Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) (37 page)

To see [him], watching the company with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and sub-conscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking, and even what each was going to say next, compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor was to realize that the poor President [Wilson] would be playing blind man’s buff in that party.

13
Hooke himself was to become a marvel of scientific energy and ingenuity, abetted by his mechanical genius and mathematical ability. He kept voluminous, minutely detailed journals and diaries, which provide an incomparable picture not only of his own ceaseless mental activity, but of the whole intellectual atmosphere of seventeenth-century science. In his
Micrographia
, Hooke illustrated his compound microscope, along with drawings of the intricate, never-before-seen structures of insects and other creatures (including a famous picture of a Brobdingnagian louse, attached to a human hair as thick as a barge pole). He judged the frequency of flies’ wingbeats by their musical pitch. He interpreted fossils, for the first time, as the relics and impressions of extinct animals. He illustrated his designs for a wind gauge, a thermometer, a hygrometer, a barometer. And he showed an intellectual audacity sometimes even greater than Boyle’s, as with his understanding of combustion, which, he said, ‘is made by a substance inherent, and mixt with the Air.’ He identified this with ‘that property in the Air which it loses in the Lungs.’ This notion of a substance present in limited amounts in the air that is required for and gets used up in combustion and respiration is far closer to the concept of a chemically active gas than Boyle’s theory of igneous particles.

Many of Hooke’s ideas were almost completely ignored and forgotten, so that one scholar observed in 1803, ‘I do not know a more unaccountable thing in the history of science than the total oblivion of this theory of Dr. Hooke, so clearly expressed, and so likely to catch attention.’ One reason for this oblivion was the implacable enmity of Newton, who developed such a hatred of Hooke that he would not consent to assume the presidency of the Royal Society while Hooke was still alive, and did all he could to extinguish Hooke’s reputation. But deeper than this is perhaps what Gunther Stent calls ‘prematurity’ in science, that many of Hooke’s ideas (and especially those on combustion) were so radical as to be unassimilable, even unintelligible, in the accepted thinking of his time.

14
In his biography of Lavoisier, Douglas McKie includes an exhaustive list of Lavoisier’s scientific activities which paints a vivid picture of his times, no less than his own remarkable range of mind: ‘Lavoisier took part,’ McKie writes,

…in the preparation of reports on the water supply of Paris, prisons, mesmerism, the adulteration of cider, the site of the public abattoirs, the newly-invented ‘aerostatic machines of Montgolfier’ (balloons), bleaching, tables of specific gravity, hydrometers, the theory of colors, lamps, meteorites, smokeless grates, tapestry making, the engraving of coats-of-arms, paper, fossils, an invalid chair, a water-driven bellows, tartar, sulphur springs, the cultivation of cabbage and rape seed and the oils extracted thence, a tobacco grater, the working of coal mines, white soap, the decomposition of nitre, the manufacture of starch…the storage of fresh water on ships, fixed air, a reported occurrence of oil in spring water…the removal of oil and grease from silks and woollens, the preparation of nitrous ether by distillation, ethers, a reverberatory hearth, a new ink and inkpot to which it was only necessary to add water in order to maintain the supply of ink…, the estimation of alkali in mineral waters, a powder magazine for the Paris Arsenal, the mineralogy of the Pyrenees, wheat and flour, cesspools and the air arising from them, the alleged occurrence of gold in the ashes of plants, arsenic acid, the parting of gold and silver, the base of Epsom salt, the winding of silk, the solution of tin used in dyeing, volcanoes, putrefaction, fire-extinguishing liquids, alloys, the rusting of iron, a proposal to use ‘inflammable air’ in a public firework display (this at the request of the police), coal measures, dephlogisticated marine acid, lamp wicks, the natural history of Corsica, the mephitis of the Paris wells, the alleged solution of gold in nitric acid, the hygrometric properties of soda, the iron and salt works of the Pyrenees, argentiferous lead mines, a new kind of barrel, the manufacture of plate glass, fuels, the conversion of peat into charcoal, the construction of corn mills, the manufacture of sugar, the extraordinary effects of a thunder bolt, the retting of flax, the mineral deposits of France, plated cooking vessels, the formation of water, the coinage, barometers, the respiration of insects, the nutrition of vegetables, the proportion of the components in chemical compounds, vegetation, and many other subjects, far too many to be described here, even in the briefest terms.

