Elemental

by Tim James

  Copyright © 2019 by Tim James

  Published in 2019 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopy, recording, or otherwise without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1702-2

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  Dedicated to

  the students of Northgate High School

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  A Recipe for Reality

  CHAPTER ONE

  Flame Chasers

  CHAPTER TWO

  Uncuttable

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Machine Gun and the Pudding

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Where Do Atoms Come From?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Block by Block

  CHAPTER SIX

  Quantum Mechanics Saves the Day

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Things that Go Boom

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Alchemist’s Dream

  CHAPTER NINE

  Leftists

  CHAPTER TEN

  Acids, Crystals, and Light

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It’s Alive, It’s Alive!

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Nine Elements that Changed the World (and One that Didn’t)

  APPENDIX I

  Sulfur with an “f”

  APPENDIX II

  Half a Proton?

  APPENDIX III

  Schrödinger’s Equation

  APPENDIX IV

  Neutrons into Protons

  APPENDIX V

  The pH and pKa Scales

  APPENDIX VI

  Groups of the Periodic Table

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  A Recipe for Reality

  Fourteen billion years ago, our Universe decided to begin. We don’t know what came before (if there was a before), we just know it started stretching in every direction and has been doing so ever since.

  In the first few nanoseconds after the big bang, all of reality was a glowing soup of particles, frothing at temperatures millions of times hotter than the Sun. As everything spread out, however, things cooled, particles stabilized, and the elements were born.

  Elements are the building blocks nature uses for cosmic cooking; the purest substances making up everything from beetroot to bicycles. Studying the elements and their uses is what we call chemistry, although sadly that word has come to mean something sinister for many people.

  A writer on a popular health website was recently moaning about “chemicals in our food” and what we can do to keep food “chemical free.” These scaremongers seem to think that chemicals are toxins created by lunatics in lab coats, but this view is far too narrow. Chemicals aren’t just the bubbling liquids you see in test tubes: they are the test tubes themselves.

  The clothes you’re wearing, the air you’re breathing, and the page you’re currently reading are all chemicals. If you don’t want chemicals in your food then I’m afraid it’s too late. Food is chemicals.

  Suppose you mix two parts of the element hydrogen with one part oxygen. In scientific notation, you’d write that as H2O, water, the most famous chemical in the world. Chuck in a bit of the element carbon and you get C2H4O2—household vinegar. Multiply each of those ingredients by three and you’ll get C6H12O6, more commonly known as sugar.

  The only difference between cooking and chemistry is that while a recipe might specify a vegetable, chemistry wants to go deeper and find out what the vegetable itself is made of. There’s practically no limit to what you can describe once you know the elements involved. Consider this beast for example:1

  It looks like something you might find in a barrel of toxic waste but it’s the chemical formula for a human being. You have to multiply each number by seven hundred trillion, but those are the correct chemical ratios for one human body. So, if you hear someone say they distrust chemicals, feel free to reassure them. They are a chemical.

  Chemistry is not an abstract subject happening in dingy laboratories: it’s happening everywhere around us and everywhere within us.

  In order to understand chemistry, therefore, we have to understand the periodic table, that hideous thing you probably remember hanging on the wall of your chemistry classroom. Glaring down at you with all its boxes, letters, and numbers, the periodic table can be intimidating. But it’s nothing more than an ingredients list, and once you’ve learned to decode it, the periodic table becomes one of your greatest allies in explaining the Universe.

  So, yes, the periodic table is seriously weird and seriously complicated, but so is the rest of nature. That’s what makes it worth studying. That’s what makes it beautiful.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Flame Chasers

  THE MOST FLAMMABLE SUBSTANCE EVER MADE

  Chemistry really began when we mastered our first reaction: setting fire to stuff. The ability to create and control fire helped us to hunt, cook, ward off predators, stay warm in winter, and manufacture primitive tools. Originally, we burned things like wood and fat, but it turns out that most substances are combustible.

  Things catch alight because they come into contact with oxygen, one of the most reactive elements out there. The only reason things aren’t bursting into flame all the time is that while oxygen is reactive it needs energy to get going. That’s why starting a fire also requires something like warmth or friction. Oxygen has to be heated in order to combust.

  The most flammable chemical ever made, though, far worse than oxygen, was created in 1930 by two scientists named Otto Ruff and Herbert Krug.1 Meet chlorine trifluoride.

  Made from the elements chlorine and fluorine in a one-to-three ratio, chlorine trifluoride is unique in being able to ignite literally anything it touches, including flame retardants.

