56 PERSONAL HISTORY BRILLIANT LIGHT

A chemical boyhood. 6 BY O LI V ER SAC KS

Something has got into me these last Achilles. Or you could alloy copper with weeks—I do not know why. I have pulled zinc, my mother said, to produce brass. out my old books (and bought many new All of us—my mother, my brothers, ones), have set the little tungsten bar on a and I—had our own brass menorahs for pedestal and papered the kitchen with Hanukkah. (My father, though, had a chemical charts. I read lists of cosmic abun- silver one.) dances in the bath. On cold, dismal Satur- I knew copper, the shiny rose color day afternoons, there is nothing better than of the great copper cauldron in our curling up with a fat volume of Thorpe’s kitchen—it was taken down only once a Dictionary of Applied Chemistry, opening year, when the quinces and crab apples it anywhere, and reading at random. It were ripe in the garden and my mother was Uncle Tungsten’s favorite book, and would stew them to make jelly. now it is one of mine. On depressive morn- I knew zinc—the dull, slightly bluish ings, I like to work out atomic radii or ion- birdbath in the garden was made of ization potentials with my Grape-Nuts— zinc—and tin, from the heavy tinfoil in their charm has come back, and they will get which sandwiches were wrapped for a me going for the day. picnic. My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a I—BEFORE THE WAR special “cry.” “It’s due to deformation of the crystal structure,” she said, forget- ANY of my childhood memo- ting that I was five and could not un- ries are of metals: these seemed derstand her—and yet her words made M to exert a power on me from me want to know more. the start. They stood out, conspicuous There was an enormous cast-iron against the heterogeneousness of the lawn roller out in the garden—it weighed world, by their shining, gleaming qual- five hundred pounds, my father said. ity, their silveriness, their smoothness We, as children, could hardly budge it, and weight. They seemed cool to the but he was immensely strong and could touch, and they rang when they were lift it off the ground. It was always struck. slightly rusty, and this bothered me, for I also loved the yellowness, the heav- the rust flaked off, leaving little cavities iness of gold. My mother would take and scabs, and I was afraid the whole the wedding ring from her finger and roller might corrode and fall apart one let me handle it for a while, as she told day, reduced to a mass of red dust and me of its inviolacy, how it never tar- flakes. I needed to think of metals as nished. “Feel how heavy it is,” she stable, like gold—able to stave off the would add. “It’s even heavier than lead.” losses and ravages of time. I knew what lead was, for I had handled the heavy, soft piping the plumber had WOULD sometimes beg my mother left behind one year. Gold was soft, too, I to bring out her engagement ring my mother told me, so it was usually and show me the diamond in it. It combined with another metal to make flashed like nothing I had ever seen, al- it harder. most as if it gave out more light than it It was the same with copper—people took in. My mother showed me how mixed it with tin to produce bronze. easily it scratched glass, and then she Bronze! The very word was like a trum- told me to put it to my lips. It was pet to me, for battle was the brave clash strangely, startlingly cold—metals felt of bronze upon bronze, bronze spears cool to the touch, but the diamond was on bronze shields, the great shield of icy. That was because it conducted heat ROBERT PARKHARRISON, “EDISON’S LIGHT” (1998)/BONNI BENRUBI GALLERY 58 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20, 1999 so well, she said—better than any Did the sun and stars burn in the same light up my cavern of sheets with an metal—so it drew the body heat away way? Why did they never go out? eerie, greenish light. from one’s lips when they touched it. All these things—the rubbed amber, This was a feeling I was never to forget. Y mother showed me other won- the magnets, the crystal radio, the clock Another time, she showed me how if M ders—she had a necklace of dials with their tireless coruscations— one touched a diamond to a cube of ice polished yellow pieces of amber, and gave me a sense of invisible rays and it would draw heat from one’s hand into she showed me how, when she rubbed forces, a sense that beneath the familiar the ice and cut straight through it as if them, tiny pieces of paper would fly up world of colors and appearances lay a it were butter. and stick to them. Or she would put the dark, hidden world of mysterious laws My mother told me that diamond electrified amber against my ear, and I and phenomena. was a special form of carbon, like the would hear and feel a tiny snap, a spark. coal we used in every room in winter. I My older brothers Marcus and Da- GREW up in London, before the war. was puzzled by this—how could black, vid were fond of magnets, and enjoyed I My father and mother were both flaky, opaque coal be the same as the demonstrating them to me, drawing a physicians. My father had his surgery in hard, transparent gemstone in her ring? magnet beneath a piece of paper on the house, with all sorts of medicines, I would gaze into the heart of the which were strewn powdery iron filings. lotions, and elixirs in the dispensary— coal fire, watching it go from a dim red I never tired of the remarkable patterns it looked like an old-fashioned chem- glow to orange, to yellow, and blow on which rayed out from the poles of the ist’s shop in miniature—and a small lab it with the bellows until it glowed al- magnet. “Those are lines of force,” my with a spirit lamp, test tubes, and re- most white-hot. If it got hot enough, brother Marcus explained to me—but I agents for testing patients’ urine, like I wondered, would it blaze blue, be was none the wiser. the bright-blue Fehling’s solution, blue-hot? Then there was the crystal radio I which turned yellow when there was I loved light, especially the light- played with in bed, jiggling the wire on sugar in the urine. There were potions ing of the Sabbath candles on Friday the crystal until I got a station loud and and cordials in cherry red and golden nights, when my mother would mur- clear. And the luminous clocks—the yellow, and colorful liniments like gen- mur a prayer as she lit them. I was not house was full of them, because my tian violet and malachite green. allowed to touch them once they were Uncle Abe had been a pioneer in the de- I badgered my parents constantly lit—they were sacred, I was told, their velopment of luminous paints. These, with questions. Where did color come flames were holy, not to be fiddled too, like my crystal radio, I would take from? Why did the platinum loop cause with. The little cone of blue flame at under the bedclothes at night, into my the gas to catch fire? What happened the candle’s center—why was it blue? private, secret vault, and they would to the sugar when one stirred it into the tea? Where did it go? Why did water bubble when it boiled? (I liked to watch water set to boil on the stove, to see it quiv- ering with heat before it burst into bubbles.) Whenever we had “a fuse,” my father would climb up to the porcelain fuse box high on the kitchen wall, identify the fused fuse, now reduced to a melted blob, and replace it with a new one of an odd, soft wire. I had not known that a metal could melt, nor did I know why it had melted. Could a fuse really be made from the same material as a lawn roller or a tin can? What was electricity, and how did it flow? Was it a sort of fluid like heat, which could also be conducted? Why did it flow through the metal but not the porcelain? This, too, called for explanation. My questions were endless, and touched on everything, though “I was once a very beautiful woman, but forty years of they tended to circle around, re- reading the ‘Times’ has taken its toll.” turn to, my obsession, the met- STRANGE LIQUID METAL 59 als. Why were they shiny? Why smooth? Why cool? Why hard? Why heavy? Why did they bend, not break? Why did they ring? My mother tried to ex- plain, but eventually, when I exhausted her patience, she would say, “That’s all I can tell you—you’ll have to quiz Uncle Dave to learn more.”

