Henri Becquerel and the Curies, and they started looking at - I love this - subatomic particles. And that kept scientists busy for decades.īut it was really the 1890s when scientists began looking at radioactive elements. And so that brought them back to reconsider the atom.Īnd it was in 1803 when John Dalton published his atomic theory on indivisible elements and the periodic table of - the periodic chart of the table of elements, which we all carried around and memorized in high school days. MARKEL: Well, it begins to catch on, you know, the late 17th to 19th century, the golden age of chemistry, and there were all these great natural philosophers - Boyle, la Vossier(ph), Priestly, and they're all obsessing about composition and the nature of matter. Howard, when did atom first enter the vernacular? We're going from the Greek, the English, things like that. 1-80 is our number, talking with Howard Markel about this week's word on SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. So it didn't come up until 1477, when a brilliant alchemist and poet named Thomas Norton - he was also a courtier for King Edward IV of England - came up with the word atoms in his poem "The Ordinal of Alchemy."įLATOW: Mm-hmm. So they didn't like his theory and that was worse than not getting tenure back then. They thought that matter was divisible into air, fire, earth and water. I mean, that whole difference, by the way, between Democritus and then Thomas Norton is a couple of thousand years is because the great experts of the day, the original groves of academe, were Plato and Aristotle, and they had a different theory. And so as he explained, all matter was eventually reducible to discrete, small particles or atomos.įLATOW: And Thomas Norton, he wrote a book called "Ordinal of Alchemy" in 1477. And there was a brilliant philosopher named Democritus, and he proposed the Greek word atomos, which means uncuttable. And you know, Sir Isaac Newton thought it was a Phoenician named Moses the Phoenician from the 13th century B.C., who we(ph) also link to the real Moses or the Moses of Charlton Heston fame.īut when it comes to the word atom, we have to go to ancient Greece of 400 B.C.
Now, there are some people who think that Indian Jainism clerics may have come up with the idea of indivisible units comprising matter. MARKEL: Well, in the English - before the English language, it's actually a Greek term. Not the guy Adam, but the concept, atom.įLATOW: Or in New York we'd spell it A-D-E-M here.įLATOW: Who first coined the word atom in the English language? Markel is professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and director of the Center for the History of Medicine there.
With these 26 magic symbols, however, millions of words are written every day.Īnd that can only mean it's time for this month's episode of Science Diction, where we talk about the history of scientific words with my guest, Howard Markel. Unidentified Man: The alphabet has only 26 letters.
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