Period 5 element corrosion-resistant tin plating of steel. Because of its low toxicity, tin-plated metal is also used for food packaging, giving the name to tin cans, which are made mostly of steel. Antimony () is a toxic chemical element with the symbol Sb and an atomic number of 51. A lustrous grey metalloid, it is found in nature mainly as the sulfide mineral stibnite (SbS). Antimony compounds have been known since ancient times and were used for cosmetics, metallic antimony was also known but mostly identified as lead. For some time China has been the largest producer of antimony and its compounds,
Chemical element of the four elements nor Paracelsus' view of three fundamental elements, left open the question of the number of elements. The first modern list of chemical elements was given in Antoine Lavoisier's 1789 "Elements of Chemistry", which contained thirty-three elements, including light and caloric. By 1818, Jöns Jakob Berzelius had determined atomic weights for forty-five of the forty-nine then-accepted elements. Dmitri Mendeleev had sixty-six elements in his periodic table of 1869. From Boyle until the early 20th century, an element was defined as a pure substance that could not be decomposed into any simpler substance. Put another way, a chemical