A Curious Boy

by Richard Fortey

  chalk (calcium carbonate) – carbon dioxide = lime (calcium oxide)

  Carbon dioxide (being a gas) was given off to the atmosphere to contribute minutely to global warming, and only lime remained behind. The next phase in the experiment was to shake the powdered lime in a test tube with cold water. I noticed that the tube became quite warm for a while. There was little to see, but some of the white powder had dissolved as it reacted with the water:

  lime (calcium oxide) + water = calcium hydroxide (limewater)

  The old way of describing this process was ‘slaking’ the lime, as if it were thirsty – almost as if it were seeking to bond with the water to quench some molecular desire. Calcium hydroxide is still known as ‘slaked lime’. Now I had to pour off the limewater into another tube, leaving behind any undissolved lime. The final phase of the experiment was to put a straw into the clear limewater and blow. As my breath bubbled into the clear liquor within a few seconds the limewater had turned all milky. The final equation explained it all:

  limewater (calcium hydroxide) + carbon dioxide (my breath) = chalk (calcium carbonate) + water

  Chalk is insoluble, so it precipitated to form the white clouds in the test tube. The whole experiment had come full circle: from chalk, and back to chalk. I used my little funnel to filter off the chalky white calcium carbonate on to a folded paper. Pure water passed through into the flask. This experiment could go around and back (unlike burning magnesium) because the energy used to drive off the carbon dioxide from the chalk sample was ‘recovered’ as heat when the lime was slaked. As for the chemical formulae used to describe scientifically what had happened – I soon learned the advantages of their brevity and concision. That last equation is written simply:

  Ca(OH)2 + CO2 = CaCO3 + H2O

  and provided a way of recording the symbols for the elements involved and making sure that there were the same numbers of atoms on both sides of the equation. I soon learned to feel comfortable with chemical symbols, but the language of yearning and metamorphosis infused my chemistry for a long time. I was not yet the pure, dispassionate scientist.

  Something had to happen to accommodate my growing collection of chemicals. At the end of the garden in Ainsdale Road was a small, weathertight wooden shed, and it became my first laboratory. I soon had a bench to work at and shelves at the back to store what my mother insisted on calling my ‘potions’. A spirit lamp gave way to a Calor gas Bunsen burner. Every birthday brought another piece of ‘kit’ to what was first known as the ‘chemistry shed’ and then abbreviated to the ‘chemi-shed’. I went in for pipettes, and accurately calibrated flasks. An old spring balance was not exactly a precision instrument but it was adequate for schoolboy recipes. I could distill and I could condense and I could evaporate. I had a pestle and mortar to grind stuff and a strange metallic retort that could have come from Paracelsus’ cellar. I could disappear into the chemi-shed for hours and my parents thought I was gainfully occupied. They had very little idea of what I was up to. I admit that stinks and bangs were quite high on my agenda. My neglect of safety issues was absolute. I made hydrogen sulphide, the gas that smells of rotten eggs (I had better not say how I made it) and I rejoiced in its unpleasantness. Only five parts per million are needed to produce its characteristic pong, and that is probably just as well because it is mightily toxic. At high concentrations it kills rather rapidly (it has even been used to commit suicide). The very idea of a boy, not yet in his teens, wafting around carrying beakers emitting this virulent stuff would result in parental panic today. As for my own detonations, gunpowder was easy. I had plenty of sulphur and saltpetre, and in my mortar I ground powdered charcoal from larger pieces that lurked forgotten under the bonfire heap. Black gunpowder was just a combination of these three ingredients, allowing me scope for experimentation in different proportions. I did manage several satisfactory explosions. I tried mixing sodium chlorate and sugar for another explosive recipe, but I did not have so much success with this combination, which tended to flame vigorously without making much of a bang. With the addition of a few iron filings the mixture became the basis of some crude fireworks and my sister insists I got her to hold some of my fizzing, flaming prototypes in her hand, while I watched from a safe distance.

