Henry Cavendish was the first to distinguish hydrogen from other gases in 1766 when he prepared it by reacting hydrochloric acid with zinc. In 1670, English scientist Robert Boyle had observed its production by reacting strong acids with metals. French scientist Antoine Lavoisier later named the element hydrogen in 1783.

French astronomer Jules Janssen obtained the first evidence of helium during the solar eclipse of 1868. Norman Lockyer and Edward Frankland suggested the name helium for the new element. In 1895, Sir William Ramsay discovered helium in the uranium mineral cleveite. It was independently discovered in cleveite by Per Teodor Cleve and Abraham Langlet.

Lithium was discovered by Johann Arfvedson in 1817 when he was analyzing minerals from the island of Uto in Sweden. The pure metal was isolated the following year by both Swedish chemist William Thomas Brande and English chemist Sir Humphry Davy working independently. In 1855, larger quantities of lithium were produced through the electrolysis of lithium chloride by Robert Bunsen and Augustus Matthiessen.

Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin discovered beryllium in the oxide form in both beryl and emeralds in 1798. Friedrich Wöhler and Antoine Bussy independently isolated beryllium in 1828 by the chemical reaction of metallic potassium with beryllium chloride. The first commercially-successful process for producing beryllium was developed in 1932 by Alfred Stock and Hans Goldschmidt.

Boron compounds have been known for thousands of years, but the element was not discovered until 1808 by Sir Humphry Davy and by Gay-Lussac and Thenard. Boron was not recognized as an element until it was isolated in 1808 by Sir Humphry Davy and by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis Jacques Thénard. Jöns Jakob Berzelius identified boron as an element in 1824.

Carbon was discovered in prehistory and was known in the forms of soot and charcoal to the earliest human civilizations. In 1772, Antoine Lavoisier showed that diamonds are a form of carbon; when he burned samples of charcoal and diamond and found that neither produced any water. In 1779, Carl Wilhelm Scheele showed that graphite burned to form carbon dioxide and so must be another form of carbon.

Nitrogen is considered to have been discovered by Scottish physician Daniel Rutherford in 1772, who called it noxious air or fixed air. It was also studied at about the same time by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley. In 1790 the French chemist Jean-Antoine-Claude Chaptal named the element nitrogen.

Carl Wilhelm Scheele obtained oxygen by heating mercuric oxide and nitrates in 1771, but did not publish his findings until 1777. Joseph Priestley also prepared this new air by 1774. The name oxygen was coined in 1777 by Antoine Lavoisier, whose experiments with oxygen helped to discredit the then-popular phlogiston theory of combustion and corrosion.

In 1529, Georigius Agricola described the use of fluorspar as a flux. In 1670 Heinrich Schwandhard found that glass was etched when exposed to fluorspar treated with acid. In 1810, French scientist Andre-Marie Ampere proposed that fluoric acid was a compound of hydrogen with a new element. The element was finally isolated in 1886 by Henri Moissan.

Neon was discovered in 1898 by the British chemists Sir William Ramsay and Morris W. Travers in London. It was discovered when Ramsay chilled a sample of air until it became a liquid, then warmed the liquid and captured the gases as they boiled off. After 1902, Georges Claude's company, Air Liquide, was producing industrial quantities of neon as a byproduct of his air liquefaction business.

The chemical abbreviation for sodium was first published by Jöns Jakob Berzelius in his system of atomic symbols. It is a contraction of the element's new Latin name natrium, which refers to the Egyptian natron, a natural mineral salt primarily made of hydrated sodium carbonate. In 1807, Sir Humphry Davy isolated sodium for the first time by electrolysis of dried sodium hydroxide, which had been very slightly moistened.

Scottish chemist Joseph Black recognized magnesium as an element in 1755. Magnesium was first isolated by Sir Humphry Davy in 1808, in London. He used electrolysis on a mixture of magnesia and mercuric oxide. Antoine Bussy prepared it in coherent form in 1831.

In 1761, Guyton de Morveau proposed the name alumine for the base in alum, and Antoine Lavoisier, in 1787, thought this to be the oxide of a still undiscovered metal. Sir Humphry Davy identified the existence of a metal base of alum in 1808. Hans Christian Ørsted was the first to isolate metallic aluminum in 1825 in impure form. Friedrich Wöhler is generally credited with having isolated the metal in 1827.

In 1800, Sir Humphry Davy thought silica to be a compound and not an element; but in 1811, Gay Lussac and Louis Jacques Thénard probably prepared impure amorphous silicon by heating potassium with silicon tetrafluoride. In 1824 Jöns Jakob Berzelius prepared amorphous silicon by the same general method. Henri Deville in 1854 first prepared crystalline silicon, the second allotropic form of the element.

Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus in 1669, in Hamburg, Germany, preparing it from urine. In 1769, Johan Gottlieb Gahn and Carl Wilhelm Scheele showed that calcium phosphate is found in bones, and they obtained elemental phosphorus from bone ash. Antoine Lavoisier recognized phosphorus as an element in 1777.

