40 Fun Facts About Phosphorus

Which bodily fluid did an alchemist boil down by the bucketful in 1669 to make the first phosphorus?

Urine carries dissolved phosphates, so boiling it to a paste and roasting the residue left a waxy solid that glowed in the dark. He had been hoping for gold.

Which fictional detective discovers that a glowing, ghostly hound is simply a real dog painted with phosphorus?

Sherlock Holmes unmasks the trick in The Hound of the Baskervilles, where the villain coats a savage dog in phosphorus so that it looks like the demon of a family legend.

More than four-fifths of the phosphorus in the human body is locked away in which parts?

Bones and teeth hold about 85% of the body's phosphorus as a hard crystalline mineral. An average adult carries roughly 0.7 kilograms of the element in all.

Phosphoric acid gives which kind of fizzy soft drink its sharp, tangy bite?

Cola gets its tang from food-grade phosphoric acid, additive E338, which doubles as a preservative. Such drinks are sometimes called phosphate sodas.

The name phosphorus comes from Greek words meaning what?

Light-bearer is the meaning of the Greek phōsphoros. Its first maker went further and named his glowing find phosphorus mirabilis, adding the Latin for miraculous.

Which legendary prize of alchemy was the discoverer of phosphorus hunting for when he stumbled on the element?

The philosopher's stone was supposed to turn base metals such as lead into gold. He never found it, though his first wife's dowry paid for years of trying.

Phosphorus bullets were developed in the First World War to ignite which hydrogen-filled raiders over Britain?

Zeppelins shrugged off ordinary bullets, which passed through the outer skin without lighting the gas inside. Burning phosphorus rounds changed that.

Which jaw-rotting disease struck Victorian workers who made white phosphorus matches?

Phossy jaw came from breathing phosphorus vapour year after year, which slowly destroyed the jaw. Fear of it helped spark the London matchgirls' strike of 1888.

Guano, a phosphorus-rich fertilizer traded worldwide in the 1800s, is the built-up droppings of which animals?

Seabirds nesting on islands off South America left droppings reported to lie over 30 metres deep. By the late 1800s the richest deposits were nearly mined out.

Phosphate groups alternate with sugars to build the long backbone of which famous biological molecule?

DNA is held together by a sugar-phosphate chain, with the genetic letters attached along it like the rungs of a ladder. Without phosphorus there is no double helix.

Which German alchemist, a former army officer, discovered phosphorus by accident and tried to keep it secret?

Hennig Brand is often called the first named person to discover a chemical element, since the earlier ones had been known since ancient times. He later sold his recipe for 200 thalers.

In Greek myth, the god Phosphorus personified which sight in the sky, now known to be the planet Venus?

The morning star and its dusk counterpart were at first taken for two different objects, so each had its own god. Venus after sunset was called Hesperus.

How many protons sit in the nucleus of every phosphorus atom, giving the element its atomic number?

15 is the atomic number of phosphorus, one place after silicon in the periodic table. Only one form of the atom, phosphorus-31, is stable.

White phosphorus glows by slowly reacting with which gas in the air, yet stays dark in the pure gas?

Oxygen makes the glow, but the reaction only runs within a certain range of pressures, so in the pure gas the glow switches off.

Chemists store white phosphorus submerged in which liquid to stop it bursting into flame in air?

Water keeps the air off, and white phosphorus barely dissolves in it. Lumps that wash up on beaches are a known hazard to unwary collectors.

The striking strip on a box of safety matches contains which colour-named form of phosphorus?

Red phosphorus on the strip meets the chemicals in the match head only at the moment of striking, which is why a safety match will not light on a wall or a boot.

The safety match, which moved the phosphorus from the match head to the box, was invented in which country?

Sweden's Gustaf Erik Pasch patented the idea in 1844, and Swedish factories long held a near-monopoly on safety matches around the world.

Which charity opened a London match factory in 1891 to prove matches could be made without white phosphorus?

The Salvation Army and its founder William Booth used a safer but costlier form of phosphorus, and pressed local shopkeepers to stock only those matches.

Which molecule with three phosphate groups is nicknamed the energy currency of the living cell?

ATP is spent and rebuilt so quickly that a person gets through roughly their own body weight of it every day.

Phospholipids, fats with a phosphate head, line up in a double layer to build which part of every living cell?

The membrane forms by itself: the phosphate heads face outward on both sides while the oily tails tuck inside, making a two-layer skin around the cell.

