22 January 2010

Tom Lehrer and the Elements

Watch and listen to Tom Lehrer's famous song about the elements (as known in 1959, when he wrote the song):




"Meet The Elements," is a new animated music video from They Might Be Giants. This animated, upbeat ode to the periodic table of elements and how they form our world, appears on the new TMBG kids' album "Here Comes Science." Video directed by Feel Good Anyway.




Here are the words for the Tom Lehrer song (You can download a copy here)

The Elements
(© 1959, Lehrer Records.) 

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium,
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.
There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.
There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.
And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.
There's sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium.
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha'vard,
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discavard.
www.privatehand.com

There are others!  If you want to find out when each element was first observed, and who described, click here to read a "Timeline of chemical elements discoveries"

Click here to listen to (and download as a QuickTime file)  The Elements, by Tom Lehrer