Kean (Sam). The Disappearing Spoon and other true tales from the Periodic Table, Black Swan, 2011.
My first thought when this book arrived was that the author might have missed a trick by failing to reference The Matrix, to my mind one of the greatest films ever produced. “There is no spoon” is a crucial and multi-layered line from it. It isn’t relevant to the book but it would have been a nice touch. He doesn’t reference Breaking Bad either which also seems a bit of a shame.
I enjoyed chemistry to O-level in my schooldays but I am not sure how much of it I actually understood. I did reasonably well I think by treating it as a series of puzzles to be solved. Like the author, I too remember being absolutely entranced by mercury which rejoices in the alternative names of quicksilver, the Latin name hydrargyrum (hence the symbol Hg) and, in the world of alchemy, azoth.
And there were the explosions. Lots of explosions. It is quite something to think of what went on in the school laboratory, sometimes even entirely unsupervised, all of which I am sure would be unthinkable now, quite rightly, under health and safety requirements. The next more advanced stage was organic chemistry which completely confounded me and I lost interest. But it has been rekindled by this book which does a sterling job of explaining things in very readable, layman’s terms. As quoted from a review in New Scientist on the cover, “Kean has Bill Bryson’s comic touch”. He personalises the elements which hugely aids understanding. I am finding it quite addictive.
We have come a long way from the four classical elements – earth, air, fire and water.
What I have finally gathered, in a very oversimplified way, is that it all seems to be about electrons and it is because of electrons that the periodic table has the shape and structure that it does (it had never occurred to me to question it). The formation of compounds is all about electron exchange.
I was vaguely aware that the numbers at the top and base of the squares in the table gave an element’s atomic number and weight but had no idea what they actually meant. The atomic number is the number of positive protons and this is immutable. If that changes it’s a different element. The number of neutrons can vary giving rise to isotopes. The atomic number plus the number of neutrons gives the atomic weight. I can forgive myself I think given that Kean says that “It took scientists many years to figure out the relationship between atomic number and atomic weight …”
The table itself “has its own grammar” and elements in the same columns are more closely related to each other than they are to their horizontal neighbours.
We learn that it was a man called Jack Kilby who to all intents and purposes invented the integrated circuit and the first real computer chips. Instead of scores of chips being laboriously soldered and wired together, Kilby started from a single block of germanium (Ge), later supplanted by silicon (Si).
There’s an entertaining list of people whose names have become everyday words: Dr Guillotin, Charles Ponzi, Jules Léotard, Étienne de Silhouette and Robert Bunsen. Bunsen improved rather than invented what we know as the Bunsen burner, that staple of the school laboratory. He too was fascinated by explosions but most significantly invented the spectroscope.
The titular disappearing spoon is made from gallium (Ga) which is a solid at room temperature but will melt like quicksilver in your hand or in a cup of tea. You can see it happening here: Bing Videos
[A couple of things have coincidentally arisen while I have been enjoying this book. One was a question on the podcast Lateral to which the answer involved the Shin-Etsu Chemical facility in Japan which manufactures the purest of silicon wafers for computer chips. There, elements such as silicon are incorporated directly into the paving or architecture. The other was an answer to a crossword clue, “pitchblende”, a.k.a. uraninite, a rather evil-looking substance which contains radium as a result of radioactive decay of uranium, amongst other things. Marie Curie used tons of it (her notebooks and papers from her laboratory are still heavily contaminated and so are stored in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliothèque Nationale).]
I love part of and a footnote to Chapter 2 ‘Near Twins and Black Sheep: The Genealogy of Elements’ which deals with extremely long words – the word section of The Guinness Book of Records was always where I looked first. For a long time this was thought to be the full spelling of the tryptophan protein at 1,913 letters but Kean has been unable actually to find it in print in full in spite of his best efforts in “the dimly lit stacks of the Library of Congress” and so the mosaic tobacco virus wears the crown at 1,185 letters. Shakespeare came up with “honorificabilitiudinitatibus” in Love’s Labour’s Lost, 27 letters, which may mean ‘with honourableness’ or may be but I am sure isn’t deliberately an anagram of a Latin sentence stating that Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by Francis Bacon. There’s “antidisestablishmentarianism”, 28 letters, and, I suppose, “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, 34 letters but they pale next to these long chemical compound (in both senses) names.