15
Boyle had experimented with the burning of metals a hundred years before, and was well aware that these increased in weight when burned, forming a calx or ash that was heavier than the original. But his explanations of the increase of weight were mechanical, not chemical: he saw it as the absorption of ‘particles of fire.’ Similarly, he saw air itself not in chemical terms, but rather as an elastic fluid of a peculiar sort, used in a sort of mechanical ventilation, to wash the impurities out of the lungs. Findings were not consistent in the century that followed Boyle, partly because the gigantic ‘burning glasses’ used were of such power as to cause some metallic oxides to partly vaporize or sublime, causing losses rather than increases in weight. But even more frequently there was no weighing at all, for analytical chemistry, at this point, was still largely qualitative.

16
In this same month, Lavoisier got a letter from Scheele describing the preparation of what Scheele called Fire Air (oxygen) admixed with Fixed Air (carbon dioxide), from heating silver carbonate; Scheele had obtained pure Fire Air from mercuric oxide, even before Priestley had. But in the event, Lavoisier claimed the discovery of oxygen for himself and scarcely acknowledged the discoveries of his predecessors, feeling that they did not realize what it was that they had observed.

All this, and the question of what constitutes ‘discovery,’ is explored in the play
Oxygen
, by Roald Hoffmann and Carl Djerassi.

17
Replacing the concept of phlogiston with that of oxidation had immediate practical effects. It was now clear, for example, that a burning fuel needed as much air as possible for complete combustion. François-Pierre Argand, a contemporary of Lavoisier’s, was quick to exploit the new theory of combustion, designing a lamp with a flat ribbon wick, bent to fit inside a cylinder, so that air could reach it from both the inside and the outside, and a chimney which produced an updraft. The Argand burner was well established by 1783; there had been no lamp so efficient or so brilliant before.

18
Lavoisier’s list of elements included the three gases he had named (oxygen, azote [nitrogen], and hydrogen), three nonmetals (sulphur, phosphorus, and carbon), and seventeen metals. It also included muriatic, fluoric, and boracic ‘radicals’ and five ‘earths’: chalk, magnesia, baryta, alumina, and silica. These radicals and earths, he divined, were compounds containing new elements, which he thought would soon be obtained (all of them were indeed obtained by 1825, except fluorine, which defeated isolation for another sixty years). His final two ‘elements’ were Light and Heat – as if he had not been wholly able to free himself from the specter of phlogiston.

19
More than fifty years later (for my sixty-fifth birthday), I was able to gratify this boyhood fantasy, and had, besides the normal helium balloons, a few xenon balloons of astonishing density – as near to ‘lead balloons’ as could be (tungsten hexafluoride, though denser, would have been too dangerous to use – it is hydrolyzed by moist air, producing hydrofluoric acid). If one twirled these xenon balloons in one’s hand, then stopped, the heavy gas, by its own momentum, would continue rotating for a minute, almost as if it were a liquid.

20
While Cavendish was the first to observe that hydrogen and oxygen, when exploded together, created water, he interpreted their reaction in terms of phlogiston theory. Lavoisier, hearing of Cavendish’s work, repeated the experiment, reinterpreting the results correctly, and claimed the discovery for himself, making no acknowledgment of Cavendish. Cavendish was unmoved by this, being wholly indifferent to matters of priority and, indeed, to all matters merely human or emotional.

While Boyle and Priestley and Davy were all eminently human and engaging, as well as scientifically brilliant, Cavendish was quite a different figure. The range of his achievements was astounding, from his discovery of hydrogen and his beautiful researches on heat and electricity to his famous (and remarkably accurate) weighing of the earth. No less astounding, and even in his lifetime the stuff of legend, was his virtual isolation (he rarely spoke to anyone, and insisted his servants communicate with him in writing), his indifference to fame and fortune (though he was the grandson of a duke, and for much of his life the richest man in England), and his ingenuousness and incomprehension in regard to all human relationships. I was deeply moved, but if anything more mystified, when I read more about him.

