Bromine Stinks, of course

My wife was reading something from William James that sent me running to the dictionary. He used the term "fuliginous mist", and I had no clue about its meaning. The definition (in case you didn't know either) is :""Fuliginous" is a word with a dark and dirty past -- it derives from
"fuligo," the Latin word for "soot." In an early sense (now obsolete),
"fuliginous" was used to describe noxious bodily vapors once thought to be
produced by organic processes. The 'sooty' sense, which English speakers have
been using since the early 1620s, can be used to describe everything from dense
fogs and malevolent clouds to overworked chimney sweeps. "

It reminded me of something I read recently about the discovery of Bromine

I Came across this on Elementymology & Elements Multidict by Peter van der Krogtl, and couldn't resist posting...

Bromine was discovered by two scientists working independently.
Antoine-Jérôme Balard (1802-1876), who was working in a pharmacy school in Montpellier, studying the brown seaweed Fucus, at that time Iodine was manufactured from ash of calcinated Fucus. Balard isolated a new substance. At first he thought that it was a Chlorine or Iodine compound. As he could not isolate the compound, he suggested to have found a new chemical element. Balard suggested the name muride, from the Latin word "muria" for brine.

The French Academy of Science, in turn, proposed the name brome from the Greek word bromos meaning stench (note) to indicate its strong irritating odor. In English the suffix -ine was added, since this suffix was previously used for other halogens

Almost simultaneously, in the Autumn of 1825, student Carl Löwig (1803-1890) took a bottle of a reddish liquid with an unpleasant smell to the Laboratory of Medicine and Chemistry of Prof. Leopold Gmelin (1788-1853), at the University of Heidelberg. Löwig told Gmelin that the liquid, of mineral origin, resulted from the treatment with gaseous Chlorine, thus explaining the red color. Gmelin realized that this was an unknown substance and encouraged Löwig to produce more of it so they could study it in detail. Unfortunately, winter exams and the holidays delayed Löwig's work too long. In the mean time, in 1826, Balard published his paper describing the new element.

The Japanese name has the same meaning. For the writing they use the two Chinese characters 臭 shuu kyuu = smell, stink, emit foul odor, and 素 "so" (elementary, principle, naked, or uncovered).

Another New "Old" Term

Adjusting some notes in my web page the other day, I was editing a page with a note on the Electron.
Here is some of it:

Our solar system is often called heliocentric because the sun is at the center. The purpose of that sentence was not to teach you science, but to point out the three different word roots that are used to refer to the star that gives life to our planet, sun, helios, and sol.
In ancient Greek myths Hyperion was the god of the sun, but eventually this became more associated with his son, helios. An eclipse in India in 1868 offered an opportunity to do something never before done, pass light from the Sun's atmosphere through a spectroscope. When light passes through a spectroscope it breaks into bands of unique colors that represent pure elements. One color was at a position never found on Earth. Assuming that the element only occured in the Sun, Astronomer Norman Lockyer named it Helium, "sun element". Later it was found on earth, but the name stuck.

When the Romans conquered the Greeks, their fascination with the Greek culture led to retaining many of the same myths, with the major characters replaced with a related Roman god. The Roman god associated with the sun was Sol, and thus we get words like solar system, parasol , and solarium (sun room). The para in parasol is not the same as the para in parabola and parallel, but comes from the Latin parare, which means to prepare. A parasol is thus preparation for the sun.

The word sun, itself, may come from the same Indo-European root that gave us sol, or perhaps there is an old Norse or Tutonic god out there I haven't found yet. However it started, it made its way from the Germanic into the Middle English as sunne to become our sun of today.

Another Greek word for our closest star was elector, which meant something loosely like "bringer of light". Things that reminded them of the brillance or color of the sun, such as amber, were called electrum. Even the early Greeks were aware of the effects of magnets and recoginzed that, when rubbed, amber acted like a magnet to some small light objects. In 1600 when English Scientist William Gilbert wrote De Magnete Magneticisque Corporibus, the similarity of the behavior of magnets to the effects of amber inspired him to create the word electricity from the Greek word for amber. The unit of magnetomotive force in the CGS system is called the Gilbert in his honor. Gilbert is buried in St. Johns College Chapel in Cambridge, Uk.

