You Could Look It Up (60 page)

The
Index
and the
Manual
are still thriving, though they are mostly used online today. A review of the fourteenth edition in 2007 began, “Over time, certain reference books achieve such an outstanding reputation that any review of a new edition is almost unnecessary. Such is true of
The Merck Index
.”
10
The entries, called “monographs,” in the current
Merck Index
are more systematic than in the early editions, and include a CAS registry number, by which the Chemical Abstracts Service assigns a unique number to every known chemical substance; all the names, synonyms, and trade names that might appear in the chemical literature; a chemical formula and structural formula; the molecular weight of the substance; physical properties such as density and melting and boiling points; the therapeutic category; citations to the scientific literature; and so on. Especially important is advice on the potential hazards of each chemical listed. The companion, the
Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy
, is in its nineteenth edition, at an overwhelming thirty-five hundred pages, and now represents the collected knowledge of three hundred contributors. A
Merck Manual of Medical Information, Home Edition
, is aimed at lay folk, available both in print and online.

A slim 116-page pamphlet issued by the Chemical Rubber Company, known in the trade as
The Rubber Handbook
, hardly sounds like a
promising work of scholarship, especially since its intention did not go beyond selling rubber and related chemicals. But it mutated into
The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics
, a work essential to everyone working in the laboratory sciences for the better part of the last century.

A Handbook of Chemistry and Physics: A Ready-Reference Pocket Book of Chemical and Physical Data
appeared in 1913. This was not even a list of products offered for sale, like
Merck’s Index
; it was instead primarily a means of keeping the name of the Chemical Rubber Company in front of practicing scientists, much in the same way that companies give out pens and calendars bearing their names and logos. It is a list of miscellaneous information that a lab scientist might need to keep at hand. The work was “carefully selected by W[illiam] R[eed] Veazey, Ph.D., Chemistry Department, Case School of Applied Science,” supported by “more than a thousand members of high standing in the Chemical and Physical profession.”
11

The contents are impressively heterogeneous. The
Handbook
opened with a table of “International Atomic Weights,” according to the latest cutting-edge standards of 1911: all eighty-one elements then known were listed with their chemical symbols and atomic weights to two decimal places. (Astatine, francium, hafnium, promethium, protactinium, rhenium, technetium, and all the transruanic elements were not discovered until after the first
Handbook
was published, and what is now known as nobium was then columbium.) Then, without transition, came a page of a dozen “Antidotes of Poisons”: “
Hydrocyanic Acid.
—Hydrogen peroxide internal, and artificial respiration, breathing ammonia or chlorine from chlorinated lime, ferrous sulphate followed by potassium carbonate, emetics, warmth.”
12
Then appeared, with just as little warning, “Vapor Tension of Water in Millimeters of Mercury –2° to +36°C.” Scattered throughout the guide were lists of fusible alloys, comparisons of wire gauges, density of water at temperatures from 0° to 36° in tenth-degree intervals, with figures given to six decimal places, and other miscellanea. More than two and a half pages were devoted to “One Hundred Completed Chemical Equations,” such as “3Hg(No3)2 + 6FeSO4 = 2Fe(NO3)3 + 2Fe2(SO4)3 + 3Hg.”

The sheer range of material is striking, and the
Handbook
was frank about its randomness: one section was headed simply
MISCELLANEOUS
DATA AND FORMULAE
. Some of it was clearly written for novices, some for experts. The section on
FUNDAMENTAL CHEMICAL THEORIES
, for instance, with entries such as “
The Atomic Theory
.—All elementary forms of matter are composed of very small unit quantities called atoms,” contained information obvious to anyone working in the field, but students still needed the reminder. Likewise the guide to the metric system—by 1913 the standard throughout Europe, but still novel to American scientists, so the
Handbook
included tables converting feet, gallons, and troy ounces to meters, liters, and grams. Professional chemists, on the other hand, benefited more from a section, one of the longest in the book, headed
GRAVIMETRIC FACTORS AND THEIR LOGARITHMS
.

A list of
PHYSICAL CONSTANTS OF INORGANIC COMPOUNDS
—solubility, molecular weight, specific gravity, melting and boiling points for 651 compounds from acetic acid to zinc sulphide blende—was just the sort of information a chemist would want to have nearby. The
Handbook
also offered some unexpected information: it ventured into nutritional science, as with “Functions and Uses of Food in the Body” (“
Protein
.—Builds and repairs tissue”) and a table of the amount of
protein, fat, carbohydrates, ash, water, and calories in a few dozen foods: “Candy stick … Herring, smoked … Lard … Parsnip.” Formulas for converting temperatures among the Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Réaumur scales were useful then. Likewise the table of
BASICITY OF ACIDS WITH VARIOUS INDICATORS
—the modern notion of pH had been developed as recently as 1909 and would not be common among scientists for another decade. Toward the end is a section on
TEXT BOOKS, MANUALS AND REFERENCE BOOKS
, providing standard citations such as Lodge’s
Elementary Mechanics
and Bottone’s
Electrical Instrument Making
.

