Maria -
The element Calcium was discovered in 1808 in
England by a scientist named Sir Humphrey Davy. He was trying to make a
substance that we now call calcium amalgamate by mixing lime (also
called calcium oxide - CaO) with mercuric oxide (HgO) and putting an
electric current across it - a process called 'electrolysis'. He'd
heard of this being done by others but aparently didn't get it quite
right, since he managed to produce isolated (if somewhat impure)
calcium. For more info on the history of the element calcium, you can
check out this link to
WebElements.com's Historical Information on Calcium page.
As
for where the name 'calcium' came from, we have to delve into a study
known as 'historical linguistics', which has to do with how words come
into existance. You can find information on this by looking in a
dictionary - the bigger the dictionary, the better. One of the best
dictionaries for this is the
Oxford English Dictionary, but I don't happen to own that one, so I'm going to tell you what I've found in my copy of
Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary.
After
looking up 'calcium', you want to look at the word's etymology. The
etymology is the part that's written in square brackets like these:
[...]. The etymology uses lots of symbols and abbreviations that you
may not know, but you can find explanations of them all somewhere near
the front or the back of the book. This is what my dictionary gives for
the etymology of 'calcium':
"[1800-1810; CALC- + -IUM]"
This
means that the word originated between 1800 and 1810 by combining the
word prefix 'calc-' and the suffix '-ium'. For the origins of these
parts, I can look them up separately:
'calc-': "[< G
kalk lime < L
calc- (s. of
calx) lime, limestone; see CALX, CHALK]"
Ok,
so this seems like a lot of gibberish, so I'll translate. The prefix
'calc-' comes first from the Greek word 'kalk' (meaning 'lime'), which
itself came from the Latin word 'calc-' (the singular form of the
plural word 'calx', meaning 'lime' or 'limestone'). For more info, you
can look up the word 'calx' or 'chalk'. Just for curiosity's sake, I
looked up 'calx' and found that the word actually was borrowed into
late Middle English (the type of English that came before we got what
we're used to now) from Latin sometime between 1350 and 1400.
Now,
it makes sense that the word 'calcium' would come from the word for
lime, since Sir Humphrey Davy discovered calcium when he accidentally
isolated it from lime. But what about the '-ium' part? Well, when I
looked that up, I found that my dictionary defines it as "a suffix
found on nouns borrowed from Latin". This also makes sense, since we
just figured out that 'calc-' comes originally from Latin.
As
for the symbol, Ca, it's just short for calcium, and it's been used at
least since 1869, when Demitrii Mendeleev came up with the
first periodic table.
-Tamara
(published on 10/22/2007)
