What is the Element Thulium?

Let's say you have very dirty laundry and you think it might be a good idea to wash it once more to clean it thoroughly.

You take the laundry out of the machine, it looks clean, but what's the harm? Let's wash it once more and it will be cleaner.

Well, let me make the situation a little more difficult for you.

You put the dirty laundry in the machine and when you wash it, the same dirt remains on it.

You threw it into the machine again, took it out and looked at it, but the same dirt remained.

How much patience would you have to wash that laundry over and over again?

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Theodore William Richards succeeded in separating pure Thulium metal from the Thulium Bromide (TmBr3) mineral, which he crystallized exactly 15 thousand times.

Thulium element is a very rare element in the world. It is located in the periodic table with atomic number 69.

It doesn't exactly have any interesting features.

Since it is a good neutron absorber, it can be used in nuclear reaction control in nuclear power plants.

Since laser light technology produces laser light with different wavelengths, it can be used for some special needs.

This element is also used in intermediate stations established to increase light power in fiber optic cables. Increasing the fiber optic light power is a necessary process in long fiber optic cables. Other elements are also used in this work, but thulium is also a good strength enhancer.

Thulium is an expensive metal because it is very difficult to synthesize it in its pure form, and it can be found quite rarely in nature as oxide minerals.

It is usually found in nature together with similar minerals called lanthanides. The thulium rate in the mineral mixture is also quite low.

A very soft metal overall. It has a silver color. You can even cut it with a knife.

Maybe it has some other properties, but it is not a metal that has been worked on very much.

We can say that it has an importance in laser light technology because it can produce blue light.

And of course, thanks to this feature in medicine, it is also useful in treating some tumors with laser light.

Thulium laser can be quite functional in skin whitening procedures.

Although lasers of other wavelengths are also used in tumor treatment, it is said that the blue light produced by thulium is also useful in destroying some tumors.

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In short, Theodore William Richards' determination caught my attention the most while doing research on this element on the internet.

Theodore William Richards was an American chemist who lived between 1868 and 1928 and received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1914.

He mostly worked on atomic masses and was a professor at Harvard University and president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for a while.

The determination to synthesize thulium 15,000 times to obtain it in pure form is truly an admirable effort.

They probably do this process with more automatic machines today, but I think he spent a lot of effort in his time.

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In fact, the first person to discover the oxide form of the thulium element (thulium, thulium oxide, Tm2O3) was Per Teodor Cleve.

Per Teodor Cleve was a Swedish chemist and biologist who lived between 1840 and 1905.

He noticed that there were minerals of different weights in the erbium oxide (Er2O3) deposits unearthed in Sweden, and discovered holmium oxide (Ho2O3) and thulium oxide (Tm2O3) minerals through his measurements.

Erbium is a shiny metal with a slightly pinkish color, like silver. It is mostly used in the glass industry to color glasses.

Per Teodor Cleve did not receive a Nobel Prize himself, but he was the chairman of the Nobel committee in chemistry for a long time.

There is also information on the internet that since thulium was first found in Sweden, it was named after Thule, the oldest name in Scandinavia.

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Those were the years when intense work was done to fill in the gaps in the periodic table.

Although it is not that easy to synthesize pure elements. Many elements are found in nature in oxide form as minerals.

If you take into account the molecular weights of minerals and the isotope states of the elements, you can understand that the periodic table cannot be reached easily.

Even if you somehow determine the weight of a pure element atom, the weight you can reach at the end of your measurement is the atomic weight of the element, that is, the weight of the protons and neutrons in the nucleus, as well as the weight of the electrons, although they do not have much effect.

If you consider that there are different isotopes in nature, that is, there are atoms with different numbers of neutrons even though they have the same number of protons in the nucleus, it is not an easy task to find the number of protons based only on this weight information and to arrange the elements in the table according to the number of protons.

They had already tried to make a table with atomic weights before, but they couldn't figure it out.

Later, they thought of arranging the atoms according to the number of protons.

Scientists noticed the gaps in today's periodic table, and some elements that had not been found until then were investigated and discovered in this way could be detected.

In fact, a few of them have been synthesized in laboratories using artificial methods.

In other words, it is not possible to find some elements in the periodic table in nature today. Especially heavy radioactive elements.

I wrote another article on this subject before.

Today's periodic table also helps to categorize the elements within itself with its row-column arrangement.

I recommend you to open it from time to time and look at the periodic table.

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Yes, there are many elements in nature that we do not know the properties of and are not very interested in searching for.

All the chemical properties of many of them are not yet known because they have not been studied sufficiently. If they are examined and enough studies are done on them, who knows what other uses they may be used for may be discovered.

Materials science is an interesting branch of science.

I think we need to do better research on what kind of elements exist in our country, and we need to do more research and development on materials.

I really don't think there is any reason why we shouldn't do a lot of things that no one else has managed to do until now, as long as we try a little, as long as we establish sufficient laboratories and infrastructure for research.

The places where we can do this are primarily our universities.

But let alone keeping our successful universities on the brink of cotton, what kind of spite is this, we do not even give up on what we do to a university like Boğaziçi University.

Look, now they are planning to dismantle Boğaziçi's business school.

However, today, the most successful finance staff working in our country and abroad, and in many parts of the world, are either graduates of my university, METU, or mostly Boğaziçi Business Administration graduates.

I think the aim is to completely destroy this country, it is not possible to understand what is being done in any other way.

Of course, the land is very valuable, overlooking the Bosphorus.

How beautiful detached houses are being built there, isn't it?

No one raises their voice against these actions.

As a society, we seem to have been drugged. We are in a coma due to overdose, our vital functions are quite weakened. We seem to have been slowly poisoned all these years.

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Anyway, everything will happen.

I hope you at least understood from this article that there is an element called thulium in the world.

Erbium and holmium, which have similar properties, may be the elements you hear about for the first time.

Chemistry is a science, and an interesting one.

If I wasn't a civil engineer, I think I would be a chemical engineer.

Let me finish by saying stay with science again today.

With love and respect to everyone from Moscow.