![]() ![]() In 2017, not long after becoming department head and having lined up emeritus professor Ulli Mueller-Westerhoff as a major donor, Brückner had the first conversations with a European company specializing not only in making periodic table cases but also providing samples for the display. “Chemistry is the central science, and the periodic table holds it all together.” “I wanted to include as many examples as possible to weave a dense fabric of as many aspects of each element as possible,” Brückner says. ![]() Usually, only a few examples of each element are shown in each cubby, keeping the 118 pigeonholes tidy but not really exemplifying the range of use for each element. I wanted to connect each element to the natural world, our daily lives, and the work that we do in research labs, from gold-coated contacts, a bottle of Selsun Blue, beautiful minerals, and iconic reagents to chemical compounds unique to the research of members of our department.”īut the task of bringing an interactive periodic table to UConn wasn’t a quick one and the idea wasn’t particularly unique.īrückner says many universities, private collectors, and companies boast periodic table displays, and some have become almost tourist draws, like the one at the University of Oklahoma that Brückner visited during a sabbatical many years ago.īut when he conjured the idea of bringing an exhibit like that to UConn, he wanted it to be different. “I wanted the display to house more than just pieces of metal and bulbs of gas. “This is the right place, because now one can show off each artifact, share its delights, and it tells a story in context,” he says. UConn chemistry department head Christian Brückner puts some of the items resembling elements in the interactive periodic table displayīeing installed in the Chemistry Building on Aug. Take, for instance, the antique domino in the nitrogen cubby (it’s in the plastic) or the pair of sunglasses cut in half and spanning the praseodymium and neodymium cases (both elements are in the lenses). “That was not the right place for any collection,” he says, gesturing to what is the right place – a wall-sized periodic table in the second-floor atrium of the Chemistry Building, lit from inside with strings of LED lights that can be manipulated to highlight groups of elements like the noble gases or to talk specifically about a single element and the things contained in its cubby. Some boxes hadn’t been opened for several decades. The collection amassed to more than a thousand pieces, some valued at only pennies and others much more, all taking up space in his office, laboratory, and home. ![]() Later on in academia, a retiring colleague gave him an antistatic brush once charged with polonium. He came upon a tungsten carbide tool used to draw heavy wires from a thick diameter to a thinner one during a summer job as a student. Department Chemistry Periodic Table Display | UConnĬhristian Brückner started collecting more than 45 years ago when he was a young teenager in Germany and his father a metallurgist who’d bring home laboratory leftovers to feed his son’s growing interest in crystals and science.įrom an early 19th century bottle of a mercury salt to manganese nodules scooped from the bottom of the Pacific, Brückner’s childhood collection grew piece by piece through the decades. ![]()
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