An English chemist by the name of Sir Humphry Davy was attempting to isolate one of the components of caustic soda using electrolysis. Davy understood that it was possible to liberate a mysterious metal from the caustic soda, but no one had succeeded in isolating it yet.
For millennia, caustic soda and many other soda compounds have been used for cooking, cleaning, and food preservation, in fact, these compounds derive their names from a compound known as soda, which is believed to have been named after the Arabic word suda, meaning headache, because the compound was sometimes used to relieve headaches.
Finally, in 1807, Davy became the first person to successfully isolate this metal in its elemental form. The metal was named after soda with the addition of the -ium suffix, making the element sodium. The addition of this suffix was typical for a metal discovered in the 19th century, which distinguished newly discovered metals from much older metals, such as copper, silver, and gold.
After more experimentation and analysis, the chemical structures of these soda compounds were discovered. Soda — sometimes called washing soda — turned out to be sodium carbonate, caustic soda was found to be sodium hydroxide, table salt was simply sodium chloride, and baking soda was nothing more than sodium bicarbonate (sometimes called sodium hydrogen carbonate).
Properties of Sodium
The sodium that Davy isolated proved to be a highly reactive metal that burned furiously in contact with water. This happens because sodium is an alkali metal, which means that sodium has only one valence electron, making sodium very reactive. Sodium is so reactive that when it is exposed to water (H2O), it will rip a hydroxide group (OH) away from the rest of the molecule and bond to it, leaving behind nothing more than a lone hydrogen (H). This hydrogen atom quickly bonds to another hydrogen atom, forming molecular hydrogen (H2), which is an explosive gas. The reaction between the sodium and water is very exothermic, therefore, it quickly produces enough heat to ignite the hydrogen gas, causing it to react with the oxygen in the air, which ironically converts the hydrogen gas back into water. After the reaction between sodium and water is complete, all that is left is lye (sodium hydroxide) and water. Here are the balanced reactions:
4 Na + 4 H2O -> 4 NaOH + 2 H2
2 H2 + O2 -> 2 H2O
Because sodium is an alkali metal, its properties are similar to those of the other alkali metals (lithium, potassium, rubidium, cesium, and francium). The alkali metals are the most reactive metals, however, sodium is interestingly one of the least reactive alkali metals because it is in a higher row of the periodic table than most of the alkali metals, which means it has fewer electron shells, making its valance electron much closer to its nucleus than the valance electrons of other atoms with more electron shells, which pulls the valance electron in and causes it to be less likely to react than the valance electrons of larger alkali metals.
Biological Function of Sodium
Sodium is an essential element and electrolyte in your body. There are many biological functions that are utterly impossible without sodium; sodium is partially, if not mostly, responsible for regulating your body’s intracellular and extracellular fluid balance, controlling your blood pressure, maintaining kidney function, enabling your muscle and nerve activity, managing the fluid in your eyes, catalyzing your cells’ nutrient intake, expelling waste from your cells and bloodstream, maintaining an optimal blood pH level, regulating your heart rhythm, promoting neuron activity in your brain, and even controlling the balance of calcium and magnesium in your bones.
What do you like most about sodium?
Onward American 