E had called him “Uncle Tung- W sten” for as long as I could re- member, because he manufactured light bulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire. (His firm was called Tungstalite.) I often visited him in his old factory in Farringdon and watched him at work, in a wing collar, with his shirtsleeves rolled up. The heavy dark tungsten powder would be pressed, hammered, sintered at red heat, then drawn into “You people make me sick. Nonetheless, here’s a little toe-tapper.” finer and finer wire for the filaments. Uncle’s hands were seamed with the • • black powder, beyond the power of any washing to get out. After thirty years of massy little bars and ingots most of all. sonably well for thousands of others. his working with tungsten, I imagined, He caressed them, balanced them (ten- But the school, as reconstituted, was a the heavy element was in his lungs and derly, it seemed to me) in his hands. travesty of the original. Food was ra- bones, in every vessel and viscus, every “Feel it, Oliver!” he would say, thrusting tioned and scarce, and our food parcels tissue of his body. I thought of this as a a bar at me. “Nothing in the world feels from home were looted by the matron. wonder, not a curse—his body invigo- like sintered tungsten.” He would tap Our basic diet was swedes and mangel- rated and fortified by the mighty ele- the little bars and they would emit a wurzels—giant turnips and huge, coarse ment, given a strength and enduring- deep clink. “The sound of tungsten,” beetroots grown basically for cattle. ness almost more than human. Uncle Dave would say. “Nothing like There was a steam-pudding whose re- Whenever I visited the factory, he it.” I did not know whether this was volting, suffocating smell comes back to would take me around the machines, or true, but I never questioned it. me (as I write, almost sixty years later) have his foreman do so. (The foreman and sets me retching and gagging once was a short, muscular man, a Popeye II—EXILE again. The horribleness of the school with enormous forearms, a palpable tes- was made worse for most of us by the tament to the benefits of working with N September, 1939, war broke out. It sense that we had been abandoned by tungsten.) I never tired of the ingenious I was expected that London would be our families, left to rot in this awful machines, always beautifully clean and heavily bombed, and parents were pres- place as an inexplicable punishment for sleek and oiled, or the furnace where the sured by the government to evacuate something we had done. black powder was compacted from a their children to safety in the country- The headmaster seemed to have be- powdery incoherence into dense, hard side. My brother Michael, five years come unhinged by his own power. He bars with a gray sheen. older than I, had been going to a day had been decent enough, even well During my visits to the factory, and school near our house in West Hamp- liked, as a teacher in London, Michael sometimes at home, Uncle Dave would stead, and when it was closed at the said, but at Greystone, where he took teach me about metals, with little ex- outbreak of the war one of the assistant over, he had quickly become a monster. periments. I knew that mercury, that masters there decided to reconstitute He was vicious and sadistic, and beat strange liquid metal, was incredibly the school, in a little village I will call many of us almost daily, with relish. heavy and dense. Even lead floated on Greystone. My parents (I was to realize “Willfulness” was severely punished. I it, as my uncle showed me with a lead many years later) were greatly worried sometimes wondered if I was his “dar- bullet and a bowl of quicksilver. But about the consequences of separating a ling,” the one selected for a maximum then he pulled out a small gray bar from little boy—I was just six—from his of punishment, but in fact many of us his pocket, and, to my amazement, it family and sending him to a makeshift were so beaten we could hardly sit sank immediately to the bottom. This, boarding school in the Midlands, but down for days on end. Once, when he he said, was his metal: tungsten. they felt they had no choice, and took had broken a cane on my eight-year- Uncle loved the density of the tung- some comfort that at least Michael and old bottom, he roared “Damn you, sten he made, and its refractoriness, its I would be together. Sacks! Look what you have made me great chemical stability. He loved to This, perhaps, might have worked do!” and added the cost of the cane to handle it—the wire, the powder, but the out well—evacuation did work out rea- my bill. Bullying and cruelty, mean- 60 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20, 1999

electric torches dimmed with red crêpe paper. We had no idea if our houses would still be standing in the morning. On another occasion, an incendiary bomb, a thermite bomb, fell behind our house, and burned with a terrible, white-hot heat. My father had a stirrup pump, and my brothers carried pails of wa- ter to him, but water seemed useless against this infernal fire—indeed, made it burn even more furiously. There was a vicious hissing and sputtering when the water hit the metal, and meanwhile the bomb was melting its casing, and throwing white- hot blobs and jets of mol- ten metal in all directions. The lawn was as scarred and charred as a volcanic land- scape the next morning, but littered, to my delight, with beautiful gleaming shrapnel. I had never seen melted iron or magnesium before.

HERE had been some T religious feeling, of a childish sort, in the years before the war. When my

• • mother lit the Sabbath can- dles, I would feel, almost while, were rife among the boys, and lessons, and she would make tea for me. physically, the Sabbath coming in, be- great ingenuity was exercised in find- And there was the village shop, where I ing welcomed, descending like a soft ing out the weak points of the smaller would go to buy gob-stoppers and, oc- mantle over the earth. I imagined, too, children and tormenting them beyond casionally, a slice of Spam. There were that this occurred all over the universe— bearable limits. I felt trapped at Grey- even times in school which I enjoyed: the Sabbath descending on far-off star stone, without hope, without recourse, making model planes of balsa wood, systems and galaxies, enfolding them all forever—and many of us, I suspect, and a tree house with a friend, a red- in the peace of God. were severely disturbed by being there. haired boy of my own age. But when I was suddenly abandoned And yet the old vicarage, with its by my parents (as I saw it) my trust in spacious garden, where the school was URING the four years I was at Grey- them, my love for them, was rudely housed, the old church next door to it, D stone, my parents visited us at the shaken, and with this my belief in God, the village itself, and the countryside school, but very rarely. There was one too. What evidence was there, I kept surrounding it were charming, even return visit to London, in December of asking myself, for God’s existence? I de- idyllic. The villagers were kind to these 1940—a frightening one, because the termined on an experiment to resolve obviously uprooted and unhappy young Blitz was still at its height. One night, the matter decisively: I planted two boys from London. It was here in the a thousand-pound bomb fell on the rows of radishes side by side in the veg- village that I learned to ride horses, with house next to ours. Fortunately, it failed etable garden, and asked God to bless a strapping young woman; she some- to explode. All of us, the entire street, it one or curse one, whichever He wished, times hugged me when I looked miser- seemed, crept away that night (my fam- so that I might see a clear difference be- able. (My brother had read me parts ily to a cousin’s house)—many of us in tween them. The two rows of radishes of “Gulliver’s Travels,” and I some- our pajamas—walking as softly as we came up identical, and this was proof times thought of her as Glumdalclitch, could. (Might vibration set the thing for me that no God existed. But I Gulliver’s giant nurse.) There was an off ?) The streets were pitch dark, for the longed now even more for something old lady to whom I went for piano blackout was in force, and we all carried to believe in. GARDEN OF NUMBERS 61

