--- title: Famous discoveries told as stories — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Famous discoveries told as stories», a lesson of the chemistry course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Great discoveries are often stories of patience and luck. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Chemistry](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/) / Famous discoveries told as stories # Famous discoveries told as stories Lesson 35 of the chemistry course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/0/) — Great discoveries are often stories of patience and luck. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/1/) — In 1928 Alexander Fleming came back from holiday to a dish of germs he had not cleaned, saw a blob of mould, and noticed that the germs around it had died: that mould gave the world penicillin. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/2/) — Other discoveries came from careful work: Antoine Lavoisier weighed everything before and after burning and showed that nothing is lost, and Marie Curie spent years separating tiny amounts of new elements from tonnes of rock. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/3/) — Some came from a clever idea: Dmitri Mendeleev wrote each element on a card, laid them out like a game of patience, and saw a pattern so strong that he could predict elements nobody had found yet. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/4/) — Good scientists check stories as well as facts. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/5/) — Some famous tales, like Archimedes running naked through the streets shouting "Eureka!", may not have happened, and some scientists, like Rosalind Franklin, did not get fair credit at first. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/6/) — Marie Curie discovered two new elements, polonium and radium, separating tiny amounts of them from tonnes of ore; her notebooks are still radioactive and are kept in lead-lined boxes. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/8/) — Antoine Lavoisier showed by careful weighing that matter is not lost when things burn or react; he also named oxygen and hydrogen. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/9/) — Dmitri Mendeleev arranged the elements into the periodic table, left gaps for elements not yet found and predicted them; they were found later. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/10/) — Archimedes noticed water rising as he got into his bath and saw how to test a crown: an object pushes aside its own volume of water; the "Eureka" run may be a legend. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/11/) — Joseph Priestley found how to put gas into water and made the first soda water, using gas from a brewery; he also discovered oxygen, as Carl Scheele did on his own. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/12/) — Humphry Davy made a safety lamp for coal miners in 1815: a metal mesh around the flame stops it lighting explosive gas in the mine, and it saved many lives. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/13/) — For centuries alchemists tried to turn lead into gold; they failed, because chemistry cannot change one element into another, but they invented many lab tools and methods. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/14/) — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray picture, Photo 51, helped show the shape of DNA; her part was overlooked at first, and she died before the Nobel Prize for DNA was given. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/15/) — Charles Goodyear found in 1839 that heating rubber with sulphur makes it strong; before that rubber went sticky in summer and cracked in winter. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/35-famous-discoveries-stories/16/) — The story that Goodyear dropped rubber on a hot stove by accident is often told, but the details are not certain. - ← previous: [Water: the most amazing liquid](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/34-water-amazing-liquid/) - next →: [Olympiad: kitchen chemistry puzzles ★★★](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/36-olympiad-kitchen-chemistry-puzzles/) - ↑ back to [Chemistry](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/)