You must have heard about Dmitri Mendeleev. The bearded man behind the periodic table which you might have abhorredin the beginning, and later realised its significance as your experience with chemistry lengthened. It is worth our appreciation as it encapsulates the periodic trends of all the elements in an easy-to-use form, apart from arranging them according to their atomic numbers.
If the Original lifeboat had an inspired design , taking in the best of both William Wouldhave and Henry Greathead’s ideas, the periodic table too is a design marvel, in its own right. One of the most notable features is – Mendeleev’s table not only accounted for existing elements at that time, but also left certain gaps, based on weights and characteristics, for elements that he was certain would be discovered.
The existence of germanium, in that sense, was predicted by Mendeleev based on the spaces in his newly created periodic table of elements. The discovery of the element, however, is credited to Clemens Winkler, a German scientist.
Son of well-known chemist and metallurgist Kurt Winkler, Clemens Winkler was taught from a young age to identify and classify plants, animals and minerals by his father. While Clemens grew passionate with respect to acquiring knowledge about his specimens, he never wanted to collect them, despite being systematic.
His constant exposure to the subject meant that by the time he entered the Freiburg School of Mines in 1857, he was much more informed about analytical chemistry than what was taught there. He made a living as a consultant chemist, improved existing gas analysis methods by inventing the three-way glass stopcock and became a brilliant and extremely popular lecturer in Freiburg. His best, however, was yet to come.
Argyrodite is discovered
Albin Weisbach, a professor of mineralogy, discovered a new ore near Freiburg in 1885 and named it argyrodite. Weisbach approached Winkler for a thorough quantitative analysis of the mineral.
Winkler’s results were consistent and he was able to tell that the ore contained silver, sulphur, iron oxide and zinc. However, the results also constantly threw up a difference of 7 per cent, leading to the conclusion that the ore contained an unknown element.
Despite being confronted with plenty of failures, Winkler tirelessly continued working for months to identify the elusive element. It was on February 6, 1886, that he finally stumbled upon the test that enabled him to isolate this element.
With the harder part behind him, Winkler was able to conclusively prove that the element discovered was in fact the ekasilicon (below silicon in the periodic table) predicted by Mendeleev. Winkler named the element germanium, in honour of his country.
A metalloid located in the middle of the carbon family in the periodic table, germanium rose to prominence with the semiconductor industry. And Winkler’s name is forever etched as the father of germanium.
