Elements song

"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 "I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General[?]" from The Pirates of Penzance.

The song starts:

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,

And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium ...

and ends:

... 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 8 of those have been named.

External links

• Complete lyrics (http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/lyrics.html)
• More 'Major General' parodies (http://www.lightjunkie.org/parody/piratesidx.html)
• Guitar chords from alt.guitar.tab newsgroup (http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=r5ielkkkkze.fsf%40gill.maths.keele.ac.uk)
• Flash video of song (http://www.privatehand.com/flash/elements.html)