As the beatings, the starvings, the I particularly loved prime numbers, sures. She showed me the spiral pat- tormentings continued, those of us the fact that they were indivisible, could terns on the faces of sunflowers in the who remained at school (many had not be broken down, were inalienably garden, and suggested I count the flo- been taken away by their parents, but themselves. (I had no such confidence rets in these. As I did so, she pointed Michael and I never complained) were in myself, for I felt I was being divided, out that they were arranged according driven to more and more extreme psy- alienated, broken down more and more to a series—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.— chological measures—dehumanizing, every week.) Why did primes come each number being the sum of the two derealizing, our chief tormentor. Some- when they did? Was there any pattern, that preceded it. And if one divided times, while being beaten, I would see any logic to their distribution? Was each number by the number that fol- him reduced to a gesticulating skeleton. there any limit to them, or did they go lowed it (1/2, 2/3, 3/5, 5/8, etc.), one (I had seen radiographs at home— on forever? I spent innumerable hours approached the number 0.618. This se- bones in a tenuous envelope of flesh.) factoring, searching for primes, memoriz- ries, she said, was called a Fibonacci At other times, I would see him as not ing them. They afforded me many hours series, after an Italian mathematician a being at all but a temporary vertical of absorbed, solitary play, in which I who had lived centuries before. The collection of atoms. I would say to my- needed no one else. ratio of 0.618, she added, was known self, “He’s only atoms”—and, more and I made a grid, ten by ten, of the first as the Divine Proportion or Golden more, I craved a world that was “only hundred numbers, with the primes Section, an ideal geometrical propor- atoms.” The violence exuded by the blacked in, but I could see no pattern, tion found in many plants and shells, headmaster seemed at times to con- no logic to their distribution. I made and often used by architects. taminate the whole of living nature, so larger tables, increased my grids to She would take me for long, botaniz- that I saw violence as the very principle twenty squared, thirty squared, but still ing walks in the forest, where she had of life. could discern no obvious pattern. me look at fallen pinecones, to see that What could I do, in these circum- The only real holidays I had during they, too, had spirals based on the Golden stances, other than seek a private place, the war were visits to a favorite aunt in Section. She showed me horsetails grow- a refuge where I might be alone, absorb Cheshire, in the midst of Delamere ing near a stream, had me feel their stiff, myself without interference from oth- Forest, where she had founded the Jew- jointed stems, and suggested that I mea- ers, and find some sense of stability and ish Fresh Air School for “delicate chil- sure these when I got back to school, and warmth? My situation was perhaps sim- dren.” All the children, indeed, had little plot the lengths of the successive segments ilar to that which Freeman Dyson de- gardens of their own, squares of earth as a graph. When I did so, and saw that scribes in his autobiographical essay “To a couple of yards wide, bordered by the curve flattened out, she explained Teach or Not to Teach”: stones. I wished desperately that I could that the increments were “exponential,” I belonged to a small minority of boys go there, rather than Greystone—but and that this was the way growth usually who were lacking in physical strength and this was a wish I never expressed (though occurred. These ratios, these geometric athletic prowess . . . and squeezed between I wondered if my clear-sighted and lov- proportions, she told me, were to be the twin oppressions of whip and sandpaper [a vicious headmaster and bullying boys]. . . . ing aunt did not divine it). found all over nature—numbers were the We found our refuge in a territory that was On my visits, Auntie Len always way the world is put together. Numbers, equally inaccessible to our Latin-obsessed delighted me by showing me all sorts my aunt said, are the way God thinks. headmaster and our football-obsessed schoolmates. We found our refuge in sci- of botanical and mathematical plea- The association of plants, of gar- ence....We learned...that science is a ter- ritory of freedom and friendship in the midst of tyranny and hatred.

OR me, the refuge I found at first F was in numbers. My father was a whiz at mental arithmetic, and I, too, even at the age of six, was quick with figures—and, more, in love with them. I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chao- tic world. There was in numbers and their relation something absolute, cer- tain, not to be questioned, beyond doubt. (Years later, when I read “1984,” the cli- mactic horror for me, the ultimate sign of Winston’s disintegration and surren- der, was his being forced, under torture, to deny that two and two is four. Even more terrible was the fact that eventually he began to doubt this in his own mind— that, finally, numbers failed him, too.) “It’s so silly. Now I can’t even remember why I killed him.” 62 dens, with numbers assumed a curiously other metals—osmium, tantalum, rhe- higher melting point. He pulled out a intense, symbolic form for me. I started nium—were new to me. Uncle kept sam- small crucible from the cabinet, beauti- to think in terms of a kingdom or a ples of them all, and some of their ores, fully smooth and shiny. It looked new. realm of numbers, with its own geogra- in a cabinet next to the bulbs. As he “This was made around 1840,” he said. phy, languages, and laws; but, even handled them, he would expatiate on “A century of use, and almost no wear.” more, of a garden of numbers, a magi- their unique, sovereign properties and cal, secret, wonderful garden in which I qualities, how they had been discovered, NCLE DAVE saw the whole earth, I could wander and play to my heart’s how they were refined, and why they U think, as a gigantic natural labo- content. It was a garden hidden from, were so suitable for making filaments. ratory, where heat and pressure caused inaccessible to, the bullies and the head- He would bring out a pitted gray not only vast geologic movements but master; and a garden, too, where I some- nugget: “Dense, eh?” he would say, toss- innumerable chemical miracles. “Look how felt welcomed and befriended. ing it to me. “That’s a platinum nugget. at these diamonds,” he would say. “They Among my friends in this garden were This is how it is found, as nuggets of were formed thousands of millions of not only primes and Fibonacci sunflow- pure metal. Most metals are found as years ago, deep in the earth, under un- ers but perfect numbers (such as 6 or compounds with other things, in ores. imaginable pressures.” 28, the sum of their factors excluding There are very few other metals which He liked to pull out the native met- themselves); Pythagorean numbers, occur native like platinum—just gold, als from his cabinet—twists and span- whose square was the sum of two other silver, and copper, and one or two oth- gles of rosy copper, wiry silver, latticed squares (such as 3, 4, 5 or 5, 12, 13); ers.” These other native metals had been gold. “Think how it must have been,” and “amicable numbers”—pairs of num- known, he said, for thousands of years, he said, “seeing metal for the first time— bers (such as 220 and 284) in which the but platinum had been “discovered” sudden glints of reflected sunlight, sud- factors of each added up to the other. only two hundred years ago, for though den shinings in a rock or at the bottom And my aunt had shown me that my it had been prized by the Incas for cen- of a stream!” garden of numbers was doubly mag- turies, it was unknown to the rest of the He would conjure up the first smelt- ical—not just delightful and friendly, world. When the explorers brought it ing of metal, how cavemen might have always there, but part of the plan on back, in the eighteenth century, the new used rocks containing a copper min- which the whole universe was built. metal enchanted all of Europe—it was eral—green malachite, perhaps—to sur- denser, more ponderous than gold, and, round a cooking fire and suddenly real- III—UNCLE TUNGSTEN like gold, it was “noble” and never tar- ized as the wood turned to charcoal that nished. It had a lustre exceeding that of the green rock was bleeding, turning RETURNED to London in the sum- silver. (Its Spanish name, platina, meant into a red liquid: molten copper. I mer of 1943, after four years of exile, “little silver.”) It took a much hotter fire, a white- a ten-year-old boy, withdrawn and dis- Native platinum was often found hot fire, to obtain tungsten. Uncle Dave turbed in some ways but with a passion with two other metals, iridium and os- handed me a little ingot. “Tungsten,” he for metals, for plants, and for numbers. mium, which were even denser, harder, said. “No one realized at first how per- I delighted in being able to visit Un- more refractory. Here Uncle pulled out fect a metal tungsten was. It has the cle Tungsten again, and I think he also samples for me to handle, mere flakes, highest melting point of any metal, delighted in having his young protégé no larger than lentils, but astoundingly it is tougher than steel, and it keeps back, for he would spend hours with me heavy. These were “osmiridium,” a nat- its strength at high temperatures—an in his factory and his lab, answering ural alloy of osmium and iridium, the ideal metal!” questions as fast as I could ask them. two densest substances in the world. Uncle had a variety of tungsten bars He had several glass-fronted cabinets There was something about heaviness, in his office—some he used as paper- in his office, one of which contained a density—I could not say why—which weights, but others had no discernible series of electric light bulbs: there were gave me a thrill, and an immense sense function whatever, except to give plea- several Edison bulbs from the early of security and comfort. Osmium, more- sure to their owner and maker. And, eighteen-eighties, with filaments of car- over, had the highest melting point of all indeed, by comparison steel bars, and bonized thread; a bulb from 1897, with the platinum metals, so it was used at even lead, felt light and somehow por- a filament of osmium; and several bulbs one time, Uncle said, to replace the plat- ous, tenuous. “These lumps of tung- from a few years later, with spidery fila- inum filaments in light bulbs. sten have an extraordinary concentra- ments of tantalum tracing a zigzag course The great virtue of the platinum tion of mass,” he would say. “They inside them. metals was that they were as noble and would be deadly as weapons—far dead- Then there were the more recent workable as gold but had much high- lier than lead.” bulbs—these were Uncle Dave’s special er melting points. Crucibles made of But sooner or later Uncle’s solilo- pride and interest, for some he had pio- platinum could withstand the hottest quies and demonstrations before the neered himself—with tungsten fila- temperatures; beakers and spatulas of cabinet all returned to tungsten’s min- ments of all shapes and sizes. There was it could withstand the most corrosive eral ores. One of these, scheelite, was even one labelled “Bulb of the Future?” acids. Uncle Dave often used plati- named after the great Swedish chemist It had no filament, but the word “Rhe- numware in his own lab, sometimes Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who was the nium” was inscribed on a card beside it. alloyed with other platinum metals first to show that it contained a new ele- I had heard of platinum, but the to give it greater hardness, and a still ment. The ore was so dense that miners 64 called it “heavy stone,” or “tung-sten,” the name subsequently given to the el- ement itself. Scheelite was found in INCUNABULAR beautiful orange crystals that fluoresced bright blue in ultraviolet light. Uncle Tom Fisher was my Grail King: Dave kept specimens of scheelite and he endowed the Gothic library other fluorescent minerals in a special to which my life had been pointing. cabinet in his office. The dim light of His high sandstone box held the culture Farringdon Road on a November eve- bush folk were scorned for lacking. ning, it seemed to me, would be trans- formed when he turned on his Wood’s On its milk-glass stack levels I still lamp, and the luminous chunks in the hear stiletto heels clacking, cabinet suddenly glowed orange, tur- glass floors for the light to perfuse, quoise, crimson, green. not for voyeurs: you could only Though scheelite was the largest make out the sex of the shoes. source of tungsten metal, the metal had first been obtained from a different The lipsticked gargoyle downstairs mineral, called wolframite. Indeed, kissed much social ascent. tungsten was sometimes called wolfram, Above, I’d browse beside the point and still retained the chemical symbol power made, for the points it didn’t. of W. This thrilled me, because my own Reflex, more than intent. middle name was Wolf. Heavy seams of the tungsten ores were often found The reading-room beams supported heraldry along with tin ore, and the tungsten and a roof like a steep tent. made it more difficult to isolate the tin. Mine was a plan-free mass of querying This was why, my uncle continued, they of condensed humans off the shelves, had originally called the metal wol- all numbered, the tribal, the elderly. fram—for, like a hungry animal, it “stole” the tin. I liked the name wol- Knowledge was the gait of compressed selves fram, its sharp, animal quality, its evoca- and poetry seemed windows of italic tion of a ravening, mystical wolf—and inset in grievous prose thought of it as a tie between Uncle which served it and mastered it: Tungsten, Uncle Wolfram, and myself, few grapes for many rows. O. Wolf Sacks.

