Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) (36 page)

I have pulled out my old books (and bought many new ones), set the little tungsten bar on a tiny pedestal, and papered the kitchen with chemical charts. I read lists of cosmic abundances in the bath. On cold, dismal Saturday afternoons, I may curl up with a fat volume of Thorpe’s
Dictionary of Applied Chemistry
 – it was one of Uncle Tungsten’s favorite books – opening it anywhere and reading at random.

The passion for chemistry, which I had thought dead at fourteen, has clearly survived, deep inside me, throughout the intervening years. Though my life has taken a different direction, I have followed the new discoveries in chemistry with excitement. In my day, elements stopped with number 92, uranium, but I have watched closely as new elements – elements up to 118! – have been made. These new elements probably exist only in the lab and do not occur anywhere else in the universe, but I was delighted to learn that the very latest of them, though still radioactive, are thought to belong to a long-sought ‘island of stability,’ in which the atomic nuclei are almost a million times more stable than those of the preceding elements.

Astronomers now wonder about giant planets with cores of metallic hydrogen, stars made of diamond, and stars with crusts of iron helide. The inert gases have been coaxed into combination, and I have seen fluorides of xenon – almost unthinkable, a fantasy for me, in the 1940
s
. The rare-earth elements, which both Uncle Tungsten and Uncle Abe so loved, have now become common and find countless uses in fluorescent materials, phosphors of every color, high-temperature superconductors, and tiny magnets of an unbelievable strength. The powers of synthetic chemistry have become prodigious: we can design molecules now with almost any structure, any property, we wish.

Tungsten, with its density and hardness, has found new uses in darts and tennis rackets and – disturbingly – in coating shells and missiles. But it also turns out – this is much more to my taste – to be indispensable to certain primitive bacteria which get their energy by metabolizing sulphur compounds in the hydrothermal vents of the ocean depths. If (as is now speculated) such bacteria were the first organisms on earth, then tungsten may have been crucial for the origin of life.

The old enthusiasm surfaces every so often in odd associations and impulses: a sudden desire for a ball of cadmium, or to feel the coldness of diamond against my face. The license plates of cars immediately suggest elements, especially in New York, where so many of them begin with U, V, W, and Y – that is, uranium, vanadium, tungsten, and yttrium. It is an added pleasure, a bonus, a grace, if the symbol of an element is followed by its atomic number, as in W74 or Y39. Flowers, too, bring elements to mind: the color of lilacs in spring for me is that of divalent vanadium. Radishes, for me, evoke the smell of selenium.

Lights – the old family passion – continue to evolve in wonderful ways. Sodium lights, a yellow glory, became widespread in the 1950
s
, and quartz-iodine lights, blazing halogen lamps, came out in the 1960
s
. If I wandered with a pocket spectroscope as a twelve-year-old in Piccadilly after the war, I have rediscovered the same joy now, walking with a pocket spectroscope through Times Square, seeing the city lights of New York as atomic emissions.

And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. The location of tungsten, at the intersection of Group VI and Period 6, becomes synonymous here with the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Sixth Street. (There is no such intersection in New York, of course, but it exists, conspicuously, in the New York of my dreams.) I dream of eating hamburgers made of scandium. Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive ‘cry’). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals – my old and valued friends – Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.

1
Only one person stayed: Miss Levy, my father’s secretary. She had been with him since 1930, and though somewhat reserved and formal (it would have been unthinkable to call her by her first name; she was always Miss Levy) and always busy, she sometimes allowed me to sit by the gas fire in her little room and play while she typed my father’s letters. (I loved the clack of the typewriter keys, and the little bell that rang at the end of each line.) Miss Levy lived five minutes away (in Shoot-Up Hill, a name that seemed to me more suitable perhaps for Tombstone than Kilburn), and she arrived at nine o’clock on the dot every weekday morning; she was never late, never moody or discomposed, never ill, in all the years that I knew her. Her schedule, her even presence, remained a constant through the war, even though everything else in the house had changed. She seemed impervious to the vicissitudes of life.

Miss Levy, who was a couple of years older than my father, continued to work a fifty-hour week until she was ninety, with no apparent concessions to age. Retirement was unthinkable to her, as it was to my parents, too.

2
There were fears for all the African relatives during the Boer War, and this must have impressed my mother deeply, for more than forty years later, she would still sing or incant a little ditty from this era:

One, two, three – relief of Kimberley

Four, five, six – relief of Ladysmith

Seven, eight, nine – relief of Bloemfontein

3
There were many attempts to manufacture diamonds in the nineteenth century, the most famous being those of Henri Moissan, the French chemist who first isolated fluorine and invented the electrical furnace. Whether Moissan actually got any diamonds is doubtful – the tiny, hard crystals he took for diamond were probably silicon carbide (which is now called moissanite). The atmosphere of this early diamond-making, with its excitements, its dangers, its wild ambitions, is vividly conveyed in H.G. Wells’s story ‘The Diamond Maker.’

4
The d’Elhuyar brothers, Juan Jose and Fausto, were members of the Basque Society of Friends for Their Country, a society devoted to the cultivation of arts and sciences that would meet every evening, discussing mathematics on Monday evenings, experimenting with electrical machines and air pumps on Tuesday evenings, and so on. In 1777 the brothers were sent abroad, one to study mineralogy, the other metallurgy. Their travels took them all over Europe, and one of them, Juan Jose, visited Scheele in 1782.

After they returned to Spain, the brothers explored the heavy black mineral wolframite and obtained from it a dense yellow powder (‘wolframic acid’) which they realized to be identical to the tungstic acid Scheele had obtained from the mineral ‘tung-sten’ in Sweden, and which, he was convinced, contained a new element. They went ahead, as Scheele had not, to heat this with charcoal, and obtained the pure new metallic element (which they named wolframium) in 1783.

