I noticed the image above when visiting Dr. Brian Cox's tweets. It shows the periodic elements as well as the country where they were first discovered. It was created by UK PhD student
Jamie Gallagher. In a
Smithsonian SmartNews interview, he stated he had a particular affinity for the story behind polonium, discovered by Marie and Pierre
Curie:
Working together they isolated this element and later named it
Polonium after Marie’s home country. (A country, I may add, that turned
her away from her pursuit of education as she was a politically
interested female). It was her hope that by naming the element after
Poland she could generate interested in the independence (from Germany)
campaign for the country. Yet the victory comes in under the French
flag where the work was carried out.
As you can see from the table above, the UK, Sweden, and Germany were the three countries that led the pack in the discovery of elements.