  A green liquid at room temperature and a colorless gas when warmed, ClF3 will set fire to glass and sand. It will set fire to asbestos and Kevlar (the material from which firefighters’ suits are made). It will even set fire to water itself, spitting out fumes of hydrofluoric acid in the process.2

  There are very few instances of ClF3 being used, though, because it has the inconvenient property of setting fire to almost anything with which it comes into contact. It takes a special kind of maniac to think, “Hmm, I’ll give that a go.”

  The most spectacular ClF3 incident happened on an undisclosed date at a chemical plant in Shreveport, Louisiana. A ton of it was being moved across the factory floor in a sealed cylinder, refrigerated to prevent it reacting with the metal. Unfortunately, the cold temperature made the cylinder brittle and it cracked, spilling the contents everywhere. The ClF3 instantly set fire to the concrete floor and burned its way through over a meter in depth before extinguishing. The man moving the cylinder was reportedly found blasted through the air 150 meters away, dead from a heart attack. That was refrigerated chlorine trifluoride.3

  During the 1940s, a few cautious attempts were made to use it as a rocket fuel, but inevitably it kept setting fire to the rockets themselves so the projects were abandoned.

  The only people who made a serious attempt to harness its power were t
he Nazi weapons researchers of Falkenhagen Bunker.4 The idea was to use it as a flame-thrower fuel, but it set fire to the flame-thrower and anyone carrying it so, again, it was deemed unusable.

  Just think about that. Not only will it set fire to water, chlorine trifluoride is so evil even the Nazis didn’t mess with it. What makes it so potent?

  The answer is that fluorine behaves in a very similar way to oxygen but needs less energy to get started. It’s the most reactive element on the periodic table and effectively out-oxygens oxygen at breaking other chemicals down. So, when you combine it with chlorine, the second most reactive element, you get an unholy alliance that starts fires without encouragement.

  FIRE FROM WATER

  The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was so enamored with fire he declared it to be the purest substance—the basic matter from which reality was made. According to him, everything was somehow made from fire in one form or another. Fire was, in other words, elemental.

  It’s an understandable assumption to make since fire does appear to possess magical properties. Then again, Heraclitus lived on a diet of nothing but grass and tried to cure himself of dropsy by lying in a cow shed for three days covered in manure … after which he was eaten by dogs.5 So perhaps we don’t need to take Heraclitus’s views too seriously.

  The reason it was so difficult to identify elements in the ancient world was because, unknown to the early philosophers, very few elements occur in their pure state. Most of them are unstable and combine to form element fusions called compounds.

  It works a bit like a singles’ bar. Each person is unhappy on their own so they link up with others to form stable pairings. At the end of the evening, most individuals have formed compounds leading to greater stability all around. Only a handful of elements like gold, which doesn’t mind being single, remain in their native state.

  Almost everything we come across in nature is a compound, so while something like table salt may look pure, the game is being rigged. Table salt is actually a compound of sodium and chlorine—the true elements.

  You’ll never find a lump of sodium in the ground or a cloud of chlorine drifting on the breeze because both are violently reactive. This makes them virtually undetectable, especially if you’re working with the crude lab equipment of the first millennium.

  There’s also the fact that many elements are shockingly rare. Take the element protactinium used in nuclear physics research; the entire global supply comes from a single flake, weighing 125 g owned by the UK Atomic Energy Authority.6 With the odds stacked against them, Greek philosophers had no chance of getting things right.

  It wasn’t until the late seventeenth century that a German experimenter named Hennig Brandt proved everyday substances had elements locked inside them and most of the stuff we thought to be pure, wasn’t at all.

  On an unknown night in 1669, Brandt was boiling vast quantities of urine in his lab (you’ve got to have a hobby), probably because urine is gold-colored and he was hoping to make a fortune by solidifying it into the precious metal.

  After many hours of what must have been unpleasant work, Brandt was finally left with a thick red syrup and a black residue similar to the gunk you get after burning toast. He mixed these two things together and heated the mixture once more. What happened next made no sense.

  His mixture of urine syrup and cooking schmutz suddenly formed a waxy solid, which smelled powerfully of garlic and glowed blue-green. Not only that, it was extremely flammable and gave off blinding white light as it burned. He had somehow extracted fire from water.

  Brandt named his chemical phosphorus from the Greek for light-bringer, and spent the next six years experimenting with it in secret. And it wasn’t a fun six years, either. Each 60-g batch of phosphorus required five and a half tons of urine to be boiled.

  Eventually, running out of his wife’s money, Brandt went public with the discovery and began selling phosphorus to Daniel Kraft, one of the first science popularizers, who took it around Europe giving demonstrations to amazed royals and scientific institutions.7

  Brandt, however, kept the method of extraction a closely guarded secret. Although how nobody figured it out has always been a puzzle. He must have had one hell of a cover story to explain why he wanted all that urine.

