6, 7, and… Fluorine?

    Allow me to paint an embarrassing scene, one that we’re often far too familiar with. You’re sitting in a classroom on a quaint Monday morning. School has just resumed, and while you’re not exactly happy about sitting in a classroom at 7 in the morning, you’ve gloomily accepted your fate, and everyone else has followed suit. It’s here, in this dreary, benign setting that your teacher decides to make the least funny joke they could. They sneak in a “6 7” joke somewhere in the class, thinking that it’s still funny when everyone knows it isn’t. Well, almost everyone. There’s always that one student whose common sense and self restraint ceases to exist at the mere mention of those words, going crazy (and embarrassing themself) at the mere suggestion of those numbers.

        This kid is something like element 9, Fluorine, a pale yellow gas so famous for its volatility that even professional chemists wince at its mention. In fact, its volatility is so dangerous that several chemists died horrifically from poisoning, explosions, and chemical burns attempting to isolate it before Henri Moissan in 1886, and even then, his exposure to fluorine worsened his health significantly (some believe this contributed to his death from appendicitis).

            But what makes Fluorine so reactive? Well, fluorine is a halogen, which means that it has 7 valence electrons and is greedy for one more. The measure of how greedy an element is for an electron is its electronegativity, and boy, when I tell you that Fluorine is greedy, it is greedy. Fluorine is the single most electronegative element, and when you combine that with its relatively small size, you get an atom just itching, itching to react, corrode, and oxidize (in fact, this is the reason that naturally fluorine is literally almost never isolated)!

    Despite that, many of you teenagers have stinky breath. Oh? That was uncalled for? Let me re-iterate. Judging from your dental hygiene, many of you have not heard of fluoride. The few of you who actually brush their teeth will recognize this as a key ingredient in many toothpastes. A more relatable example may be non-stick pans, which use fluoropolymers like teflon to keep the garlic I know you’re eating from sticking to the pan. In fact, the device you’re reading this on likely uses fluorine-silicon compounds as semiconductors! Despite the dangers of working with fluorine, it is a highly useful element that is crucial to the development of our world. It is unfortunately, however, not crucial to your breath.

• Opeyemi J., 11th Grade