He did not love; he did not hate; he did not hope; he did not fear; he did not worship as others do [wrote his biographer George Wilson in 1851]. He separated himself from his fellow men, and apparently from God. There was nothing earnest, enthusiastic, heroic, or chivalrous in his nature, and as little was there anything mean, grovelling, or ignoble. He was almost passionless. All that needed for its apprehension more than the pure intellect, or required the exercise of fancy, imagination, affection, or faith, was distasteful to Cavendish. An intellectual head thinking, a pair of wonderfully acute eyes observing, and a pair of very skilful hands experimenting or recording, are all that I realise in reading his memorials. His brain seems to have been but a calculating engine; his eyes inlets of vision, not fountains of tears; his hands instruments of manipulation which never trembled with emotion, or were clasped together in adoration, thanksgiving or despair; his heart only an anatomical organ, necessary for the circulation of the blood…

Yet, Wilson continued,

Cavendish did not stand aloof from other men in a proud or supercilious spirit, refusing to count them his fellows. He felt himself separated from them by a great gulf, which neither they nor he could bridge over, and across which it was vain to stretch hands or exchange greetings. A sense of isolation from his brethren, made him shrink from their society and avoid their presence, but he did so as one conscious of an infirmity, not boasting of an excellence. He was like a deaf mute sitting apart from a circle, whose looks and gestures show that they are uttering and listening to music and eloquence, in producing or welcoming which he can be no sharer. Wisely, therefore, he dwelt apart, and bidding the world farewell, took the self-imposed vows of a Scientific Anchorite, and, like the Monks of old, shut himself up within his cell. It was a kingdom sufficient for him, and from its narrow window he saw as much of the Universe as he cared to see. It had a throne also, and from it he dispensed royal gifts to his brethren. He was one of the unthanked benefactors of his race, who was patiently teaching and serving mankind, whilst they were shrinking from his coldness, or mocking his peculiarities…He was not a Poet, a Priest, or a Prophet, but only a cold, clear Intelligence, raying down pure white light, which brightened everything on which it felt, but warmed nothing – a Star of at least the second, if not of the first magnitude, in the Intellectual Firmament. Many years later, I reread Wilson’s astonishing biography and wondered what (in clinical terms) Cavendish ‘had.’ Newton’s emotional singularities – his jealously and suspiciousness, his intense enmities and rivalries – suggested a profound neurosis; but Cavendish’s remoteness and ingenuousness were much more suggestive of autism or Asperger’s syndrome. I now think Wilson’s biography may be the fullest account we are ever likely to have of the life and mind of a unique autistic genius.

21
The ease of obtaining hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis, in ideally inflammable proportions, led at once to the invention of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe, which produced higher temperatures than had ever been obtained before. This allowed, for example, the melting of platinum, and the raising of lime to a temperature at which it gave out the most brilliant sustained light ever seen.

22
Mendeleev, sixty years later, was to speak of Davy’s isolation of sodium and potassium as ‘one of the greatest discoveries in science’ – great in its bringing a new and powerful approach to chemistry, in its defining of the essential qualities of a metal, and in its exhibition of the elements’ twinship and analogy, the implication of a fundamental chemical group.

23
The enormous chemical reactivity of potassium made it a powerful new instrument in isolating other elements. Davy used it himself, only a year after he discovered it, to obtain the element boron from boric acid, and he tried to obtain silicon by the same method (Berzelius succeeded here, in 1824). Aluminium and beryllium, a few years later, were also isolated through the use of potassium.

24
Mary Shelley, as a child, was enthralled by Davy’s inaugural lecture at the Royal Institution, and years later, in
Frankenstein
, she was to model Professor Waldman’s lecture on chemistry rather closely on some of Davy’s words when, speaking of galvanic electricity, he said, ‘a new influence has been discovered, which has enabled man to produce from combinations of dead matter effects which were formerly occasioned only by animal organs.’