H

Hydrogen · №1

The first atom there ever was. Nine out of ten still are.

Before Hydrogen There Were No Atoms At All

For its first three hundred and eighty thousand years the universe was too hot for an electron to stay anywhere. When it cooled, protons caught electrons, and the first atoms were hydrogen. That light is still arriving. Nine atoms in ten are still hydrogen.

Inflammable Air

Henry Cavendish isolated the gas in 1766 and called it inflammable air. Burn it and what condenses on the glass is water — nothing else. Lavoisier gave it the name we use, from the Greek: the thing that makes water.

WikipediaHydrogenHydrogen is a chemical element; it has the symbol H and atomic number 1. It is the lightest and most abundant chemical element in the universe, constituting about 75% of all normal matter. Under standard conditions, hydrogen is a gas of diatomic molecules with the formula H2, called dihydrogen, or sometimes hydrogen gas, molecular hydrogen, or simply hydrogen. Dihydrogen is colorless, odorless, non-toxic, and highly combustible. Stars, including the Sun, mainly consist of hydrogen in a plasma state, while on Earth, hydrogen is found as the gas H2 (dihydrogen) and in molecules, such as in water and organic compounds. The most common isotope of hydrogen, 1H, consists of one proton, one electron, and no neutrons.

600M tonnes a second

The Sun fuses six hundred million tonnes of hydrogen every second, and gets five hundred and ninety-six million tonnes of helium out.

The missing four million tonnes are not lost. They leave as light. Some of it lands on your face.

Most of them walked away

America had the world's only helium and banned its export, so the Hindenburg flew on hydrogen instead. When it caught fire at Lakehurst in 1937 the flames went straight up, because hydrogen is too light to pool. Sixty-two of the ninety-seven people on board walked away.

Hydrogen is the only atom whose quantum equations can be solved exactly, on paper, with no approximation.

Add a second electron and it becomes impossible — every other element in the table is a very good estimate.

Someone lit a cigarette

Mali, 1987, over an abandoned well…a driller in Bourakébougou hit a dry well, and it was capped and forgotten. Years later a man leaned over the borehole with a cigarette and the air caught fire. What was coming up was hydrogen, almost pure, made by the rock. Nobody had thought to look.

1% Clean

Hydrogen is sold as the clean fuel, and burning it does produce only water. Making it is the problem. About ninety-five per cent is stripped out of fossil gas, throwing off nine to twelve tonnes of carbon dioxide per tonne.

Under one per cent is made cleanly.

62%

of atoms in your body are hydrogen
(by count, not by weight)

Every one was made in the first minutes after Big Bang