  I had a secret source that helped me extend my range of chemicals. Next door but one to Tooke’s, 614 Fulham Road, was a dispensing chemist. Mr Ehrbar was the pharmacist, and owned the slightly dowdy premises. Big blue phials of copper sulphate were the only gesture towards decoration. He was a quiet man with a central European accent, who wore a white laboratory coat, and had a world-weary air about him, as if he were an émigré who had seen too much. He befriended the young chemical enthusiast. This is where I filled my glass-stoppered bottle with oil of vitriol. I am sure that it was illegal to sell a young boy concentrated sulphuric acid but he did not seem to mind. I like to think he wanted to encourage me along a chemical pathway. Even he would probably have drawn the line at giving me arsenic. Oliver Sacks had an uncle who supplied him with just about any chemical element he required. Sacks described the stories of his boyhood investigations in Uncle Tungsten and he seemed to be able to recall every experiment he had ever conducted. My own agenda was far more random. I certainly remember asking Mr Ehrbar for picric acid (he obliged) for no better reason than I wanted to synthesise the related chemical potassium picrate – which explodes very satisfactorily upon percussion (and it could be used as a fuse). I gradually worked through the chemicals that Mr Ehrbar hid behind the scenes in his back room. I suspect that many of them were as obsolete for medical treatment as mandrake root, so some of his storage jars may not have been opened for years until I came along. My chemi-shed shelves filled up in a satisfying way, from aluminium to zinc, and I knew by heart the appearance and even feel of many of Mr Ehrbar’s contributions. I learned the litany of the chemical elements, the basic building blocks of my collection. I began to understand what transformations were within my grasp, and those I would never achieve from my own bench.

  It was as well that I was not a psychopath. A near contemporary of mine was Graham Young, ‘the teacup poisoner’. He, too, became enamoured of chemistry from an early age, and started his career with a chemistry set, but rather than stinks and bangs, he became skilled in the sly arts of the poisoner. When he was thirteen, while I was closeted in the chemi-shed, Young had already tried out cocktails of dire chemicals on his school friends, and then pursued his grisly studies further on his own family. He obtained those elemental poisons – antimony, arsenic, thallium – that even Mr Ehrbar would never dispense. He knew all about alkaloids, the deathly secrets of deadly plants. After several planned trials, he lethally poisoned his stepmother, watching her final agony with dispassionate interest. He was sent to Broadmoor at the age of fourteen (‘the hospital for the criminally insane’ as it was then known), its youngest inmate since 1885. While incarcerated in Broadmoor he was consulted on other cases, because of his extensive knowledge of toxicology. He was released when he was just twenty-three, and lost no time in returning to Willesden to gloat over his previous crimes. He must have been lurking just around the corner from Harding’s fishing-tackle shop, as my father constructed his split-cane rods. Within a few years Young had killed two further victims, still in thrall to his macabre chemical obsessions. He died in gaol in 1990 at the age of forty-two. He must have looked upon his human prey much as I looked upon butterflies quivering before death in a killing jar; but I had more sympathy for the pain of those few grams of fragile living arthropod than he had for his own family. It is evidently not difficult for human beings to view their fellows as no more than ‘specimens’ – this is the tragic tale of every genocide – but civilised society in peacetime regards such judgements with horror, and describes them as aberrations. Graham Young was the ultimate aberration.

  Many years later when I began to write in earnest I wondered to what extent writers have to become dispassionate observers of their fellow beings. Do they treat people as
specimens? Observations on personalities or idiosyncrasies are not altogether dissimilar to those made on morphology by a lepidopterist or a palaeontologist. Writers need to pin the features of their characters accurately down upon the page: they observe from the sidelines in the role of ‘the cat in the corner’, as John Updike described it. A certain measure of disengagement is part of the process. The peculiar chemistry of writing resides in the metamorphosis of observations from life into written character: an irreversible reaction, another rearrangement of the molecules.

