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
Block (periodic table) the s-block, with its outer (and only) electrons in the 1s atomic orbital, although its chemical properties are more similar to the p-block noble gases due to its full shell. In addition to the blocks listed in this table, there is a hypothetical g-block which is not pictured here. The g-block elements can be seen in the expanded extended periodic table. Lanthanum and actinium are placed under scandium and yttrium to reflect their status as d-block elements, as they have no electrons in the 4f and 5f orbitals, respectively, while lutetium and lawrencium do. The s-block is on the left