Theory and Experiment Meet, and a New Form of Boron Is Found

Artem R. Oganov, a professor of geosciences at Stony Brook University, calls “a stream of discoveries and misdiscoveries.” . They have found a form of boron that is nearly as hard as diamond. In 1808, within a week and a half of each other, two research efforts, led by chemists Sir Humphrey Davy in London and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis-Jacques Thénard in Paris, announced that they had isolated boron. They had not. Another great chemist, Henri Moissan, later showed that the two earlier groups had made a compound consisting of 60 percent boron. Moissan also claimed to have isolated boron. He too was wrong, although he did do better: a compound with 90 percent boron.Not until 1909 was a sample of 99 percent pure boron produced.boron comes in multiple forms — as many as 16 have been reported. Alpha boron, is a dark but transparent red. Beta boron is black and looks like coal. Even today, scientists do not definitively know which of these two forms is the stable form. (It is probably beta boron.) The third form is a horrendously complicated structure known as T-192. The fourth form is the newly discovered one.