  I did pass the Graham Young Test. That is, I had poisons in the chemi-shed which could have obliterated the entire population of Ainsdale Road, and I chose not to do so (even the banker whom I thought contacted Miss Long). My lethal gallery was courtesy of another book, or rather a series of books, an antiquated but comprehensive encyclopedia of knowledge in blue covers that we had acquired in a ‘job lot’ at auction while Primrose Cottage was being furnished. I believe it dated from the years after the First World War. Like most encyclopedias the entries were alphabetical: Aesop to Arsenic was but a small step. The chemical entries were a poisoner’s delight. When I looked up hemlock, I found a cross reference to ‘coniine’. I followed through to its separate entry and found a paragraph much like: ‘Coniine, a poisonous alkaloid with the chemical formula C8H17N which induces paralysis and death within a short while after consumption. It can be obtained from hemlock (Conium maculatum) by boiling the young leaves and reducing the liquor and then applying alcohol extraction. The death of Socrates is attributed to hemlock poisoning.’ I could recognise hemlock without much trouble – it grew by the River Brent in Pitshanger Park, a herb taller than I was, with purple-blotched stems and feathery leaves. The encyclopedia entry was a gauntlet thrown down to a young chemist, and before long I had some colourless coniine crystals in my evaporating dish to put into a little bottle with an appropriate label. Next entry: ‘Digitalin formula C36 H50 O14, a poisonous alkaloid inducing heart failure in excessive doses, and obtained from foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) by …’ Foxgloves were one of the few plants that grew in our garden with abandon, clearly to challenge my chemical expertise. Or ‘Monkshood (see Aconitine)’, a blue flower in our herbaceous border and a recipe for a quick death … I suppose that my motivation for extracting the deadly essences from these herbs was akin to that of the gun collector who never intends to fire a shot. They were a secret cache, a testament to expertise, a guilty but delicious ‘what if?’

  If that old encyclopedia of arcana was my ‘dark web’, then my Wikipedia was another set of encyclopedias that I leafed through almost as soon as I could read fluently. Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia was a cornucopia of facts in ten volumes. The first version of this work was published in parts before the First World War, but the one we had at home was a different and later version published shortly before the global conflict that was to follow within a few decades. Nonetheless, the maps of the world that decorated the frontispiece were mostly coloured pink – the British Empire still intact, and appropriately tinted Africa, Canada, India and Australia, and many more patches of the world besides. The values inculcated by Arthur Mee were of his time, and must have sunk deep into my pores, to be sweated out slowly during future decades. The Empire was – in the supercilious classification of 1066 and All That – a Good Thing. There were photographs of peoples from around the (pink) world: fine warriors from Africa holding spears and shields, Australian Aborigines waving tubers, Maoris splendidly tattooed, Indian maharajahs as grand as could be on elephants draped in finery. There was, I believe, no overt racism – we were invited to marvel at the rich variety of the peoples of Empire – but everything was underlain by an assumption that we British were beneficent purveyors of the right stuff. The English language allowed Hottentot and sepoy alike to rejoice in the magnificent writing of William Shakespeare. British justice was the model for all courts; fair play was an export that came as a free bonus from colonialism. There are revisionist historians who purvey somewhat similar views even today, and I suppose I must have uncritically accepted imperialist notions when I was young. As for the geography of these diverse peoples, I saw the world through my postage-stamp collection, locating countries on a small atlas as I applied the hinge to the back of the stamp to add to my album. I did notice that Great Britain was the only country that was entitled to anonymity on a stamp – everyone should jolly well know who we are even without a label (though the royal head did rather give it away).

  Arthur Mee’s encyclopedia was about much more than the Empire. It was organised into sections covering many areas of knowledge. Religion was essentially the Church of England, with brief nods to other faiths. The constellations were illustrated by the stars of the night, with spectral great bears or Diana the huntress sketched in to dramatise the heavens. The history of life was in there, too, tucked away between articles on art and architecture, or the origin of foodstuffs, or stories of great people who did great things. It was all distinctly worthy. The Wilshin Aunts could smile indulgently while young Richard played the bookworm, knowing that he was in safe hands. Facts absorbed by that growing brain remain obstinately ineradicable. I realised just a few days ago that the reason I know that sago is extracted from the pith of a cycad palm tree is because of Arthur Mee; a fact that has stood me in good stead for many years.

  First among the stories of great discoveries was that of Dmitri Mendeleev and his recognition of the periodic table of elements. This was thrilling to an aspiring chemist; it made the ranks of my chemicals more than a list, it slotted them into the grand scheme of things. Elements went into families, and like all families they shared patterns of behaviour. This was the first step towards our understanding of matter at the atomic, and now at the subatomic level. I felt a sense of wonder that Mendeleev was able to predict the discovery of elements to fill the ‘holes’ that existed in his table. I began to see how common salt, vital to life, sodium chloride (NaCl) itself, could be utterly different from its components: a metal so active that it fizzed on water, and a gas so choking that to manufacture it only once was quite enough for me. I learned of chlorine’s wicked younger sister – fluorine, producing a marriage with hydrogen so greedy that it could gobble glass and burn through floors. The encyclopedia told another story of Marie and Pierre Curie and the isolation of radioactive elements like radium, which I thought of as elements that yearned to leave their own family and join another. Marie Curie labouring with tons of heavy pitchblende to extract the merest whisper of radium showed me that persistence was an important part of science, and Marie Curie’s death from exposure to the very thing that made her famous told me what tragedy was long before I had seen King Lear.