AMES fascinated me—their sounds, ammoniac. There was cinnabar, the were evocative in a more topical way: N their associations, the sense they heavy red sulfide of mercury, and massi- stolzite, a lead tungstate, and scholzite, gave of people and places. The names of cot and minium, the twin oxides of lead. too. Who were Stolz and Scholz? Their the elements were filled with such evo- Then there were minerals named names seemed very Prussian to me, and cations, but there were only a few dozen after people. One of the most common this, just after the war, evoked an anti- of these, whereas the number of miner- minerals, much of the redness of the German feeling. I imagined Stolz and als ran into the hundreds or thousands. world, was the hydrated iron oxide Scholz as Nazi officers with barking These were all beautifully laid out, with called goethite. (Was this named in voices, swordsticks, and monocles. their names and formulas, in the cabi- honor of Goethe, or did he discover it? Other names appealed to me mostly nets of the Geology Museum, in South I had read that he had a passion for for their sound, and for the images they Kensington, where, later, I would go mineralogy and chemistry.) Many min- conjured up. I loved classical words and whenever I could. erals were named after chemists—gay- their depiction of simple properties— The older names gave one a sense of lussite, scheelite, berzelianite, bunsenite, the crystal forms, colors, shapes, and antiquity and alchemy: corundum and liebigite, moissanite, crookesite, and optics of minerals—like diaspore and galena, orpiment and realgar. (Orpi- the beautiful, prismatic “ruby-silver,” anastase and microlite and polycrase. A ment and realgar, two arsenic sulfides, proustite. There was samarskite, named great favorite was cryolite—ice stone, went euphoniously together, and made after a mining engineer, Colonel Sa- from Greenland, so low in refractive me think of an operatic couple, like marski. There were other names that index that it was transparent, almost Tristan and Isolde.) There was pyrites, ghostly, and, like ice, became invisible fool’s gold, in brassy, metallic cubes, in water. and chalcedony and ruby and sapphire and spinel. Zircon sounded Oriental; N one visit, Uncle Dave showed calomel, Greek—its honeylike sweet- O me a large bar of aluminum. Af- ness, its “mel,” belied by its poisonness. ter the dense platinum metals, I was There was the medieval-sounding sal amazed at how light it was, scarcely 65

