A very happy 97th birthday to Tom Lehrer, American child prodigy, songwriter, satirist, pianist, and mathematics lecturer.
I first heard about Tom Lehrer years ago, when I took high school chemistry.
My chemistry teacher, Mr. O as we called him, was the kind of teacher you and your friends would visit after school in the chemistry lab for 1 1/2 hours.
Why?
Because Mr. O told all kinds of fascinating stories about chemistry mishaps and fun things we could do with chemical solutions.
The sort of things he couldn’t talk about during our fifth hour class.
Along with talking about news of the day, he listened to us.
For high school students, getting the undivided attention of an adult was pretty special.
One day early in the semester at one of our after-school chats, he asked if any of us knew who Tom Lehrer was.
We all shook our heads; none of us had heard of Lehrer.
Mr. O played a recording of Lehrer singing The Elements. I don’t think the recording got past the first four lines of the song before we all started laughing.
Mr. O must have played the song at least half-dozen times for us that day, before we could listen to the whole song without chuckling out loud.
Made me love chemistry even more!
The Elements
In 2020, Tom Lehrer placed everything he wrote in the public domain.
Check out the lyrics from his The Elements song, arranged to the tune of the “Major-General’s Song” from The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan.
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 and 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 Ha’vard,
And there may be many others but they haven’t been discavard.