  Art sections of the encyclopedia were rather strong on the late Pre-Raphaelites, particularly Lord Frederic Leighton and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. This was before these painters became unfashionable, and long before they became fashionable all over again in recent years; I suspect this choice may have been Arthur Mee’s own from the very first edition. Classical themes were popular and the female form was ubiquitous: Leighton’s nymphs often wore curiously wrinkled wraps that adhered to their bodies in interesting ways. One of Alma-Tadema’s was boldly nude, frolicking in a bath or a sylvan glade (he was good at water). When I was somewhat older they were my first introduction to eroticism. I suspect I am the only male in existence to have successfully ogled a naiad of Leighton. The Wilshin aunts would have spun in their graves. Arthur Mee would have taken a turn or two in sympathy.

  The most complex achievement of the chemi-shed was in attaining the apotheosis of pong. Yet another book was the starting point. The Guinness Book of Records came as a Christmas present in the later 1950s. Facts were on offer of a different kind from those in Arthur Mee – all the superlatives: fattest, fastest, oldest, smallest, most expensive. That the book continues to be published is a measure of how much we like to know such things, despite recent attempts to get a place in the book by people who eat large numbers of pies
. I looked, of course, for ‘smelliest’, and there was the entry: ‘Smelliest substance known to man. Ethyl isocyanide C3H5N[2] is reputed to smell of a combination of decaying meat, rotting cabbage and sewer gas …’ Irresistible. Surely another gauntlet had been thrown down: to synthesise this Mount Everest of the malodorous. A little more research in the library led me on the route to make this special substance, a trail that involved a few reactions in sequence. The only trouble was that the first step in the whole process demanded potassium cyanide, which had another entry in the Book of Records as one of the most poisonous substances known to man, one that quickly blocks the body’s capacity to assimilate oxygen. It was a favoured component of suicide capsules; in the Berlin bunker it finally extinguished Nazi ambitions. There was no way I could obtain potassium cyanide.

  This was to reckon without that old blue encyclopedia of knowledge of all bad things. I was excited and surprised to find a recipe there for making cyanide from available ingredients. The cyanide radical (CN) is present quite widely in nature in tiny quantities – it imparts the taste and smell to bay leaves, for example, and is present in fingernails. The recipe involved roasting parings from horses’ hooves with several other common chemicals in a metal tube, and extracting the result with water. My sister had become horse mad, and owned a pony. After the farrier had been to fit new horseshoes abundant shavings of hoof lay on the stable floor, and my most recherché ingredient was to hand. The Bunsen burner worked on the ingredients until the iron tube fairly glowed. I let it cool before adding water and filtering the result. This innocuous-looking, nearly colourless fluid should be deadly cyanide, but there was no way of telling just by squinting at it. The tricky next step concerned changing the putative cyanide into its twin isocyanide. Although they are both made of nitrogen and carbon, isocyanide (the so-called isomer of cyanide) has the symmetry of the molecule reversed. From the chemi-shed shelves came silver nitrate, easily obtained from a photographer’s suppliers. A chemical reaction ‘switched’ silver cyanide into silver isocyanide, and I was now ready for the last transformation. I am coy about revealing the details but ethyl alcohol (thank you, Mr Ehrbar) was involved, and a final distillation brought the experiment to an end. As a precaution I put a wooden clothes peg on my nose when a meagre stream of drops dribbled from the tip of my Liebig condenser into a very small bottle. I shoved in a cork hard after it was finished. Perhaps a third of the bottle was filled with liquid. When I removed the peg from my nose I did not have to wonder whether my long journey from hoof shavings to ethyl isocyanide had been successful: just the smear around the edge of the cork produced an intolerable stench. It was the summation of all things horrible: rotting cabbage and flesh was the least of it. It was also the smell of success.