Fascinatingly and somewhat incidentally it was scientist Fred Hoyle who coined the phrase “big bang theory” but he did so derisively in order to rubbish the concept.
Chapter 4 pleasingly references and acknowledges Carl Sagan: ‘Where Atoms Come From: “We Are All Star Stuff”‘. And how appallingly extraordinary that lead (Pb) from leaded petrol became so pervasive in the atmosphere and even our hair that the analysis of chunks of meteors was nigh on impossible because of the contamination. It was Clair Patterson nevertheless who is most responsible for the removal of lead from petrol paint and ws able to come up with what is still the best estimate for the age of the earth, 4.55 billion years.
The fifth chapter, ‘Elements in Times of War’ is a catalogue of evil, dealing in particular with chemical warfare. We are reminded that only the United States refused to sign the Hague Convention of 1899 banning chemical weapons. Not that it took other countries long to break their word. A phenomenally vile German chemist, Fritz Haber, not only came up with industrial fertilisers but was more interested in nitrogen-based bombs and later bromine and then chlorine gas bombs one version of which released what became known as mustard gas on impact. As if that were not enough he also invented the insecticide Zyklon A which was superseded by Zyklon B, used to gas millions. Incredibly, Haber was Jewish.
The Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar meanwhile sold vast quantities of tungsten (W) to both sides during the Second World War, making huge profits. Tungsten or wolfram was used to manufacture war machinery and armour-piercing missiles.
War is of course so often the mother of invention and Kean says that if he had tried to write this book before World War II there would have been little to say about most of the metallic elements. Now, they all have their niches. Tantalum (Ta) or niobium (Nb) are essential for mobile phones, “elements that have decimated central Africa.” – the DRC holds 60% of the world’s supply.
[It was from the ever affable, reliable and clearly all-round genuinely compassionate Michael Palin in his latest travel documentary about the Philippines that I learnt of the importance of nickel (Ni) in enabling electric car batteries to hold their charge. I have long been sceptical about electric cars whilst of course acknowledging our desperate need to consume fewer fossil fuels. Things are changing but fossil fuel use in battery manufacture remains high and recycling may be becoming more advanced but to describe the cars as environmentally friendly ignores huge other costs – to people, the environment and human rights. Again the DRC in particular suffers under the demand for cobalt (Co), lithium (Li) mining in South America and Australia for example uses vast quantities of water to the detriment of local farmers and agriculture, and on the islands of the Palawan province in the Philippines, it’s nickel mining doing untold harm. Swathes of biodiverse old growth forests are destroyed, tax structures have been altered to benefit the mining companies, endemic wildlife is at great risk, and toxic run-off and debris contaminate water courses and obliterate the livelihoods of indigenous farmers and fishers – coastal waters are also severely affected.
“The mining companies have prevented Indigenous peoples from entering and using their forests and non-timber forest products. They hire security guards to keep them from the mining area.” This is taken from Palawan: a natural treasure in peril as the world scrambles for critical minerals | IUCN NL which describes all of this in detail. Spiritual and cultural connections to the land are also being ignored and lost. All this even though “The nature of the island is internationally recognised by the designation of multiple Key Biodiversity Areas and a UNESCO Man and Biosphere reserve.”
Palin highlights in particular the pervasive presence of nickel source laterite in the water. The mining companies bare-facedly claim that this has nothing to do with them and that the substance is in any case harmless. But it has rendered over 100 hectares (that we know about) of rice fields unproductive and when Palin throws a small rock into a river there is an immediate plume of brown particles, a phenomenon simply not present before.]
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