The three numbers on a bag of fertilizer stand for nitrogen, phosphorus and which other element?

Potassium completes the trio known as NPK, after the chemical symbols N, P and K. Phosphorus is always the middle number on the label.

Which notorious poison is the element sitting directly below phosphorus in the periodic table?

Arsenic shares many chemical properties with phosphorus because the two are neighbours in one column. Its yellow form is even soft and waxy, like white phosphorus.

Which North African country holds by far the world's largest known reserves of phosphate rock?

Morocco's deposits dwarf everyone else's, which is why forecasts of the world's future fertilizer supply lean so heavily on a single country.

Phosphorus washing off farm fields into lakes feeds explosive blooms of which fast-growing organisms?

Algae multiply on the extra nutrient, then die and rot, stripping the lake of what fish need to breathe. The process is called eutrophication.

Phosphates were phased out of which household product from the 1970s because they over-fertilised lakes?

Detergent makers added phosphates to help washing powder clean, but every wash sent a dose of fertilizer down the drain and on towards lakes and rivers.

In 2020 astronomers caused a stir by reporting which toxic gas, a possible sign of life, in the clouds of Venus?

Phosphine, one phosphorus atom bonded to three hydrogens, was reported in amounts no known lifeless process could explain. A later re-analysis found errors and failed to confirm it.

Which German port, the birthplace of phosphorus, was later devastated by phosphorus bombs in World War II?

Hamburg is where the element was first isolated in 1669. Nearly three centuries later, Allied incendiary raids turned the same substance on the city.

Which Anglo-Irish chemist, best known for his gas law, made phosphorus in 1680?

Robert Boyle also used the element to light chemically tipped wooden splints, forerunners of the match, and his assistant turned phosphorus-making into a business.

Which French chemist, later sent to the guillotine, recognised phosphorus as a chemical element in 1777?

Antoine Lavoisier had earlier burned phosphorus and noticed that it gained weight, a clue that helped him work out what burning really is.

Astronomers studying the remnant Cassiopeia A confirmed that phosphorus is forged in which cosmic events?

Supernovae scatter the phosphorus they make across space. The debris of Cassiopeia A held up to 100 times more of it, relative to iron, than the Milky Way in general.

Phosphorus is the second most plentiful mineral in the human body, behind which other one?

Calcium and phosphorus travel as a pair: a diet with enough of the first and enough protein almost always supplies enough of the second.

Sarin and VX, compounds built around a phosphorus atom, belong to which deadly class of chemical weapons?

Nerve agents such as sarin were first made in 1930s Germany by chemists who were trying to create stronger pesticides, which are their close chemical cousins.

Which tiny Pacific island nation was strip-mined for phosphate for about a century, wrecking its interior?

Nauru's mines once made its people among the richest in the world. The viable phosphate ran out in the 1990s, and the island slid into serious financial trouble.

A one-atom-thick sheet of black phosphorus is called phosphorene, echoing which carbon wonder material?

Graphene inspired the method as well as the name: phosphorene was first made by peeling layers off a crystal of black phosphorus with sticky tape.

Phosphorus belongs to which family of elements, whose name comes from a Greek word meaning to choke?

Pnictogens take their name from the stifling effect of nitrogen gas, the lightest member of the family, which cannot support breathing.

Unlike carbon and nitrogen, phosphorus cycles through nature while barely touching which part of the planet?

The atmosphere plays almost no part because phosphorus compounds rarely turn into gas, which makes this one of the slowest natural cycles on Earth.

Self-igniting phosphorus gases from rotting matter may explain which ghostly lights of folklore?

Will-o'-the-wisp lights flicker over marshes, where decay releases gases that catch fire on meeting air and can set the far more plentiful marsh methane alight.

Superphosphate, the first chemical fertilizer, is made by treating phosphate rock with which strong acid?

Sulfuric acid turns stubborn rock phosphate into a form that plants can take up, and making fertilizer this way has become one of the acid's major industrial uses.

The world's longest conveyor belt hauls phosphate rock about 100 km across which disputed territory?

Western Sahara's Bou Craa mine feeds the belt, which runs to the coast, and the dust blowing off it is visible from space.

Traces of phosphorus are added to silicon, a step called doping, to make which kind of electronic material?

Semiconductors need a few spare electrons to conduct, and each phosphorus atom brings five outer electrons where the silicon atom it replaces has four.