5
Cryolite was the chief mineral in a vast pegmatitic mass in Ivigtut, Greenland, and this ore was mined continuously for more than a century. The miners, who had sailed from Denmark, would sometimes take boulders of the transparent cryolite to use as anchors for their boats, and never quite got used to the way in which these vanished, became invisible, the instant they sank below the surface of the water.

6
In addition to the hundred-odd names of existing elements, there were at least twice that number for elements that never made it, elements imagined or claimed to exist on the basis of unique chemical or spectroscopic characteristics, but later found to be known elements or mixtures. Many were place names, often exotic, discarded because the elements turned out to be spurious: ‘florentium’, ‘moldavium’, ‘norwegium,’ and ‘helvetium’, ‘austrium’ and ‘russium’, ‘illinium’, ‘virginium,’ and ‘alabamine,’ and the splendidly named ‘bohemium.’

I was oddly moved by these fictional elements and their names, especially the starry ones. The most beautiful, to my ears, were ‘aldebaranium’ and ‘cassiopeium’ (Auer’s names for elements that actually existed, ytterbium and lutecium) and ‘denebium,’ for a mythical rare earth. There had been a ‘cosmium’ and ‘neutronium’ (‘element o’), too, to say nothing of ‘archonium’, ‘asterium’, ‘aetherium,’ and the Ur-element ‘anodium,’ from which all the other elements supposedly were built.

There were sometimes competing names for new discoveries. Andres del Rio discovered vanadium in Mexico in 1800 and named it ‘panchromium’ for the variety of its many-colored salts. But other chemists doubted his discovery, and he eventually gave up his claim, and the element was only rediscovered and renamed thirty years later by a Swedish chemist, this time in honor of Vanadis, the Norse goddess of beauty. Other obsolete or discredited names also referred to actual elements: thus the magnificent ‘jargonium,’ an element supposedly present in zircons and zirconium ores, was most probably the real element hafnium.

7
Thomas Mann provides a lovely description of silica gardens in
Doctor Faustus
:

I shall never forget the sight. The vessel…was three-quarters full of slightly muddy water – that is, dilute water-glass – and from the sandy bottom there strove upwards a grotesque little landscape of variously coloured growths: a confused vegetation of blue, green, and brown shoots which reminded one of algae, mushrooms, attached polyps, also moss, then mussels, fruit pods, little trees or twigs from trees, here and there of limbs. It was the most remarkable sight I ever saw, and remarkable not so much for its appearance, strange and amazing though that was, as on account of its profoundly melancholy nature. For when Father Leverkuhn asked us what we thought of it and we timidly answered him that they might be plants: ‘No,’ he replied, ‘they are not, they only act that way. But do not think the less of them. Precisely because they do, because they try to as hard as they can, they are worthy of all respect.’

8
Griffin was not only an educator at many levels – he wrote
The Radical Theory in Chemistry
and
A System of Crystallography
, both more technical than his
Recreations
 – but also a manufacturer and purveyor of chemical apparatus: his ‘chemical and philosophical apparatus’ was used throughout Europe. His firm, later to become Griffin & Tatlock, was still a major supplier a century later, when I was a boy.

9
I read John Hersey’s
Hiroshima
a few years later, and I was struck by this passage:

When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off…)

10
Such thoughts about ‘tuning,’ I was later to read, had first been raised in the eighteenth century by the mathematician Euler, who had ascribed the color of objects to their having ‘little particles’ on their surface – atoms – tuned to respond to light of different frequencies. Thus an object would look red because its ‘particles’ were tuned to vibrate, resonate, to the red rays in the light that fell on it:

The nature of the radiation by which we see an opaque object does not depend on the source of light but on the vibratory motion of the very small particles [atoms] of the object’s surface. These little particles are like stretched strings, tuned to a certain frequency, which vibrate in response to a similar vibration of the air even if no one plucks them. Just as the stretched string is excited by the same sound that it emits, the particles of the surface begin to vibrate in tune with the incident radiation and to emit their own waves in every direction.

David Park, in
The Fire Within the Eye: A Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light
, writes of Euler’s theory:

I think this was the first time anyone who believed in atoms ever suggested that they have a vibrating internal structure. The atoms of Newton and Boyle are clusters of hard little balls, Euler’s atoms are like musical instruments. His clairvoyant insight was rediscovered much later, and when it was, nobody remembered who had it first.

11
Now, of course, none of these chemicals can be bought, and even school or museum laboratories are increasingly confined to reagents that are less hazardous – and less fun.

Linus Pauling, in an autobiographical sketch, described how he, too, obtained potassium cyanide (for a killing bottle) from a local druggist:

Just think of the differences today. A young person gets interested in chemistry and is given a chemical set. But it doesn’t contain potassium cyanide. It doesn’t even contain copper sulfate or anything else interesting because all the interesting chemicals are considered dangerous substances. Therefore, these budding young chemists don’t have a chance to do anything engrossing with their chemistry sets. As I look back, I think it is pretty remarkable that Mr. Ziegler, this friend of the family, would have so easily turned over one-third of an ounce of potassium cyanide to me, an eleven-year-old boy.

When I paid a visit not long ago to the old building in Finchley which had been Griffin & Tatlock’s home a half century ago, it was no longer there. Such shops, such suppliers, which had provided chemicals and simple apparatus and unimaginable delights for generations, have now all but vanished.

12
Many years later, when I read Keynes’s wonderful description of Lloyd George (in
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
), I was strangely reminded of Auntie Lina. Keynes speaks of the British prime minister’s ‘unerring, almost medium-like sensibility to everyone immediately around him.’