What element was discovered first?

Answer 1

There is no way of knowing the first element discovered. Several elements such as gold, silver, and tin have been known for thousands of years. It is not known exactly when these elements were discovered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoveries_of_the_chemical_elements

suggests that copper was the first but the question was asked already on wiki answers and replied with Hydrogen.

Answer 2

what was the first element discovered

Certain elements occur naturally in their pure form.

• Carbon
• Gold
• Copper
• Sulfur
• Platinum
• Nitrogen
• Oxygen

Of these Carbon would be the most abundant and obvious. Gold and Copper were known in the stone age, well known in the bronze age. Sulfur was known in the bronze age. The last three, despite their occurring naturally, were not recognized until the 19th century.

Answer 3

People have known about some chemical elements such as gold, silver, and copper from antiquity, as these can all be discovered in nature in native form and are relatively simple to mine with primitive tools. However, the notion that there were a limited number of elements from which everything was composed originated with the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle proposed that there were four main elements: air, fire, earth and water. All of these elements could be reacted to create another one; e.g., earth and fire combined to form lava. However, this theory was dismissed when the real chemical elements started being discovered. Scientists needed an easily accessible, well organized database with which information about the elements could be recorded and accessed. This was to be known as the Periodic Table.

Hennig Brand was the first person recorded to have discovered a new element. Brand was a bankrupt German merchant who was trying to discover the Philosopher's Stone - a mythical object that was supposed to turn inexpensive base metals into gold. He experimented with distilling human urine until in 1649 he finally obtained a glowing white substance which he named phosphorus. He kept his discovery secret, until 1680 when Robert Boyle rediscovered it and it became public. This and related discoveries raised the question of what it means for a substance to be an "element". In 1661 Boyle defined an element as a substance that cannot be broken down into a simpler substance by a chemical reaction. This simple definition actually served for nearly 300 years (until the development of the notion of subatomic particles), and even today is taught in introductory chemistry classes.

By 1869, a total of 63 elements had been discovered. As the number of known elements grew, scientists began to recognize patterns in the way chemicals reacted and began to devise ways to classify the elements. The original periodic table was created before the discovery of subatomic particles or the formulation of current quantum mechanical theories of atomic structure. If one orders the elements by Atomic Mass, and then plots certain other properties against atomic mass, one sees an undulation or periodicity to these properties as a function of atomic mass. The first to recognize these regularities was the German chemist Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner who, in 1829, noticed a number of triads of similar elements. One of the first triads that was put together was that of Chlorine, Bromine, and Iodine.

In 1829 Döbereiner proposed the Law of Triads: The middle element in the triad had atomic weight that was the average of the other two members. The densities of some triads followed a similar pattern. Soon other scientists found chemical relationships extended beyond triads. Fluorine was added to Cl/Br/I group; sulfur, oxygen, selenium and tellurium were grouped into a family; nitrogen, phosphorus, arsenic, antimony, and bismuth were classified as another group. Dmitri Mendeleev, a Siberian-born Russian chemist, was the first scientist to make a periodic table much like the one we use today. Mendeleev arranged the elements in a table ordered by atomic weight, corresponding to relative molar mass as defined today.

For a number of years there was a gap in the periodic table between molybdenum (element 42) and ruthenium (element 44). Many early researchers were eager to be the first to discover and name the missing element; its location in the table suggested that it should be easier to find than other undiscovered elements. It was first thought to have been found in platinum ores in 1828. It was given the name polinium but it turned out to be impure iridium. In fact, the missing element was technetium, an element that was not present naturally on Earth. It was to be the first element discovered through synthesis. This discovery filled a gap in the periodic table, and the fact that no stable isotopes of technetium exist explains its natural absence on Earth (and the gap). With the longest-lived isotope of technetium, Tc-98, having a 4.2 million year half-life, no technetium remains from the formation of the Earth. Only minute traces of technetium occur naturally in the Earth's crust (as a spontaneous fission product of uranium-238 or by neutron capture in molybdenum ores), but technetium is found naturally in red giant stars. This would set the stage for later synthetic discoveries.

Answer 4

Although not called an element at the time, copper was the first element used as a metal in tools. Very soon thereafter, copper was alloyed with tin to make bronze and it was so popular archaeologists call the whole era the Bronze Age.

Answer 5

Arsenic . It is an acid and it is the most powerful acid.

Answer 6

Some elements as iron, Mercury, copper, tin, sulfur, gold, silver, carbon, etc. are known from prehistoric times.

Answer 7

In the prehistoric times; impossible to know: gold or silver, mercury or copper, sulfur or carbon.

Answer 8

This question can not be answered, because the discovery of gold, for example, was prehistoric.

Answer 9

Might have been copper. Please see the link.