“We shall feel amply rewarded for our effort and expense,” wrote W. R. Veazey in 1913, “if this volume proves to be of use and convenience to the profession.”
13
They have indeed been amply rewarded. The Nobel laureate Linus Pauling summed up the importance of the
Handbook
: “People who have interviewed me have commented on the extensive knowledge that I have about the properties of substances. I attribute this knowledge in part to the fact that I possessed the Rubber Handbook.” Sixty years after the first edition appeared, the Chemical Rubber Company stopped making chemicals and rubber, but they continued issuing the manual, which had become more important than their entire manufacturing business. A review of the seventy-fifth edition (1994) calls the
CRC Handbook
“a classic must for scientists in all areas,”
14
and CRC Press, now part of Taylor & Francis, continues to issue new editions of the
CRC Handbook
, which is now in its ninetieth edition. The
CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae
went through a major change in 1991, when most of the functions available on pocket calculators were nixed to make room for more useful material.

The
Handbook
is no longer a book but a franchise, with a tremendous suite of related books: the
CRC Handbook of Laboratory Safety
, the
CRC Handbook of Tables for Probability and Statistics
, the
CRC Handbook of Environmental Control
, the
CRC Handbook of Radiation Measurement and Protection
, the
CRC Handbook of Antibiotic Compounds
, the
CRC Handbook of Animal Models for the Rheumatic Diseases
, the
CRC Handbook of Imunoblotting of Proteins
, the
CRC Handbook of Lubrication
, the
CRC Handbook of Avian Body Masses
… the list goes on and on. But even these dozens of tables available from CRC are just a small selection of the information modern scientists need to keep at hand.
The range of tables available to the scientist at the end of the twentieth century was gigantic: a 214-page reference book called
Handbooks and Tables in Science and Technology
is needed just to list the other reference books.
15

The science historian Lynn Thorndike’s claim—“Encyclopedias are perhaps the most important monuments of the history of science and of civilization”
16
—may sound like hyperbole. Surely legendary works of scholarship like Newton’s
Principia Mathematica
, Darwin’s
Origin of Species
, and Einstein’s famous papers of 1905 are the real monuments of science. But it takes nothing away from the towering geniuses of science to remember that the day-to-day operations in the laboratory and in the classroom owe much to the practical works that have sat on every lab bench for generations. Otto Lueger’s
Lexikon der gesamten Technik
(1894) was updated through the twentieth century, and we continue generating gigantic reference works such as the
Human Genome Project
(2003), the effort to identify and catalog the billions of base pairs that make up human DNA. Works like the
Merck Index
and the
CRC Handbook
rarely get their due in the history of scientific endeavor; they are taken for granted, treated as part of the background of scientific discovery rather than part of the story itself. That assumption should change.

CHAPTER
23 ½

AT NO EXTRA COST!

The Business of Reference Books

“Information,” according to the slogan, “wants to be free.” But compiling that information is work, and the people who do it expect to be paid, though very few have gotten rich in the process. It has always been difficult to break even. Johnson's
Dictionary
was published by booksellers working together in an ad-hoc consortium, a “conger,” that allowed all of them to minimize risk. They paid Johnson £
1
,
575
—maybe around £
200
,
000
or $
300
,
000
today—and they covered the costs of printing and distribution. They planned to break even if they sold a thousand sets for £
4
10
s., but that was several months' wages for a day laborer. Sales were disappointing. After a few months the booksellers tried to sell the
Dictionary
in pieces:
165
parts, one a week, at sixpence each (which came out to the same £
4
10
s. as the original). The results were no better. The
Dictionary
had received strong notices, and those in the know recognized it as a major work—but it seemed to be a commercial flop.

At that point the idea for an abridged edition came up. Johnson took his hefty
Dictionary
and tightened up the definitions, trimmed the etymologies, and stripped out the 115,000 quotations—the very feature that made it such a lexicographical milestone. The result was two much smaller volumes, octavos instead of folios, called
A Dictionary of the English Language … Abstracted from the Folio Edition
. Finally the publishers had something that made money. Over Johnson's lifetime, the folio
Dictionary
sold about five thousand copies, compared to thirty-five thousand of the abridged editions.
1
To history, “Johnson's
Dictionary
” is the monumental work of 1755, but to the large majority of its actual users, “Johnson's
Dictionary
” did not have a single quotation. When Becky Sharp threw a copy of Johnson's “dixonary” out the carriage
window in William Makepeace Thackeray's
Vanity Fair
, it was no doubt the little one.