fled Russia, using the passport of a dead man named Landau. He was six- Students murmured airily of the phallic teen. As Marcus Landau, he made his they were going to be marked by, way to Paris, and then Frankfurt, where but the shelvers’ book trolleys were parked by he married. (His wife was sixteen, too.) closed gaping tomes and stood them dryly back, Two years later, in 1855, now with the vogue, value, theory. first of their children, they moved to England. The stacks clanged down metal stairs My mother’s father was, by all ac- to floors below reality, counts, a man drawn equally to the spir- to books in dragon-buckram, books like dreams, itual and the physical. He was by pro- antiphonaries and grimoires, fession a boot and shoe manufacturer, philologies with pages still uncut: a shochet (a kosher slaughterer), and later a grocer—but he was also a Hebrew my blade made a sound like a rut. scholar, a mystic, an amateur mathe- I never used the catalogue, matician, and an inventor. He had a it held no serendipities. wide-ranging mind: he published a The lateral book’s the tip: it is newspaper, the Jewish Standard, in his the seminal one near the one set. basement, from 1888 to 1891; he was interested in the new science of aero- You must range real shelves to find it. nautics, and corresponded with the Strict exams could have excluded me; Wright brothers, who paid him a visit Soon they did weed out my sort. when they came to London in the early Critique closed over poetry, nineteen-hundreds. (Some of my un- the hip proved very straight. cles could still remember this.) He had a passion, my aunts and uncles told me, What our donjon of kisses and cribs held for intricate arithmetical calculations, they say now will go on line. which he would do in his head, while This does not light my taper. lying in the bath. But he was drawn, Others may have my joys at home? Fine. above all, to the invention of lamps— But I surfed the true paper. safety lamps for mines, carriage lamps, street lamps—and he patented many of —LES MURRAY these in the eighteen-seventies. When I was very small, my mother would take me to the Science Museum, in South heavier than a piece of wood. “I’ll show and shiny metal reduced so quickly to a Kensington, up to the top floor, where you something interesting,” he said. He crumbling mass of oxide. It made me there was a simulacrum of a coal mine, took a smaller lump of aluminum, with think of a curse or a spell, the sort of its dim, low passages lit by fitful beams. a smooth, shiny surface, and smeared it disintegration I sometimes saw in my There she would show me the Landau with mercury. All of a sudden—it was dreams. It made me think of mercury as safety lamp on display, right next to the like some terrible disease—the surface evil, as a destroyer of metals. Would it more famous Humphry Davy lamp. broke down, and a white substance like do this to every sort of metal? A polymath and an autodidact him- a fungus rapidly grew out of it, until “Don’t worry,” Uncle answered. “The self, Grandfather was passionately keen it was a quarter of an inch high, then metals we use here, they’re perfectly on education—and, most especially, a half an inch high, and it kept growing safe. If I put this little bar of tungsten in scientific education—for all his children, and growing until the small piece of the mercury, it would not be affected at for his nine daughters no less than for aluminum was completely eaten up. all. If I put it away for a million years, it his nine sons. Whether it was this or the “You’ve seen iron rust, oxidizing, com- would be just as bright and shiny as it is sharing of his own passionate enthusi- bining with the oxygen in the air,” Un- now.” In a precarious world, tungsten, at asms, seven of his sons were eventually cle said. “But here, with the aluminium, least, was stable. drawn to mathematics and the physi- it’s a million times faster. That big bar is cal sciences—including the two I was still quite shiny, because it’s covered by a S the youngest of almost the young- closest to, Uncle Dave and Uncle Abe. fine layer of oxide, and that protects it A est (I was the last of four, and my from further change. But rubbing it mother the sixteenth of eighteen), I was IV—STINKS AND BANGS with mercury destroys the surface layer, born nearly a hundred years after my so then the aluminium has no protec- maternal grandfather, and never knew Y parents and my brothers had tion, and it combines with the oxygen him. He was born Mordechai Fredkin, M introduced me, even before the in seconds.” in 1837, in a small village in Russia. war, to some kitchen chemistry: pour- I found this magical, astounding, but As a youth, he managed to avoid being ing vinegar on a piece of chalk in a tum- also a little frightening—to see a bright impressed into the Cossack Army, and bler and watching it fizz; then pouring 66 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20, 1999 the heavy gas this produced, like an chemistry and chemists myself, I longed It was through reading Mary Elvira invisible cataract, over a candle flame, to have a lab of my own. Weeks’s “Discovery of the Elements”— putting it out straightaway. Or tak- As a start, I wanted to lay hands on a book published just before the war— ing red cabbage, pickled with vine- cobaltite and niccolite, and compounds that I got a vivid idea of the lives of gar, and adding household ammonia or minerals of manganese and molyb- many chemists, the great variety, and to neutralize it. This would lead to an denum, of uranium and chromium— sometimes vagaries, of character they amazing transformation, the juice go- all those wonderful elements that were showed; and the relation (sometimes) ing through all sorts of colors, from discovered in the eighteenth century. between their characters and their work. red to various shades of purple, to tur- I wanted to pulverize them, treat them Here I found quotations from the early quoise and blue, and finally to green. I with acid, roast them, reduce them— chemists’ letters, which portrayed their enjoyed these experiments, I wondered whatever was necessary—so I could excitements (and despairs) as they fum- what was going on, but I did not feel a extract their metals myself. I knew, bled and groped their way to their real chemical passion—a desire to com- from looking through a chemical cat- discoveries, losing the track now and pound, to isolate, to decompose, to see alogue at the factory, that one could again, getting caught in blind alleys, substances changing, familiar ones dis- buy these metals already purified, but though ultimately reaching the goal appearing and new ones appearing it would be far more fun, far more they sought. in their stead—until I returned from exciting, I reckoned, if I was able to If Humphry Davy was the first Greystone, remet Uncle Dave, and saw make them myself. This way, I would chemist I had ever heard of, he was also his lab and his passion for experiments enter chemistry, start to discover it the one I most warmed to. I loved read- of all kinds. for myself, in much the same way its ing of his experiments with explosives Now, after hearing him talk about first practitioners did—I would live and electric fish; his discovery of incan- chemistry, and starting to read about the history of chemistry in myself. descent metal filaments and electric arcs; of catalysts (it was only now that I realized why we had a platinum loop above the gas stove); of the physiologi- cal effects of nitrous oxide, laughing gas; and, above all, of his using the just invented electric battery to isolate the alkali and alkaline-earth metals in a sin- gle miraculous year. He appealed to me especially because he was boyish and impulsive, the way he danced with joy all around his lab when he first isolated potassium, in 1807, and saw the shin- ing metallic globules burst and take fire. Davy moved me to emulation— to sampling the effects of nitrous oxide for myself (my mother kept a cylinder of it in her obstetric bag), and mak- ing my own sodium and potassium by electrolysis. I was awed, too, by the figure of Men- deleev—his passionate search for or- der among the elements (more than sixty were known by the eighteen- fifties, a rich chaos), and his final dis- covery of such an order (supposedly in a dream) in 1869. When I first saw the Periodic Table, it hit me with the force of revelation—it embodied, I was convinced, eternal truths, the eternal and necessary order of the elements. I thought of Mendeleev as a sort of Moses, bearing the tablets of the God-given Periodic Law. And then, in a different mode, there was Marie Curie, who had spent four backbreaking years in a shed extracting a pinch of “her” element, radium, from “Only time will tell whether this merger makes sense or not.” four stubborn tons of pitchblende. Ra- A PINCH OF RADIUM 67 dium, my mother would say, was a magical element, with unique powers to harm and cure. She herself had worked with radium therapy at the Marie Curie Hospital, in Lon- don, and had met Marie Curie on one occasion. (I was in- trigued when she told me of the radium “bomb” at the hos- pital, and the fine gold needles full of radon which were in- serted into tumors.) Eve Curie’s biography of her mother— which my mother gave me when I was ten—was the first portrait of a scientist I read, and Marie Curie was added to my pantheon of heroes. (Fifty- five years later, in 1998, at a meeting in New York to cele- brate the centenary of the Cur- ies’ discovery of polonium and radium, I met Eve Curie, now “If we’re being honest, it was your decision to follow my in her nineties, and asked her recommendations that cost you money.” to sign the book.) It was through reading • • these accounts that I first real- ized one could have heroes in real life. which I did things, they were