  Nowadays we understand exactly what was going on in Brandt’s methods. The human body’s recommended intake of phosphorus is between 0.5 and 0.8 g a day, but since everything we eat contains it, we tend to consume over twice that amount. All this excess is passed into the urine and Brandt was just boiling everything else away.

  His discovery marked a crucial moment for chemistry because the extracted phosphorus was so markedly different from its source. Urine doesn’t glow in the dark (sadly) but it obviously contains a chemical that does. It was proof there were chemicals hiding in plain sight. The elements weren’t out of reach.

  THE MEN WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE

  At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the German chemist Georg Stahl, armed with this new knowledge that everyday substances could be made from hidden elements, decided to put forward an explanation for fire.

  When metals burn they form colored powders, which were called calxes at the time. Calxes were notoriously difficult to set alight, so Stahl concluded that they were elements, difficult to ignite because their fire had been removed.

  According to this hypothesis, anything flammable contained a substance that escaped into air when heated, leaving behind the charred remains. This substance was named phlogiston from the Greek phlogizein (to set alight) and Stahl argued that a fire was phlogiston being separated from a calx.8

  Stahl’s fire hypothesis was important because, unlike previous ideas in chemistry, it was testable. If correct, it should be possible to trap phlogiston and combine it with a calx to regenerate the original metal. By putting forward an idea that could be proven wrong, Stahl gave us a genuine scientific hypothesis and, like most scientific hypotheses, it was quickly destroyed.

  The first chink in the armor came from the French-British scientist Henry Cavendish. He was a notoriously shy man with a penchant for collecting furniture, beloved by physicists because he helped provide evidence for the force of gravitation. His greatest contribution to chemistry though was a series of experiments involving acid and iron.

  The reaction between these two always released an invisible gas, which Cavendish collected. His first thought was that he had successfully got hold of phlogiston until he discovered something odd. The gas was explosive.9 If fire was the result of phlogiston escaping, how could phlogiston itself be burned? How could phlogiston escape from itself?

  Stranger still, when Cavendish’s gas (which he called flammable air) exploded, it generated pure water. If you could make water from other things, maybe water wasn’t elemental either.

  The next mystery came in 1774 from the heretical English clergyman Joseph Priestley. Priestley was experimenting on calx of mercury (the red powdery substance you get when mercury is burned) and directing beams of sunlight at it with a magnifying glass.10

  He collected the gas given off and found that other things burned very well inside it, better than they did in normal air. Whatever it was, it was clearly good at removing phlogiston. Logically this gas had to be dephlogisticated because it was able to absorb phlogiston, so he called it “dephlogisticated air.”

  About two hundred years previously, the Polish magician Michał Sędziwój had discovered air to be a mixture of two gases, one of which was “the food of life” and one of which was useless.11 Could this be related?

  Priestley decided to seal some mice in a box with his dephlogisticated gas and they survived without harm. He also discovered, after testing it on himself, that it was actually preferable to regular air and made him feel euphoric to breathe it. Sędziwój’s food-of-life gas was apparently the same as his dephlogisticated gas.

  Priestley also discovered that plants seemed to breathe the gas out, replenishing a room after a fire had burned. The who
le thing was very confusing. Fires generating water, metals generating fire, plants generating air … What was going on?

  BRINGING ORDER

  The answer to all the riddles came in 1775 when Priestley shared his phlogiston results with the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier.

  Lavoisier worked for the French government collecting tax contributions but his real passion was science. He had already been experimenting on calxes by the time Priestley’s experiments came to his attention12 and decided it was time to put the phlogiston hypothesis through its paces. If fire was the result of phlogiston leaving a substance, the leftover calx should weigh less.

  Priestley had tried taking measurements with his magnifying glass and mercury calx, but precision equipment didn’t exist in the eighteenth century. Imagine trying to distinguish a powder weighing 1 g from a powder weighing 1.1 g. Quite the challenge.

  Lavoisier decided to scale up Priestley’s experiment in order to get a clear result. The difference between 1000 kg and 1100 kg is a difference of 100 kg, which you could see with the naked eye. So, Lavoisier ordered the construction of a nine-foot magnifying glass and blasted a plateful of mercury calx with sunlight.13

  The results were unmistakable—calxes weighed more than the original metal. Everyone had it backward. Fire wasn’t the removal of phlogiston: it was something being added from the air itself. Substances like metals and phosphorus were the elements and fire was what happened when they combined with Priestley’s gas.

  As brilliant as this insight was, Lavoisier wasn’t perfect and mistakenly thought Priestley’s gas was also responsible for the sour taste of acids. He called it oxygène from the Greek oxys-genes (sour-maker), which translates into English as oxygen.