{"id":190952,"date":"2022-11-10T07:15:34","date_gmt":"2022-11-10T12:15:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=190952"},"modified":"2022-11-11T13:20:30","modified_gmt":"2022-11-11T18:20:30","slug":"chemistry-buildings-interactive-periodic-table-tells-stories-one-element-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2022\/11\/chemistry-buildings-interactive-periodic-table-tells-stories-one-element-at-a-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Chemistry Building\u2019s Interactive Periodic Table Tells Stories, One Element at a Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christian Br\u00fcckner<\/a> started collecting more than 45 years ago when he was a young teenager in Germany and his father a metallurgist who\u2019d bring home laboratory leftovers to feed his son\u2019s growing interest in crystals and science.<\/p>\n

From an early 19th century bottle of a mercury salt to manganese nodules scooped from the bottom of the Pacific, Br\u00fcckner\u2019s childhood collection grew piece by piece through the decades. He came upon a tungsten carbide tool used to draw heavy wires from a thick diameter to a thinner one during a summer job as a student. Later on in academia, a retiring colleague gave him an antistatic brush once charged with polonium.<\/p>\n

The collection amassed to more than a thousand pieces, some valued at only pennies and others much more, all taking up space in his office, laboratory, and home. Some boxes hadn\u2019t been opened for several decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was not the right place for any collection,\u201d he says, gesturing to what is the right place \u2013 a wall-sized periodic table in the second-floor atrium of the Chemistry Building, lit from inside with strings of LED lights that can be manipulated to highlight groups of elements like the noble gases or to talk specifically about a single element and the things contained in its cubby. Take, for instance, the antique domino in the nitrogen cubby (it\u2019s in the plastic) or the pair of sunglasses cut in half and spanning the praseodymium and neodymium cases (both elements are in the lenses).<\/p>\n

\"UConn
UConn chemistry department head Christian Bru\u0308ckner puts some of the items resembling elements in the interactive periodic table display being installed in the Chemistry Building on Aug. 26, 2022. (Sydney Herdle\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThis is the right place, because now one can show off each artifact, share its delights, and it tells a story in context,\u201d he says. \u201cI wanted the display to house more than just pieces of metal and bulbs of gas. I wanted to connect each element to the natural world, our daily lives, and the work that we do in research labs, from gold-coated contacts, a bottle of Selsun Blue, beautiful minerals, and iconic reagents to chemical compounds unique to the research of members of our department.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the task of bringing an interactive periodic table to UConn wasn\u2019t a quick one and the idea wasn\u2019t particularly unique.<\/p>\n

Br\u00fcckner says many universities, private collectors, and companies boast periodic table displays, and some have become almost tourist draws, like the one at the University of Oklahoma that Br\u00fcckner visited during a sabbatical many years ago.<\/p>\n

But when he conjured the idea of bringing an exhibit like that to UConn, he wanted it to be different. Usually, only a few examples of each element are shown in each cubby, keeping the 118 pigeonholes tidy but not really exemplifying the range of use for each element.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to include as many examples as possible to weave a dense fabric of as many aspects of each element as possible,\u201d Br\u00fcckner says. \u201cChemistry is the central science, and the periodic table holds it all together.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2017, not long after becoming department head and having lined up emeritus professor Ulli Mueller-Westerhoff as a major donor, Br\u00fcckner had the first conversations with a European company specializing not only in making periodic table cases but also providing samples for the display.<\/p>\n

Of course, Br\u00fcckner knew he needed only a fraction of the number of samples other places might to fill the holes in his collection, like an antique bedside alarm clock with radium-painted numbers that glow or a sphere of volatile liquid bromine.<\/p>\n

He also wanted the shape of the full exhibit to look different than others, which usually are rectangular and made so with strategically placed cabinets to fill in the space around the irregularly shaped periodic table.<\/p>\n

Cabinetmaker Marcos Palomo of 118 Displays suggested a display in the very shape of the periodic table and Br\u00fcckner was sold. A wall-mounted monitor at the top would crown it and two freestanding interactive kiosks would bookend it.<\/p>\n

Over the next five years, as project approvals wended the pipeline, Mueller-Westerhoff passed away, his sister picked up his pledge, and UConn\u2019s Office of the Provost<\/a> and the Br\u00fcckner family added additional funding.<\/p>\n

One constant continued: Br\u00fcckner kept collecting, now with a defined purpose.<\/p>\n

\u201cI scoured, for example, Etsy for a very long time and found interesting samples, like europium-colored glass. It wasn\u2019t advertised as europium-colored glass, but its color was exactly what I would have expected for europium-colored glass – pink, a very unique pink. I also found buttons made out of this pink glass,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

He mentioned the project to an alumnus who works at Boston Scientific and donated coronary stents and heart valve frameworks made from a nickel and titanium alloy. He unsuccessfully solicited local hospitals for an empty bottle of an imaging agent that is gadolinium-based but eventually procured a full bottle from a graduate school friend who is co-director of an imaging center at Harvard Medical School.<\/p>\n

\"Some
Some of the items that could be put in the interactive periodic table display being installed in the Chemistry Building sit in one of the conference rooms in the building on Aug. 17, 2022. (Sydney Herdle\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThere are items in there from colleagues long passed, there are items there from current colleagues, there are items from alumni,\u201d Br\u00fcckner says, noting that when he told people what he was doing they were eager to be a part of the story \u2013 his dentist offered a titanium-based dental implant.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a nickel-iron meteorite from outer space in there, items fished from air, and things from the bottom of the ocean,\u201d he says. \u201cThere is a piece of fused sand from the first nuclear explosion, the Trinity hydrogen bomb test in New Mexico. It arguably contains some of the radioactive fallout, elements not otherwise accessible or safe to handle.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the aluminum cube, Br\u00fcckner put in a spoon that he picked up when he was visiting the East Bloc in Prague at 15 years old: \u201cI like to tell the story in my inorganic chemistry class that the first aluminum cutlery was given to the king of France because at the time people learned how to make elemental aluminum it was more expensive than gold. If you wanted to be fancy, you had aluminum cutlery. Now, we have aluminum soda cans. Things change, and to me this aluminum cutlery is a link to that story.\u201d<\/p>\n

While there is a uranium glass sugar bowl \u2013 a beautiful green \u2013 in the display, not all elements could be represented because they are radioactive and only small amounts have ever been made. These cubes instead hold just a representative picture, think Albert Einstein for einsteinium or Enrico Fermi for fermium.<\/p>\n

But other man-made elements that might be more obscure to the layman are represented: \u201cAmericium, we have that in smoke detectors. There\u2019s a little americium source in there,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

With physically larger samples of some elements on reserve out of the display \u2013 part of the transatlantic cable filled with copper wires or a small but weighty ingot of tungsten, for instance \u2013 Br\u00fcckner says he has a bucket of show-and-tell items that groups could use for a quick lesson when they visit campus.<\/p>\n

After all, he says, that\u2019s a goal of the project.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would also like it to be an educational tool,\u201d he says. \u201cIt can be a centerpiece for outreach activities to the general public. It\u2019s like a mini museum for anyone from elementary school students to adults of any age. Anybody could find some items in the display they can relate to and see the fun in this.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A collection decades in the making<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":160,"featured_media":191987,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"video","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2235,2227,70],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2368],"class_list":["post-190952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-video","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-edu-homepage","category-video","post_format-post-format-video"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 06:31:43","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190952"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":192334,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190952\/revisions\/192334"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/191987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190952"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=190952"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=190952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}