alarmed, moment). I would hoard my pocket There seemed to me an integrity, an es- and urged me to plan experiments and money for weeks—occasionally one of sential goodness, about a life dedicated to be prepared to deal with fires and ex- my uncles, approving my secret passion, to science. I had never given much plosions. Eventually, after I had filled would slip me a half crown or so—and thought to what I might be when I was the house one day with vile-smelling then take a succession of trains and buses “grown up”—growing up was hardly (and very toxic) hydrogen sulfide, they to the shop. The cheaper chemicals imaginable—but now I knew: I wanted insisted that I install a small fume cup- were kept in huge stoppered urns of to be a chemist. A sort of eighteenth- board, and a special drain for corrosive glass. The rarer, more costly substances century chemist coming fresh to the liquids—and that with dangerous ex- were kept in smaller bottles. Hydrofluoric field, looking at the whole, undiscovered periments I wear gloves and goggles. acid—dangerous stuff, used for etching world of natural substances and miner- Uncle Dave advised me closely on glass—could not be kept in glass, so it als, analyzing them, plumbing their se- the choice of apparatus—test tubes, was sold in special small bottles made of crets, finding the wonder of new and flasks, graduated cylinders, funnels, gutta-percha, a sort of rubbery sub- unknown metals. pipettes and burettes, a Bunsen burner, stance. Beneath the serried urns and bot- crucibles, watch glasses, a platinum tles on the shelves were great carboys of ND so I set up a little lab of my own loop, a desiccator, a blowpipe, a range of acid—sulfuric, nitric, aqua regia; globu- A at home. There was an unused spatulas, a balance. He advised me, too, lar china bottles of mercury (it was in- back room I took over, originally a laun- on basic reagents, some of which he credibly dense, and seven pounds of it dry room, which had running water and gave me from his own lab, along with would fit into a bottle the size of a fist); a sink and drain and various cupboards a supply of stoppered bottles of all and slabs and ingots of the commoner and shelves. Conveniently, this room led sizes—bottles of varied shapes and col- metals. The shopkeepers soon got to know out to the garden—so that if I con- ors (dark green or brown for light- me—an intense and rather undersized cocted something that caught fire, or sensitive chemicals), with perfectly fit- schoolboy, clutching his pocket money, boiled over, or emitted noxious fumes, I ting ground-glass stoppers. spending hours amid the jars and bot- could rush outside with it and fling it on Every month or so, I stocked my lab tles—and though they would warn me the lawn. The lawn soon developed with visits to a chemical-supply shop, now and then, “Go easy with that one!” charred and discolored patches, but this, Griffin & Tatlock, far out in Finchley. they always let me have what I wished. my parents felt, was a small price to The shop was housed in a large shed pay for my safety—their own, too, per- set at a distance from its neighbors (who Y first taste was for the spectacu- haps. But seeing occasional flaming viewed it, I imagined, with a certain M lar—the frothings, the incan- globules rushing through the air, and the trepidation, as a place that might ex- descences, the stinks and the bangs, general turbulence and abandon with plode or exhale poisonous fumes at any which almost define an entry into chem- 68 istry. One of my guides was J. J. Griffin’s After reading this, I was too scared to it “cold fire” (kaltes Feuer), or, in a more “Chemical Recreations,” an 1850-ish open the hydrofluoric acid I had bought. affectionate mood, “mein Feuer.” Through- book I had found in a secondhand out the eighteenth century it was made bookshop. Griffin started recreational, TTRACTED by the sounds and flashes from bones. and gradually got more systematic. I A and smells coming from my lab, I decided to obtain my phosphorus worked my way through “Alteration of my two older brothers, Marcus and Da- direct from Griffin & Tatlock. When it Vegetable Colours by Acids and Alka- vid, now medical students, sometimes came, as a bundle of pale, waxy sticks lis,” “Experiments with Coloured Li- joined me in experiments—the ten-year which one had to keep under water, it quors and Sympathetic Inks,” “Chem- age difference between us hardly mat- had, nonetheless, a persistent garlicky ical Metamorphoses,” and then got on tered at these times. On one occasion, smell—and this, I imagined, was the ir- to the serious stuff. There was a special as I was experimenting with hydrogen removable residue of its beastly, slaugh- chapter on “Chemistry for Holidays,” and oxygen, there was a loud explosion, terhouse origins. It was important to with the “Volatile Plum-Pudding” and an almost invisible sheet of flame, keep it in its brown bottle, because the (“when the cover is removed . . . it leaves which blew off Marcus’s eyebrows com- beautiful, almost colorless translucent its dish and rises to the ceiling”), “A pletely. But Marcus took this in good sticks became ugly and yellow and Fountain of Fire” (using phosphorus— part, and he and David often suggested opaque with the light—another exam- “the operator must take care not to burn other experiments. ple of the mysterious power of light. himself ”), and “Brilliant Deflagration” We mixed potassium perchlorate Phosphorus attracted me strangely, (here, too, one was warned to “remove your with sugar, put it on the back step, and dangerously, because of its luminosity— hand instantly”). I was amused by the banged it with a hammer. This caused a I would sometimes slip down to my lab mention of a special formula (sodium most satisfying explosion. at night to gaze at it—the “cold fire” that tungstate) to render ladies’ dresses and We made a “volcano” together with had so fascinated its discoverer (and had curtains incombustible—were fires that ammonium dichromate, setting fire to a caused him, and others, such terrible common in Victorian times?—and used pyramid of the orange crystals, which burns). A whole series of experiments, it to fireproof a handkerchief for myself. then flamed, furiously, becoming red- of enchantments, spread out from this. Chemical exploration, chemical dis- hot, throwing off showers of sparks in As soon as I had my fume cupboard set covery, if full of excitement, was full of all directions, and swelling portentously, up, I put a piece of white phosphorus in surprises and dangers, too. I was struck like a miniature volcano. Finally, when water and boiled it, dimming the lights by the range of accidents that had be- it had died down, there was, in place of so that I could see the steam coming out fallen the pioneers. Few naturalists had the neat pyramid of crystals, a huge, of the flask, glowing a soft greenish-blue. been devoured by wild animals or stung fluffy pile of dark-green chromic oxide. If one ignited phosphorus in a bell to death by noxious plants or insects; Another early experiment, suggested jar (using a magnifying glass), the jar few physicists had lost their eyesight by David, was pouring oily, concen- would fill with a “snow” of phosphorus looking at the heavens, or broken a leg trated sulfuric acid on a little sugar, pentoxide. If one did this over water, on an inclined plane; but chemists had which instantly turned black, heated, the pentoxide would hiss, like red-hot lost their eyes, their limbs, and some- steamed, expanded, forming a mon- iron, as it hit the water and dissolved, times their lives, usually by causing ex- strous pillar of carbon that rose high making phosphoric acid. plosions or producing inadvertent tox- above the rim of the beaker. “Beware,” Another, rather beautiful experiment ins. Davy, for instance, had been nearly David said as I gazed at this transfor- was boiling phosphorus with caustic asphyxiated by nitric oxide, had poi- mation. “You’ll be turned into a pillar of potash in a retort—I was remarkably soned himself with nitrogen peroxide, carbon if you get the acid on yourself.” nonchalant in boiling up such virulent and had severely inflamed his lungs substances; lucky, too, in that I never re- with hydrofluoric acid, prior to his HE first recorded individual who ally hurt myself—and this produced dangerous experiments with nitrogen T discovered an element, it seems, phosphoretted hydrogen (the old term), trichloride. was Hennig Brandt, of Hamburg, who or phosphine. As the bubbles of phos- Bunsen, investigating cacodyl cya- obtained phosphorus (apparently with phine escaped, they took fire sponta- nide, lost his right eye in an explosion, some alchemical ambition in mind) neously, forming beautiful rings of white and very nearly lost his life. Several ex- from urine in 1669. He adored the smoke. perimenters, trying to make diamond strange, luminous element, and called By heating white phosphorus, I could from graphite in intensely heated, high- transform it into a much stabler form— pressure “bombs,” threatened to blow red phosphorus, the phosphorus of themselves and their fellow-workers to matchboxes. I had learned as a small kingdom come. child that diamond and graphite were Mary Elvira Weeks’s book on the different forms, allotropes, of the same discovery of the elements devoted an element, and I vividly remembered how entire section to “The Fluorine Mar- my shining tin soldiers had been trans- tyrs.” All the early experimenters, I read, formed one winter into a gray dust: had “suffered the frightful torture of “tin pest.” Now, in the lab, I could ef- hydrofluoric-acid poisoning,” and at fect some of these changes for myself, least two of them died in the process. turning white phosphorus into red 70 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20, 1999

