Strontian

Strontian is a village of a few hundred people in the western Highlands of Scotland, on the shore of Loch Sunart. In 1790, Adair Crawford and William Cruickshank in London examined a mineral specimen from the lead mines at Strontian and determined that it contained a new earth — a substance chemically distinct from barium and calcium, though it resembled both. They called the new earth strontianite, after the village. The element hiding inside it waited another eighteen years to be isolated.

Humphry Davy extracted the metal in 1808 — the same year he isolated barium, calcium, and magnesium — using electrolysis on strontium chloride. He named it strontium, continuing the tradition of naming elements after their mineral sources and, by extension, after the places those minerals were found. A village of lead miners in the Scottish Highlands had its name permanently inscribed in the periodic table.

Strontium burns with a brilliant crimson-red flame, a property that made strontium compounds essential to pyrotechnics. Every red firework in a Fourth of July display or a Chinese New Year celebration gets its color from strontium carbonate or strontium nitrate. The same property was used in flares and tracer ammunition. The village of Strontian, tucked between mountains and sea, is present in every red explosion over every city in the world.

Strontium-90, a radioactive isotope produced by nuclear fission, became one of the most feared byproducts of nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s. Because strontium is chemically similar to calcium, the body absorbs it into bones and teeth. The baby tooth survey of 1958–1970, organized by Louise Reiss and Barry Commoner in St. Louis, collected over 300,000 children's teeth to measure strontium-90 levels. The results — showing that children born during atmospheric testing had significantly elevated levels — contributed directly to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.