By the 3rd century, the Chinese discovered that sulfur could be extracted from pyrite. Indian alchemists wrote extensively about the use of sulfur in alchemical operations with mercury, from the eighth century AD onwards. In 1777, Antoine Lavoisier helped convince the scientific community that sulfur was an element, not a compound.

Around 1630, chlorine was recognized as a gas by the Belgian chemist and physician Jan Baptist van Helmont. Elemental chlorine was first prepared and studied in 1774 by Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele. By 1810, the scientific consensus was that chlorine was actually a compound that contained oxygen. In 1811, Sir Humphry Davy concluded the new gas was in fact a new element.

Argon was suspected to be present in air by Henry Cavendish in 1785. It was not isolated until 1894 by Lord Rayleigh and Sir William Ramsay in Scotland. Argon became the first member of the noble gases to be discovered. In 1957, IUPAC agreed that the symbol should change from A to Ar.

Potassium's symbol K comes from 'kalium' the name of the element in Germany and Scandinavia. Potassium metal was first isolated in 1807 by Sir Humphry Davy, who derived it from caustic potash by the use of electrolysis of the molten salt with the newly discovered voltaic pile. Potassium was the first metal that was isolated by electrolysis.

Calcium was known as early as the first century when the Ancient Romans prepared lime as calcium oxide. Calcium was first isolated by Sir Humphry Davy in 1808 when he electrolyzed a mixture of lime and mercuric oxide. Davy was trying to isolate calcium; when he heard that Jöns Jakob Berzelius and Pontin prepared calcium amalgam by electrolyzing lime in mercury, he tried it himself.

In 1879, Lars Fredrik Nilson and his team detected scandium in the minerals euxenite and gadolinite. Nilson prepared 2 grams of scandium oxide of high purity. Per Teodor Cleve showed that scandium had properties similar to those predicted by Mendeleev for eka-boron. Metallic scandium was first prepared in 1937 by Fischer and his colleagues.

William Gregor found the oxide of titanium in ilmenite in 1791. Martin Heinrich Klaproth independently discovered the element in rutile in 1795 and named it. The pure metallic form was only obtained in 1910 by Matthew A. Hunter. In 1936, the Kroll Process made the commercial production of titanium possible.

Vanadium was originally discovered by Andrés Manuel del Río in 1801. In 1805, the French chemist Hippolyte Victor Collet-Descotils incorrectly declared that del Río's new element was only an impure sample of chromium. In 1831, the Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefström rediscovered the element in a new oxide he found while working with iron ores. Later that same year, Friedrich Wöhler confirmed del Río's earlier work.

In 1797, Louis Nicolas Vauquelin received samples of crocoite ore. In 1798, Vauquelin discovered that he could isolate metallic chromium by heating the oxide in a charcoal oven, making him the discoverer of the element. Vauquelin was also able to detect traces of chromium in precious gemstones, such as ruby or emerald.

By the mid-18th century, Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele had used pyrolusite to produce chlorine. Scheele and others were aware that pyrolusite contained a new element, but they were not able to isolate it. Johan Gottlieb Gahn was the first to isolate an impure sample of manganese metal in 1774, by reducing the dioxide with carbon.

The first iron used by humans is likely to have come from meteorites. The oldest known iron objects used by humans are some beads of meteoric iron, made in Egypt in about 4000 BC. The discovery of smelting around 3000 BC led to the start of the iron age around 1200 BC and the prominent use of iron for tools and weapons.

Cobalt compounds have been used for centuries to impart a rich blue color to glass, glazes and ceramics. The element was first isolated by Swedish chemist George Brandt in 1735. He showed it was the presence of the element cobalt that caused the blue color in glass, not bismuth as previously thought.

Artifacts made from metallic meteorites have been found dating from as early as 5000 BC. In 1751, Baron Axel Fredrik Cronstedt was trying to extract copper from kupfernickel and instead produced the white metal. In the early twentieth century, Ludwig Mond patented a process using nickel carbonyl to purify nickel.

Copper occurs naturally as native copper and was known to some of the oldest civilizations on record. Earliest estimates of the discovery of copper suggest around 9000 BC in the Middle East. It was one of the most important materials to humans throughout the copper and bronze ages.

Metallic zinc was produced in the 13th century A.D. India by reducing calamine with organic substances such as wool. The metal was rediscovered in Europe by Andreas Sigismund Marggraf in 1746. He heated a mixture of calamine ore and carbon in a closed vessel without copper to produce the metal.

In 1871, existence of gallium was first predicted by Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev and called the element eka-aluminum. Gallium was discovered spectroscopically by French chemist Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1875 by its characteristic spectrum in an examination of a sphalerite sample. Later that year, Lecoq obtained the free metal by electrolysis of its hydroxide in potassium hydroxide solution.

In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev predicted its existence and some of its properties based on its position on his periodic table and called the element eka-silicon. In 1886, Clemens Winkler found the new element along with silver and sulfur, in a rare mineral called argyrodite. The first silicon-germanium alloys were obtained in 1955.

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