a good-sized lump of it—about three pounds—and made an excursion to Highgate Pond, in Hampstead Heath, with two of my friends, Eric Korn and Jonathan Miller. When we arrived, we climbed up a little bridge, and then I pulled the sodium out of its oil with tongs, and flung it into the water be- neath. It took fire instantly, and sped around and around on the surface like a demented meteor, with a huge sheet of yellow flame above it. My friends still have vivid memories of this. We all exulted—this was chemistry with a vengeance!

V—BRILLIANT LIGHT

HIS first interest in chemistry, this T desire to interrogate and explore everything in sight, led to a different feeling after a couple of years—a need to integrate my knowledge, to under- “I got married—I finally realized I’m event-driven.” stand. Not just to throw sodium into water but all the alkali metals, to see • • how they compared, to plot the trends, physical and chemical, as one went phosphorus, and then (by condensing pered flask. It had a colorless flame— through them all, from lithium to so- its vapor) back again. These transfor- not yellow and smoky, like the flames dium to potassium to rubidium to cae- mations made me feel like a magician. of gas jets or the kitchen stove. Or I sium. Weighing and measuring became could feed the hydrogen, with a grace- crucially important, convincing me of HILE I darted about these exotic fully curved piece of glass tubing, into the fixed proportions in which elements W experiments I also went steadily a soap solution, to make soap bubbles combined, drawing me to atomic theory through my small repertoire of chemi- filled with hydrogen; the bubbles, far and the concept of atomic weights. cals, trying to learn their basic prop- lighter than air, would rush up to the Reading Dalton, who proposed the erties and reactions, and the basics of ceiling and burst. atomic hypothesis, reading about his forming and decomposing compounds. I made oxygen, too. I wanted to make atoms (I saw his own wooden models I decomposed water, using a large it by heating mercuric oxide—this was of these in the Science Museum), put battery, much as Humphry Davy had the original way, I read, by which Jo- me in a sort of rapture, conceiving that done at the start of the nineteenth cen- seph Priestley had first made it, in the chemical reactions one saw mac- tury; and then I recomposed it, sparking 1774—but I was afraid, until the fume roscopically, in the lab, with all their hydrogen and oxygen together. There cupboard was installed, of toxic mercury puzzling constancies and exactitudes, were many other ways of making hy- fumes. Yet it was easy to prepare by heat- were the consequence of activities al- drogen with acids or alkalis—with zinc ing an oxygen-rich substance like deep most infinitely small—single atoms, and sulfuric acid or aluminum bottle purple-red potassium permanganate. I with distinctive weights and charac- caps and caustic soda. remember thrusting a glowing wood ters, combining with each other one by But it seemed a shame to have the chip into a test tube full of oxygen, and one—and imagining that if one had a hydrogen just bubble off and go to seeing how it flared up, flamed, with an microscope powerful enough, and pow- waste. To stopper my flasks, I got some intense brilliance. ers of perception quick enough, this tight-fitting rubber bungs and corks, There were some metals that were so was what one would actually see. Until some with holes in the middle for glass reactive they could actually tear the oxy- now, there had been only a vague, mys- tubes. One of the things I had learned gen out of water, leaving the hydrogen terious sense of an invisible micro- in Uncle Dave’s lab was how to soften to bubble off. Magnesium did this, if world; Dalton’s atoms gave the imagi- glass tubing in a gas flame, and gently the water was hot—this was why one nation something concrete to chew on, bend it to an angle (and, more exciting, could not put out an incendiary bomb made this tangible and real. to blow glass as well, gently puffing into with water. And potassium did so ex- It was only when I had the concept the molten glass to make thin-walled plosively, even in cold water. of atomic weight firmly in mind, along globes and shapes of all sorts). Now, Sodium was cheaper, and not quite with the concept of atoms’ combining using glass tubing, I could light the hy- as violent as potassium, so I decided to power, or valency, that I could appre- drogen as it emerged from the stop- look at its action outdoors. I obtained ciate the startling beauty, the obvious A DEMENTED METEOR 71 truth, of the Periodic Table—for me, wear a wing collar and highly polished X-rays and reëmit it as light in the visi- now, the most beautiful thing in the shoes even when he worked at his lab ble range—and he had developed and world. By arranging all the elements in bench. Abe was smaller, somewhat patented a luminous paint containing a simple grid of intersecting “Periods” gnarled and bent (in the years that I radium which was used in military gun- and “Groups,” the Table showed, at a knew him), brown and grizzled, like an sights during the First World War (and glance, how all of them were related to old shikari, with a hoarse voice and may have been decisive, he told me, in one another, and how one could pre- chronic cough; he cared little what he the Battle of Jutland). dict the existence and properties of as wore, and usually had on a sort of rum- His attic was a wondrous place, full yet undiscovered elements simply by pled lab smock. of electric machines and induction coils, knowing their place in the Table, for Both Uncle Dave and Uncle Abe batteries and magnets, and sealed vac- when one arranged the elements in were intensely interested in light and uum tubes (Geissler tubes) of rarefied order of atomic weight their proper- lighting, but with Dave it was “hot” gases which when electrified would ties echoed one another periodically. light, and with Abe “cold” light. Uncle light up with brilliant colors—neon Thus each period started with an al- Dave had drawn me into the history of red, helium yellow. It was here, with kali metal and ended with an inert gas, incandescence, of the rare earths and Abe, that I learned about electricity and and then one shuttled back to the next metallic filaments that glowed and in- color and fluorescence; with Abe (and period, starting with a heavier alkali candesced brilliantly when heated. He his ten milligrams of radium bromide) metal and ending with a heavier inert had inducted me into the energetics of that I learned something about the gas. The periods contained eight ele- chemical reactions—how heat was ab- wonders and dangers of radioactivity. ments apiece at first, then expanded to sorbed or emitted during the course of (His own hands were covered with ra- eighteen, then thirty-two—a mysteri- these; heat that sometimes became visi- dium burns and malignant warts, from ous but surely fundamental numerical ble as fire and flame. his long, careless handling of radioac- series. I could not help thinking back Through Uncle Abe, I was drawn tive materials.) It was with Abe, too, to the grids, the tables of primes, I into the history of “cold” light—lumi- that I learned about spectroscopy—put- used to make, where I sought so des- nescence—which started perhaps before ting different elements into the color- perately for order but found none. The there was any language to record things, less flame of a Bunsen burner and look- Periodic Table, by contrast, was a Ja- with observations of fireflies and glow- ing at the radiant spectra they emitted; cob’s ladder, a numinous spiral, going worms and will-o’-the-wisps and lumi- seeing how these were unique to each up to, coming down from a Pythago- nous seas, and of St. Elmo’s fire, the element. Spectroscopy became one of rean heaven. eerie luminous discharges that could my delights as a boy. Most especially, This almost religious feeling about stream from a ship’s masts, giving its Abe dwelt on the mysterious spac- the Periodic Table afforded me a very sailors a feeling of bewitchment. ing of the spectral lines, how (at least deep, cosmic sense of security and sta- Abe’s first love was the investigation in hydrogen) they followed a simple bility, a conviction that the physical of fluorescence and phosphorescence— formula, and how this was to remain universe, at least, was lawful, orderly, the power of certain substances to ab- tantalizingly unexplained for almost harmonious. This certainty did much sorb radiant energy like ultraviolet or thirty years, like the periodicity of the to alleviate the terrifying uncertainties that had so undone me in my years at Greystone.

