Disappearing Spoon Chapters 5-7

These couple chapters focused on war and how warfare effected the periodic table. The first part focused on nitrogen and the attempts made to capture it. Fritz Haber was the scientist who finally achieve this goal. He was trying to create nitrogen bombs to use in WWI, even though this was illegal in the eyes of  the Hague Convention, but his findings ended up going into fertilizers instead. Eventually Haber's research helped save lives by rescuing those who were starving but he also killed a fair number with his bombs. The next part talked about Colorado! (Hooray a connection to life!) On Bartlett Mountain in Colorado, molybdenum was discovered. This is used to strengthen steel and because it could withstand extreme temperatures in was incredibly valuable to the war effort. In a bidding war over the right to this mountain Otis King won and became insanely wealthy by selling the molybdenum to Germany. That was the most exciting part for me because of the Colorado connection. WWI wasn't the only war where chemical warfare was used though. In the Republic of Congo, war broke out after the discovery of large deposits of  tantalum were discovered. This is a metal used in making cell phones in the 90s. The Congo government was so unstable that tibes fought for the money being made by selling the tantalum to huge cell phone companies. In this war about 5 million people died. Later on in the book it talked about Henry Moseley who managed to discover 4 elements before his early death. He did this by creating an electron gun that could find new elements in other elements essentially. When Moseley died scientists began using more math and calculations to find elements.Next the book moved into the Manhattan Project.  The US was trying to perform nuclear warfare by manipulating plutonium and uranium. Not enough would burn out and too much would cause mayhem. This period of time is also where women were brought in to the science world. The wives of scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project would tire through hours of calculations and ended up as an enormous help. Yay women! Then some other large chemical warfare discoveries were made from Berkley. Both berkelium and californium were discovered there and many experiments on alpha and beta particles took place. The research there was competing with Russia to the point where Joseph Stalin was interested in the research to benefit him and the Soviet Union in WWII but failed. I still am not a large fan of this book but there are some little details that i find interesting.