By now you've probably figured out that the name for the electron also is related. When JJ Thompson discovered the particle we now call the electron while studying the mysterious cathode rays in tubes, he called them corpuscles. The Word, Electron had been coined earlier by G. Johnstone Stoney in 1891. Stoney used the word to denote the unit of charge found in experiments that passed electric current through chemicals. He had written about the unit of charge as early as 1874, making him one of (if not the) first to recognize that, in his words, "For each Chemical bond which is ruptured within an electrolyte a certain quantity of electricity traverses the electrolyte, which is the same in all cases." He first referred to the unit quantity as E1.

In the same sense the term was used by Joseph Larmor, J.J. Thomson's Cambridge classmate. Larmor devised a theory of the electron that described it as a structure in the ether . But Larmor's theory did not describe the electron as a part of the atom. When the Irish physicist George Francis FitzGerald suggested in 1897 that Thomson's corpuscles were really "free electrons," he was actually disagreeing with Thomson's hypotheses. FitzGerald had in mind the kind of "electron" described by Larmor's theory. The idea did not stick, but the name did.

I was reading an old Philosophical Magazine (October, 1894) article by Stoney about the creation of the unit and the term, when I was struck by an unusual notation I had never seen before. He describes the unit of charge of the electron as three eleventhets of the C.G.S electrostatic unit of quantity. This he illustrates to be 3 x 10 ^-11.
After a little research, I found another article by Stoney, in the November 1899 issue of the same magazine which he had presenter earlier to The Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society. In the article he defines several terms which, I assume, he is the creator of (please correct me if you have information on this).

If any of these terms below are still in use by someone, I would appreciate information about the nature of that use.

A "Happy" Phrase That Didn't Stick

In the July 1912 issue of the Philosophical Magazine I came across a term I had never seen in the review of "Elements of Analytical Geometry", 1911, by Professor G. A. Gibson and Dr. P. Pinkerton.

The review praised the book, "One special feature of the book is the great number of excellent diagrams drawn on squared paper. These cannot fail to be of great instructive value to the pupil."

They went on to describe, "Another excellent feature is the early introduction of what Chrystal [George Chrystal, of whom more later] called the 'freedom equation' of a curve, in which x and y, instead of being expressed in terms of one another, are each expressed in terms of a third variable."

Then they conclude, "The method is known in some books as the parametric representation; but there is no doubt that Chrystal's distinction between the Freedom and Constraint equations is one that should be early brought to the mind of the student, and the phraseology is particularly happy (does anybody write that way anymore?). In another review where the author did not use the term, it was lamented that he had, "missed the opportunity of calling them by this picturesque title."

The term parametric was far from an established term at the time. According to "Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics" by Jeff Miller, a teacher at Gulf High School in New Port Richey, Florida.

PARAMETRIC EQUATION is found in 1894 in "On the Singularities of the Modular Equations and Curves" by John Stephen Smith in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. I could not find the document in which Chrystal first used "Freedom equations", and welcome comments from those with more information. It seems like it may have been well before 1911 since an article about Chrystal in the November 2, 1911, copy of Nature indicates his contribution of the term may be little known.


It does seem the term may still have some usage in modern times as I found a definition of it at Math Resources web site, apparently a Canadian site.

Chrystal was a powerful force in Edinburgh Math Society just before 1900, and I mentioned him earlier as one of the contributors to symbols for the sub-factorial notation.

Addendum: In the Spring of 2015, Dave Renfro (one of my most valuable leaning tools) sent me a note about the Gibson/Pinkerton book and described it as "excellent for its coverage of graphing techniques." The book is available on line here.

Pushing Back the Date on the Irrational Number Line

In my research on math books, I had been surprised by how recent it seemed that number lines had come into use in textbooks. Prior to this summer, my notes read, "I have not, at this point, seen a book (or article) prior to 1960 which illustrates a general number line with anything other than integers."
But over my summer road trip, I was able to move that date back considerably as a result of some documents I received from Dave Renfro. Although the term, "Number line" did not become common until around 1960, (it does appear as early as 1928) but the use of a number line with rational fractions appears in "A College Algebra" by Henry Burchard Fine in 1904,

and three years later, in 1907, there is an example of a number scale with an irrational (the square root of two) in Albert Harry Wheeler's "First Course in Algebra." I point out with some smugness that Mr. Wheeler is listed as the "Teacher of Mathematics in the English High School at Worcester, Massachusetts. Nice to have a first by a High School Teacher.



For more on my research on Math Books on the Number line The same page also has more general remarks about the development of math texts.