ESIDES spending time with Uncle B Dave and in my lab, I began to spend time with another of my moth- er’s brothers, Uncle Abe. He was a few years older than Dave, and more dis- posed to physics than to chemistry: the great discoveries of X-rays, radioactivity, the electron, and quantum theory had all occurred in his formative years. Though Abe and Dave were alike in some ways (both had the broad Lan- dau face, with wide-set eyes, and the unmistakable, resonant Landau voice— characteristics still marked in the great- great-grandchildren of my grandfather), they were very different in others. Dave was tall and strong, with a military posture (he had served in the Great War, and in the Boer War before that), always carefully dressed. He would “Oh, look, dear—crime’s back!” 72 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20, 1999 elements in the Periodic Table itself. electricity, the nature of color, of lumi- follow my own whims. School, merci- It was through Uncle Abe that I nescence, of density, of magnetism—all fully, had been indifferent to what I was learned of the incredible scientific events the questions I had puzzled over as a doing—I did my schoolwork, and was of 1913. It was “the year the world boy. There was an exuberance at this. otherwise left to my own devices. Per- changed,” he would always say, with But the promise held a threat, too: haps, too, there was a biological respite, Bohr’s quantal model of the atom and What would become of classical chem- the special calm of latency. Moseley’s X-ray spectrography of the el- istry now? What need was there for it, if But now all this was to change: ado- ements confirming between them the the new theory was so powerful? lescence rushed upon me, like a ty- Periodic Table, providing an electronic I had dreamed of becoming a chem- phoon, buffeting me with insatiable understanding of the chemical proper- ist, but the chemistry that really stirred longings. And at school I left the unde- ties of the elements (as well as the spac- me was the lovingly detailed, naturalistic, manding classics “side,” and moved to ing of their spectral lines), in terms of descriptive chemistry of the nineteenth the pressured science side instead. I had a new and radical theory of the atom. century, not the new chemistry of the been spoiled, in a sense, by my two un- Prior to this, as Bohr remarked, spec- quantum age, which, so far as I under- cles, and the freedom and spontaneity tra seemed as beautiful and meaning- stood it, was highly abstract and, in a of my apprenticeship. Now, at school, I less as butterflies’ wings, but now, in sense, closer to physics than to chemistry. was forced to sit in classes, to take notes the words of another great pioneer, Chemistry as I knew it, the chemistry I and exams, to use textbooks that were Arnold Sommerfeld, they were revealed loved, was either finished or changing flat, impersonal, deadly. What had been as “a true atomic music of the spheres.” its character, advancing beyond me. fun, delight, when I did it in my own Uncle Abe spoke of the sense of bril- From this point, chemistry seemed way became an aversion, an ordeal, liant light, of sudden, profound under- to recede from my mind—my love af- when I had to do it to order. In his essay standing, that came to many chemists fair, my passion for it, came to an end. “To Teach or Not to Teach,” Freeman and physicists at this time, and how it There were, perhaps, other factors as Dyson speaks of different sorts of peo- was suddenly overwhelmed by the terri- well. I had been living (it seems to me ple: students who are best given inde- bleness of the Great War. in retrospect) in a sort of sweet inter- pendence, allowed and encouraged to lude, having left behind the horrors and develop in their own way, and those VI—THE END OF THE AFFAIR fears of Greystone. I had been guided who profit most from structured teach- to a region of order, and a passion for ing, from school. I was clearly one who ITH the ending of the war, other science, by two very wise, affectionate, flourished best alone. W triumphs were soon to come: and understanding uncles. My parents Was it, then, the end of chemistry? an understanding of why metals were had been supportive and trusting, had My own intellectual limitations? Ado- lustrous, why they conducted heat and allowed me to put a lab together and lescence? School? Or was it, more sim- ply, that I was growing up, and that “growing up” makes one forget the lyri- cal, mystical perceptions of childhood, the glory and the freshness of which Wordsworth wrote, so that they fade into the light of common day?

FTER all, it was “understood,” by the A time I was fourteen, that I was going to be a doctor; my parents were doctors, my brothers in medical school. My parents had been tolerant, even pleased, with my early interests in sci- ence, but now, they seemed to feel, the time for play was over. One incident stays clearly in my mind. In 1947, a couple of summers after the war, I was with my parents in our old Humber touring the South of France. Sitting in the back, I was talking about thallium, rattling on and on about it: how it was discovered, along with indium, in the eighteen-sixties by the brilliant-colored green line in its spectrum; how some of its salts, when dissolved, could form so- lutions nearly five times as dense as water; how thallium indeed was the “We found the spare key under the welcome mat.” platypus of the elements, with paradox- HAFNIUM AT THE OPERA 73 ical qualities that had caused uncer- tainty about its proper placement in the Periodic Table—soft, heavy, and fusi- ble, like lead, chemically akin to gal- lium and indium, but with dark oxides like those of manganese and iron, and colorless sulfates like those of sodium and potassium. As I babbled on, gaily, narcissistically, blindly, I did not notice that my parents, in the front seat, had fallen completely silent, their faces bored, tight, and disapproving—until, after twenty minutes, they could bear it no longer, and my father burst out vio- lently: “Enough about thallium!” No doubt anyone would have re- sponded the same way. But now, the message came through, it was time to grow up, to be serious, to work—these words were used again and again—for the training of a doctor was long, hard, and demanding.

HE old lab bench has now become T a thing of the past. When I paid a visit not long ago to the old building in Finchley which had been Griffin & “All this talk of Viagra and penile implants reminds Tatlock’s home a half century ago, it me of a charming story about my own penis.” was no longer there. Such shops, such suppliers, which had provided chemi- • • cals and simple apparatus and unimag- inable delights for generations, have New York, of course, but it exists, is preceding elements. We have seen moon now all but vanished. conspicuous, in the New York of my rocks and Mars rocks, containing min- And yet the old enthusiasm, which I dreams.) I dream of eating hamburgers erals never before seen. We wonder had thought dead at fourteen, survives, made of scandium. Sometimes, too, I about giant planets with cores of metal- clearly, deep inside me, and surfaces dream of the indecipherable language lic hydrogen, stars made of diamond, every so often, in odd associations and of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, and stars with crusts of iron helide. The impulses. A sudden desire for a ball of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite inert gases have been coaxed into com- of cadmium, or to feel the coldness of dream is of going to the opera (I am bination, and I have seen a fluoride of diamond against my face. The license Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met xenon, unthinkable in the nineteen- plates of cars immediately suggest ele- with the other heavy transition met- forties. A totally unexpected new form ments, especially in New York, where als—my old and valued friends—Tan- of carbon has been made, forming ex- so many of them begin with U, V, W, talum, Tungsten, Rhenium, Osmium, quisite, soccerball-shaped giant mole- and Y—that is, uranium, vanadium, Iridium, Platinum, and Gold. cules (buckminsterfullerene, “bucky- tungsten, and yttrium. It is an added Yet it is not just dreams and associa- balls” for short). Scandium is now used pleasure, a bonus, a grace, if the symbol tions, nostalgic yearnings, that prick my in the fins of missiles—and in bicy- of an element is followed by its atomic imagination now but hearing of the cles. The rare-earth elements, which number, as in W 74 or Y 39. Flowers, new achievements of chemistry—a both Uncle Tungsten and Uncle Abe so too, bring elements to mind: the color chemistry that, if less personal than the loved, have now become common and of lilacs in spring for me is that of diva- old, has come to embrace the whole found countless uses in fluorescent ma- lent vanadium. world and the universe. In my day, ele- terials, phosphors of every color, high- I often dream of chemistry at night, ments stopped with No. 92, uranium, temperature superconductors, and tiny dreams that conflate the past and the but now elements up to 118 have been magnets of an unbelievable strength. present, the grid of the Periodic Table made. These new elements exist only in These things, and a thousand oth- transformed to the grid of Manhattan. the lab, and may not occur anywhere ers, excite me, stir me, set the imagina- The location of tungsten, at the inter- else in the universe. The very latest of tion running in every direction; and section of Group VI and Period 6, be- them, though still radioactive, belong they show me that, though I and the comes synonymous here with the in- to a long-sought “island of stability,” world may have changed beyond rec- tersection of Sixth Avenue and Sixth where their atomic nuclei are almost a ognition, the boy who loved chemistry Street. (There is no such intersection in million times stabler than those of the is still kicking inside.