Can you make an element from scratch?

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]For thousands of years, humans believed we could only find the building blocks of nature hidden in dirt, rocks, or air.

[00:00:07]Nobody thought we could make our own.

[00:00:09]But in 1937, two curious friends asked a daring question. What if we could build a brand new piece of the universe from scratch?

[00:00:19]Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè received a strange package. Inside was a thin piece of metal called molybdenum. This metal had just been smashed with tiny super fast energy bullets inside a giant machine in California.

[00:00:35]Carlo and Emilio worked day and night to test the unusual smashed metal. It was an incredibly hard puzzle. But then, they saw it. Buried inside was a secret treasure. It was a brand new building block that did not exist anywhere on Earth. They named it technetium, a word that means artificial.

[00:00:57]This thrilling discovery proved humans could stretch the boundaries of the famous periodic table.

[00:01:03]We were no longer just finding things in nature, we were creating them.

[00:01:08]Today, this very first human-made element is used in special medicines to help doctors see inside our bodies and save lives.