Glucinum
3 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Glucinum. All 3 are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
The Encyclopedia of Founding (1892)
A metal resembling aluminum, prepared after the same manner. It is rare metal, and was discovered by Wohler, 1828. See ALUMINUM. Glue is an impure gelatine, made chiefly from fragments of hides, hoofs, bones, etc. Besides the many uses to which it is put for carpentry, pattern-making etc., it is capable of furnishing an excellent means for imparting cohesiveness to the several free sands used for cores. When used as a glue water for dampening the sand, the gelatine binds the particles of sand together with a jelly-like substance, which, when the water has evaporated during the drying, leaves the core hard and brittle in proportion to the quantity of glue in the water. By using the smallest quantity necessary to stiffen pure sand, little or no gas is generated by the heat, thus making it possible, in numerous instances where it is difficult to obtain a vent, to use cores that are devoid of vents altogether. When cores of this class have been burnt by the metal there is no difficulty in extracting them from the castings, the glue having burned away, leaving only the incoherent sand. See FREE SAND; CORE-SAND; FLOUR.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
glu-si'num, a metallic element. Its salts have a sweet or glucose taste, whence the name. It belongs to the same group of metals as aluminum. It has the appearance of steel. It is very light, having a specific gravity of 2.1. It is of interest chiefly to chemists. It makes excellent pen points, but most so-called glucinum pens are mere steel imitations. Glucinum was obtained in a metallic form from beryl in 1828. It is sometimes called beryllium.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
an elementary metal, the base of the earth glucina. It resembles aluminum, and is prepared in the same manner. It is not acted on by water, fuses with difficulty, and when heated in the air, burns, producing glucina. It was discovered by Wöhler in 1828.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
All three accounts describe a laboratory curiosity, and Aiton's in 1910 called it "of interest chiefly to chemists" and noted its salts have "a sweet or glucose taste" ed lost the argument: chemists settled on beryllium, the name Collier's mentions only in passing as an alternative, and glucinum vanished from the periodic table. Tasting the salts is now unthinkable bthe metal and its compounds are highly toxic, and chronic beryllium disease (berylliosis), an incurable lung condition recognised in workers from the 1930s and 1940s, made beryllium one of the most tightly regulated industrial materials. Far from being a chemist's plaything, it became a strategic metal: copper beryllium alloys for non-sparking tools and springs, thin windows for X-ray tubes, moderators and reflectors in nuclear reactors, and the eighteen gold-coated beryllium mirror segments of the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021.
Written for this edition, 2026.