Chemical element native solid elements occur in alloys, such as that of iron and nickel. The history of the discovery and use of the elements began with primitive human societies that found native elements like carbon, sulfur, copper and gold. Later civilizations extracted elemental copper, tin, lead and iron from their ores by smelting, using charcoal. Alchemists and chemists subsequently identified many more; all of the naturally occurring elements were known by 1950. The properties of the chemical elements are summarized in the periodic table, which organizes the elements by increasing atomic number into rows ("periods") in which the columns ("groups") share
Period 6 element period 6 other metals are incredibly toxic, such as thallium. Period 6 contains the last stable element, lead. All subsequent elements in the periodic table are radioactive. After bismuth, which has a half-life or more than 10 years, polonium, astatine, and radon are some of the shortest-lived and rarest elements known; less than a gram of astatine is estimated to exist on earth at any given time. Caesium or cesium is the chemical element with the symbol Cs and atomic number 55. It is a soft, silvery-gold alkali metal with a melting point of 28 °C (82 °F), which makes