Why Berzelius Day...

I'm writing this final blog about Berzelius Day for one reason - to send a few YouTube complainers to read it rather than engage with them on message boards.

On August 20 periodicvideos (my chemistry channel on YouTube) celebrated the birthday of the chemistry founding father Berzelius... We called it Berzelius Day.

See this video for more about Berzelius.

We marked the day by uploading 24 videos over 24 hours.

These weren't our typical videos, but highlights from our favourite reactions over fours years of filming.

You can see them here.

Some people have complained (within their rights) about having 24 videos in their subscription box.

So here's why we did it:

1. To celebrate Berzelius Day through the day no matter what timezone people were in - and in a unique way.

2. Because many of our subscribers (well over half) only joined this year and may have been unaware of previous experiments we've done. Each video had prominent links back to the original video.

3. Some of the experiments were quite old and we hadn't uploaded them at a high resolution.

4. I think it will be a useful resource for many teachers and educators to have videos showing "just the reactions" rather than the usual 7-8 minutes of talking and build-up that goes with it.

5. It was fun for me to go through 24 hours interacting with viewers around the globe. It was just something I wanted to try. As people have woken and gone to bed, it was fun seeing the comments evolve.

6. I think it was a nice gimmick... It's unusual and reached a new audience as a result.

I'm sorry for anyone who was inconvenienced by an overdose of periodicvideos for one day and I'm aware some of them have unsubscribed from the channel.

I did it make it very clear beforehand that we'd be doing it with messages in a video and on social media!

But if one big day of chemistry was too much...?

We won't be doing another marathon like it - but I enjoyed it as a one-off celebration!

A BIG PS: This blog is just for me to explain to the naysayers... The overwhelming amount of feedback has been very positive and I'm grateful for that!