Google Doodle Celebrates Discovery of Aluminum

One of the neatest features about Google, besides its innovative search engine technology, is its ability to teach with one simple artistic flair.

Yesterday's homepage logo featured a Google Doodle (which you can see here) celebrating the life of Hans Christian Orsted. He was a Danish physicist and chemist credited with discovering aluminum in 1825 and electromagnetism, and was born on Aug. 14, 1777. Orsted made the aluminum discovery after mixing anhydrous aluminum chloride with potassium amalgam and the rest is history as one would say.

The Google Doodle depicts an electrical cord connecting a battery, and is just the latest of a continuing series of logo creations marking important events and people.

According to Wikipedia, Orsted was also a noted poet who is credited with creating 2,000 Danish words in his literature efforts. He died in 1851 at the age of 73.

As a story in the Guardian noted, Orsted is very likely one of those scientific innovators who most people didn't know much about until Google decided to celebrate his accomplishments with a doodle.

But that's been a Google intention since it first began doodling with its homepage logo years ago. Most recent Google Doodles have marked the arrival of this week's Perseid meteor shower, the anniversary celebration of the Apollo 11 mission and birthdays of other famous and important people including Morse code maker Samuel Finley Breese Morse.

The Google logo, states a Wikipedia entry, has also been used to celebrate the Lego block's 50th anniversary and the Burning Man Festival.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons