DEVELOPING AND DESIGNING NEW CHEMICALS AND MATERIALS - Chemistry: Notable Research and Discoveries - page 2

tall, although a skyscraper under construction in Dubai called the Burj
Dubai has already surpassed the CN Tower and will be about 2,684 feet
(818 m) when completed. But a tower that can transport satellites into
space requires a height many times this figure. Attaining this height is
impossible until researchers develop a material that is strong enough to
support the structure, yet light enough so that the weight due to gravity
does not cause it to collapse.
The same difficulty occurs when people design and build any object—
a substance or chemical having the required properties must be avail-
able. Jet engines, for example, were only a gleam in the eye of aeronautics
engineers before the development of high-strength, heat-resistant alloys.
Medications to fight bacterial infections must be able to kill the invading
microorganisms without harming the patient's own cells.
A lack of proper materials hampers the progress of technology in all
fields. Discovering and developing new substances is presently a slow
process, based on luck and intensive work. But now scientific research
is pushing into a new frontier—designing and manufacturing chemi-
cals and materials, rather than relying on chance discoveries.
InTroduCTIon
The ability to design new materials will require a deep understanding
of chemistry. A person who designs an object must be able to predict
its properties in advance, otherwise the “design” would be no more
productive than a guess. One of the greatest steps toward this goal in
chemistry came in 1869, when the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev
(1834-1907) devised an early version of the periodic table of chemical
elements. A modern version of the table appears in the appendix on
page 200 of this topic.
Elements are fundamental substances that cannot be broken down
into smaller chemical components. The smallest unit of an element is
an atom, a term based on the Greek word atomos, meaning indivisible.
But atoms are divisible—they consist of a nucleus containing positively
charged particles called protons and electrically neutral particles called
neutrons, surrounded by a swarm of electrically negative particles called
electrons. In chemical reactions, atoms interact and combine to form
a molecule of a compound. (Chemical reactions also occur when the
atoms in molecules interact and combine to form even bigger com-