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
The Periodic Table (short story collection) as an anti-Fascist partisan, his arrest and imprisonment, interrogation, and internment in the Fossoli di Carpi and Auschwitz camps, and postwar life as an industrial chemist. Every story, 21 in total, has the name of a chemical element and is connected to it in some way. The book was dramatised for radio by BBC Radio 4 in 2016. The dramatisation was broadcast in 12 episodes, with Henry Goodman and Akbar Kurtha as Primo Levi. The Periodic Table (short story collection) The Periodic Table () is a collection of short stories by Primo Levi, published in 1975, named after the periodic