christmas Sales Run Even to Slightly Ahead.” Women’s Wear Daily, 28 November 1960, 4/5. ProQuest.

Murphy, M. J. “Tips to Good Human Relations for Factory Executives.” Factory Management and Maintenance, 109.11, November 1951, 137.

———. “Tips to Good Human Relations for Factory Executives.” Factory Management and Maintenance, 110.2, February 1952, 133.

Oxford English Dictionary Online. Third Edition. September 2011. s. v. Black Friday, n., black, adj. & n., Black Saturday, n., Black Thursday, n.

Taylor-Blake, Bonnie. “‘Black Friday’ (day after Thanksgiving), 1951.” American Dialect Society Email List (ADS-L). 5 August 2009.

———. “‘Black Friday’ (day after Thanksgiving), 1961.” American Dialect Society Email List (ADS-L). 5 May 2011.

Zimmer, Ben. “The Origins of ‘Black Friday.’” Word Routes. 25 November 2011.

Photo credit: Powhusku, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

doughboy

A WWI-era doughboy, c. 1919

20 November 2023

Doughboy is a slang word for an American soldier, particularly an infantryman, that is most often associated with the First World War, but the term is almost a hundred years older than that war, dating to at least 1835. Why the soldiers were dubbed doughboys is unknown, but that hasn’t stopped people from speculating.

The earliest use of the doughboy to refer to a soldier that I’m aware of is in a letter published in the Army and Navy Chronicle of 30 July 1835. The letter is critical of the new volume of tactics published that year. The use of doughboy is somewhat cryptic here, but it seems to mean an infantryman (I have no clue as to what “Ghost of Indian Warfare” refers):

Mr. Editor:—I call the Infantry Tactics of ’26, made by a board of officers, a system sufficiently good for the United States’ Infantry as now organized, and I’ll prove it to you. The Military Tactics of ’35, I call a system not so good as that of ’26, for several reasons.

Dough-boy’s Ghost of Indian Warfare. (Extract from “Military Tactics, &c.”) The formation in three ranks, provided for in this system, is, for the present, suspended, and will not be adopted in practice until other orders are given from this department.

From this, you must perceive how valuable and how beneficial this system is to be the army [sic]. A careful comparison of the two systems will show that the three rank formation is the distinguishing feature of that of ’35; that the alterations are trifling, but sufficiently great to cause much confusion and considerable trouble to officers and men for the next twelve months. If the three rank system is not to be used why was it translated? Why could it not remain in French until needed, and then put into the hands o the printer? There is a principle to which all military men concede, viz: never to alter a regulation or order unless such alteration be manifestly beneficial, and that in great degree, and in tactics it is particularly applicable.

The extract reading, “The formation in three ranks […] from this department,” is taken from a notice by then Secretary of War Lewis Cass contained in the front matter of the manual on infantry tactics published that year. But the phrase Dough-boy’s Ghost of Indian Warfare and the individual words doughboy, ghost, or Indian do not appear in that manual. What the letter writer is referring to with this phrase is something of a mystery.

But what the standalone word doughboy means is made clear in another letter published in that newspaper on 27 August 1835. This letter makes clear that a doughboy is an infantryman:

It seems as if the inventive powers of some individuals were endless. When we advised a different colored binding for the several volumes of the Infantry Tactics, for the sole purpose of distinction, it did not occur to us that this distinction, to be complete, should address itself to more senses than one. To effect the omission on our part, the brigadier in charge of the printing and binding has caused the second volume to appear in red and gold; the red cloth, unlike the blue imitation of seal skin, is smooth, and the emblematic bugle horn of the Dough Boys is stamped on the flanks of each book, so that by day or by night the most blind may find which is the Military Tactics and which the Infantry.

Doughboy would remain an army slang term and wouldn’t often make its way into print until much later in the nineteenth century. But we do see it some diaries and correspondence of soldiers. Napoleon J. T. Dana, an Army officer, uses it in his diary entry of 1 January 1847 during the Mexican-American War:

We were off at daylight, and the morning was mighty cold, so our pace was soon quickened almost to what is vulgarly called a dogtrot until we were stopped about eight o’clock at the foot of a large steep hill, where we “doughboys” had to wait for the artillery to get their carriages over. But after we did get over, we went even faster than before.

We see it in a Civil War context, but only in a text written decades after the fact. Robert Goldthwaite, in his Four Brothers in Blue, which was serialized in 1898, writes of an exchange between Union cavalrymen and infantry on 20 September 1862. The cavalry, returning from a battle, passed an infantry column fording a river:

The cavalry were met returning. The splashing of their horses the water flying into the faces of some of our grumblers, who out of spite, shouted out, “Are there any dead cavalry-men ahead? What guerillas do you belong to?” etc., etc., to which the answer comes back promptly, “Yes, you bummers, we do the fighting and leave the dead cavalry-men for the ‘dough boys’ to pick up. Go to the rear you “worm crushers”!”

It's not until the First World War that the doughboy makes it way out of army slang into general parlance.

There is a much older, probably unrelated, somewhat more literal use of doughboy to mean a boiled or deep-fried dumpling. We see this usage as early as 1685 in Basil Ringrose’s Bucaniers of America:

These men that were landed, had each of them three or four Cakes of Bread, (called by the English Dough-boy’s) for their provision of Victuals; and as for drink, the Rivers afforded them enough.

Also, in the early nineteenth century doughboy was also used as a slang term for a baker’s assistant.

