Birthday Gifts for Sad Chemists

This was published (in slightly edited form) in the lamented Chemical Innovation, April 2001, and then reproduced (with a bit more editing) in (the also lamented) Today's Chemist at Work, March 2003.

As my forty sixth birthday approached earlier this year, my wife asked if there was anything I would particularly like. Looking for inspiration, I wondered if there would be any percentage in suggesting something along the lines of wedding anniversaries – a different substance for every year, but this time based on atomic numbers. Cubic zirconia instead of ruby at forty, neodymium magnets (you get them in the loudspeakers in mobile phones) instead of diamond at sixty. You would have to allow compounds of the respective elements, let’s say twenty mole percent, since not that many are actually used in their native form. And there could be some particularly awkward years – it would be a brave parent who gave their nine year old elemental fluorine.

Some years it works rather well – water is innocuous enough for a one year old, a set of graphite pencils would be very suitable at age six, bronze (tin) just about acceptable at fifty. Gold would make an excellent elemental gift for octogenarians, but sadly it misses out by a year, and the poor old souls would have to make do with mercury thermometers.

Unfortunately, the concept is not always so successful. While a helium balloon would please a two year old, the other noble gas years would lack interest. I don’t suppose an eighteen year old  would thank you for an argon lamp. Scandium has a rarity value suitable for twenty one, but you don’t see many artefacts made from it. Brass (zinc), on the other hand is somewhat mundane for thirty. It’s difficult to think of how you could give arsenic to someone approaching a third of a century without also giving the wrong message, likewise bromide at thirty five. And the transuranic years, for those who live that long, would be hazardous and not that easy to arrange.

Next birthday will be a good one for me (silver), but I thought I would leave it until then to suggest the idea to the boss, since element number forty six is palladium, and I didn’t particularly want a new catalytic converter. I couldn’t think of any other uses, so for a while I contemplated generating one of my element-based Last Word reminiscences around the subject, how it had influenced my career and so forth. Not in principle a bad idea. I could spin this out at an essay a year for the rest of my life, except for gold and gadolinium which I covered a few months ago. The lanthanide years would be tedious, but I told myself to view it as a challenge. However, I struggled immediately, having no recollection of ever having handled palladium. It was conceivable, but not certain, that I had catalysed a reaction with it as an undergraduate, but since then our paths hadn’t crossed.

A little research showed that it has more uses than I imagined. However, my delving didn’t help with my birthday. Few applications carry enough of the element to count, while those that do wouldn’t strike most people as celebratory presents. It soaks up a lot of hydrogen, which could be useful if hydrogen fuel cells are ever used to power automobiles, but that’s for the future, and may never happen - is there enough palladium in the world? Besides the obvious uses in catalysis, it also finds its way into jewellery (there’s a little in white gold), electronics and dentistry. Nevertheless, I’m not going to ask for a spot of bridgework.

It’s named after the asteroid Pallas, discovered in the same year, 1803. Given that the asteroid that whacked into Yucatan and saw off the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous was highly enriched in iridium, compared to the Earth’s crust, it would be interesting to see if Pallas is actually a valuable source of its own related Group VIII metal – I imagine it probably is. The bicentenary is also coming up. Perhaps we should declare 2003 to be the Year of the Heterogeneous Catalyst.

But back to birthdays. My daughters will be eight, eleven and thirteen next year, so an aluminium can of mineral (sodium) water (oxygen this time) for each of them would do nicely, and cut down on the costs. This is just as well, since my wife, who also has a chemistry degree, will insist on something made of technetium. I’m not sure where I’m going to find some, but she won’t let me off – I’ve just given her age away.