Elements song - Definition and Overview

"The Elements" (1959) is a song by Tom Lehrer that recites the names of all the chemical elements that were known at the time of writing, up to number 102, nobelium. It can be found as a track on An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer. The song is sung to the tune of Sir Arthur Sullivan's "Major General's Song" ("I am the very model of a modern major-general...") from The Pirates of Penzance:

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,

And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,

And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,

And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,

Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,

And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,

And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium,

And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,

And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,

And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,

And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium and barium.

There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,

And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,

And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,

Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium,

And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium,

Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,

And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,

And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There's sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium,

And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,

And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium,

And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,

And there may be many others but they haven't been discovered.

Indeed, since that time, 11 more have been discovered, and 9 of those have been named. Those 9 are lawrencium, rutherfordium, dubnium, seaborgium, bohrium, hassium, meitnerium, darmstadtium and roentgenium.

As a note, the final rhyme of "Harvard" and "discovered" is delivered in something of a Massachusetts accent.

External links

• Guitar chords from alt.guitar.tab newsgroup (http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=r5ielkkkkze.fsf%40gill.maths.keele.ac.uk)
• Flash animation of song (http://www.privatehand.com/flash/elements.html)