A number of explanations for why American soldiers were called doughboys have been promulgated over the years. Perhaps the name comes from a penchant for consuming doughboys. Or maybe infantryman, because of their youth and inexperience, were likened to bakers’ doughboys. Some suggest it comes from the round buttons on the military uniform, which resembled the pastry. Others say it comes from using white dough to mask blemishes on the white belts worn by the soldiers. But these are all just speculation, with no solid evidence behind them.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Carter, Robert Goldthwaite. “Four Brothers in Blue.” 20/2. The Main Bugle, January 1898. HathiTrust Digital Library. [Green’s Dictionary of Slang dates this source to 1862, which is not quite accurate. The event described happened in that year, but the account was written in 1898.]

Cass, Lewis. Letter, 10 April 1835. As front matter to Winfield Scott. Infantry-Tactics, vol. 1 of 2. New York: George Dearborn, 1835. HathiTrust Digital Library.

“Communications: New Infantry Tactics.” Army and Navy Chronicle (Washington, DC), 30 July 1835, 247. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals.

———. Army and Navy Chronicle, 27 August 1835, 277. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals.

Dana, Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh. Diary, 1 January 1847. In Ferrell, Robert H., ed. Monterrey Is Ours!: The Mexican War Letters of Lieutenant Dana, 1845–1847. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990, 166. JSTOR.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. doughboy, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2014, s.v. doughboy, n.

Ringrose, Basil. Bucaniers of America, vol. 2. London: William Crooke, 1685, 4. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: Spurr Studio, Waterloo, Iowa, c. 1919. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

iodine

Iodine evaporating into a purple gas

17 November 2023

The origin of the word iodine is a story of cooperation and rivalry between scientists of warring nations in the Napoleonic era.

Iodine is a semi-lustrous, non-metallic solid at room temperature and pressure with atomic number 53 and the symbol I. Iodine is essential for human health, and a deficiency can lead to goiters in adults and intellectual disabilities in children. (Nowadays, iodide is typically added to table salt to prevent such deficiency.) It has a variety of applications, including medicine, where it has long been used for its anti-microbial properties. More recently it has been used as a radiocontrast material in medical imaging and in treating thyroid cancer.

The name comes from the Greek ἰώδης (iodes, violet colored), after the purple color of its gaseous state.

Iodine was discovered in 1811 by Bernard Courtois. At the time, in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, France was blockaded by Prussia and Austria on land and by the Royal Navy at sea and was thus unable to obtain nitrate for gunpowder from abroad. Courtois was engaged in finding ways to extract nitrate from kelp. One day, probably in November of that year—the exact date is not known—when using acid and heat to clean out the vats used to extract nitrate from the seaweed, Courtois noticed a purple vapor arising from the vessels and metallic-like crystals forming at their bottoms. Courtois sent samples of the substance to various colleagues for analysis, including Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and André-Marie Ampère.

Two years passed with no discernable progress made on identifying the substance. Then in October 1813 English chemist Humphry Davy and his young lab assistant, twenty-two-year-old Michael Faraday, were traveling through France on their way to Italy. (It was a different time then, and despite being at war with England, Bonaparte was happy to grant passports to English scientists, especially an eminent one like Davy.) While in France, Davy met with Ampère, who shared his sample of the unknown substance. Davy, using the traveling laboratory he always took with him, got to work. Upon hearing this, Gay-Lussac was furious; he had already determined it was an element but had been slow in publishing his findings and did not want to be scooped by his English rival.

Davy and Gay-Lussac engaged in a bitter quarrel over who had priority in the discovery. Gay-Lussac was the first to publish, but he did so under Courtois’s name in October 1813, dubbing the new element iode:

La substance nouvelle, que depuis on a nommée iode à cause de la belle couleur violette de sa vapeur, a bien tout l’aspect d’un metal.

(The new substance, which has since been named iode because of the beautiful purple color of its vapor, has all the appearance of a metal.)

Davy wrote up his findings in December 1813, when he was still in Paris, changing Gay-Lussac’s coinage to iodine, and sent them off to the Royal Society, where they were read and published the following year:

The name ione has been proposed in France for this new substance from its colour in the gaseous state, from ἴον, viola; and its combination with hydrogen has been named hydroionic acid. The name ione, in English, would lead to confusion, for its compounds would be called ionic and ionian. By terming it iodine, from ἰώδης, violaceous, this confusion will be avoided, and the name will be more analogous to chlorine and fluorine.

Thus iodine was born out of a scientific rivalry between warring nations (not unlike the transuranic elements discovered during the Cold War of the twentieth century). Ironically, the young lab assistant Faraday would end up eclipsing both Davy and Lussac with his scientific achievements.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Courtois, B. (Gay-Lussac, Joseph Louis) “Découverte d’une substance nouvelle dans le Vareck.” Annales de Chimie, 88, 31 October 1813, 304–10 at 305. Bibliothèque Nationale de France: Gallica.

Davy, Humphry. “Some Experiments and Observations on a New Substance Which Becomes a Violet Coloured Gas by Heat” (10 December 1813, read 20 January 1814). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 104, 74 at 93 at 91. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1814.0007. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstl.1814.0007

Kelly, Francis C. “Iodine in Medicine and Pharmacy Since Its Discovery—1811–1961.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 54.10, October 1961, 831–926. DOI: 10.1177/003591576105401001.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. iodine, n.

Image credit: Chemical Elements: A Virtual Museum, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.