Periodic Tales
Page 1
Periodic Tales
A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc
Hugh Aldersey-Williams
To my parents
Mary Redfield Aldersey-Williams
(23 June 1930–16 May 2004)
Arthur Grosvenor Aldersey-Williams
(6 June 1929–23 December 2008)
with love and gratitude
Contents
List of Illustrations
Prologue
Part One: Power
El Dorado
Going Platinum
Noble Metals, Ignobly Announced
The Ochreous Stain
The Element Traders
Among the Carbonari
Plutonium Charades
Mendeleev’s Suitcases
The Liquid Mirror
Part Two: Fire
The Circumnavigation of the Sulphur
Pee is for Phosphorus
‘As under a green sea’
‘Humanitarian nonsense’
Slow Fire
Our Lady of Radium
Nightglow of Dystopia
Cocktails at the Pale Horse
The Light of the Sun
Part Three: Craft
To the Cassiterides
Dull Lead’s Grey Truth
Our Perfect Reflection
The Worldwide Web
Au Zinc
Banalization
‘Turn’d to barnacles’
The Guild of Aerospace Welders
The March of the Elements
Part Four: Beauty
Chromatic Revolution
‘Lonely-chrome America’
Abbé Suger’s Sheet Sapphire
Inheritance Powder
Rainbows in the Blood
Crushing Emeralds
The Crimson Light of Neon
Jezebel’s Eyes
Part Five: Earth
Swedish Rock
Europium Union
Auerlicht
Gadolin and Samarsky, Everymen of the Elements
Ytterby Gruva
Epilogue
Notes
References and Select Bibliography
Text Credits
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other Books by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
List of Illustrations
Detail from Simon Patterson, Untitled, 1996. (Copyright © Simon Patterson. Courtesy Haunch of Venison Gallery, London.)
Marc Quinn, Siren, 2008 (solid gold). (Copyright © Marc Quinn. Courtesy White Cube.)
Cripple Creek.
Film poster for Platinum Blonde. (Copyright © 1931, renewed 1958, Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.)
Scratch card advertisement. (Will Hammond.)
Wollaston’s anonymous palladium announcement. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library from McDonald and Hunt, A History of Platinum, p. 105.)
Max Whitby’s element specimens.
Charcoal-making. (The Dorset Charcoal Co.)
Carbonari initiation ceremony. (John Murray, 1821.)
AERE bus. (Mike Bennett.)
Homoeopathic Plutonium.
Mendeleev’s first printed periodic table. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library from Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing, p. 29.)
Mercury mirror in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée. (14(c) 1946 SNC (Groupe M6) / Comité Cocteau. Special Thanks to Pierre Bergé, President of the Comité Cocteau.)
Alexander Calder, Mercury Fountain. (Copyright © 2010 Calder Foundation, New York / DACS London.)
Thomas Aquinas. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library from Roberts, The Mirror of Alchemy, p. 34.)
Mercury–sulphur experiment. (Nicolas Thomas, INRAP–Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.)
HMS Sulphur. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library from Belcher, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, frontispiece and title page.)
Joseph Wright, The Alchymist, 1771. (Copyright © 2010 Derby Museum and Art Gallery.)
Trying to isolate phosphorus.
The fire-bombing of Hamburg. (Imperial War Museum IWM C 3677.)
John Singer Sargent, Gassed, 1919. (Imperial War Museum IWM ART 1460.)
The Bromo-Seltzer Tower. (Visit Baltimore.)
The Radium Palace Hotel. (Léebné lázn Jáchymov a.s.)
Radium leather dye.
Sodium street light townscape. (Copyright © David Jones.)
Humphry Davy’s voltaic piles. (Courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.)
A View of the Fireworks and Illuminations at his grace the Duke of Richmond’s at Whitehall and on the River Thames, on Monday 15th May 1749, coloured engraving by the English School (eighteenth century). (Private Collection / The Bridge-man Art Library.)
Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa’s atom diagrams. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library from Besant and Leadbeater, Occult Chemistry, plate IV.)
Ernst Haeckel’s marine organisms. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library from Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur, plate 41.)
A Cornish tin mine.
Zoe Laughlin’s tuning forks. (Zoe Laughlin.)
Bleigiessen.
Crane Park shot tower.
Anselm Kiefer, Jason. (Copyright © Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.)
Silver Ring Thing promotional material. (Copyright © The Silver Ring Thing.)
David Clarke silverware. (David Clarke.)
Cornelia Parker, Stolen Thunder, 1997–9: tarnish from James Bowie’s (inventor of the Bowie knife) soup spoon. (One of a set of ten, each 63 × 63 cm. Courtesy of Cornelia Parker and Frith Street Gallery, London.)
Christopher Wren’s original sketch of an alternative detail for the top of the Monument. (Courtesy Codrington Library, All Souls College, Oxford.)
Moritz Seelig zinc statue. (Carol Grissom.)
Zinc cladding, Jewish Museum, Berlin. (Bitter Bredt Fotographie.)
Maurice Lambert, head of Edith Sitwell. (Courtesy Mrs Alexandra Hayward, Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire.)
Picquot Ware tea-set.
Hopscotch grid in chalk.
Orvieto cathedral. (Moira Morrissey.)
Michelangelo, tomb of Pope Julius II. (Image copyright © Jean-Christophe Benoist.)
Barbara Hepworth’s studio with marble sculptures. (Copyright © Bowness Hepworth Estate, BHM, St Ives, 1976.)
David Poston’s studio.
Ann Marie Shillito’s jewellery. (Ann Marie Shillito.)
My father’s paints.
Cornelissen’s artists’ material shop.
Longwood House. (Ripetungi.)
William Morris wallpaper. (Andrew Meharg.)
Sea tunicates. (Copyright © Gary Bell / OceanwideImages.com.)
William Ramsay’s gas discharge tubes.
Fiona Banner Studio, Bones, 2007: question mark. (One of ten neon parts bent by the artist, paper templates, clamps, wire and transformers, each 70 × 100 cm. Studio installation shot.)
‘Neon boneyard’, Las Vegas. (Courtesy of the Neon Museum, Las Vegas, NV.)
Antimony star. (Isaac Newton, ‘Newton’s Most Complete Laboratory Notebook’, in William R. Newman, ed., The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/newton.)
Statue of Carl Scheele, Stockholm.
A chemist’s blow-pipe.
Giovanni Mataloni, Incandescenza a Gas. (Courtesy of Italgas Historical Archive.)
&n
bsp; Berzelius’s labelled chemical bottles. (Lennart Nilsson. Courtesy Centre for History of Science, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.)
Ytterby mine.
All uncredited photographs are by the author.
Prologue
Like the alphabet or the zodiac, the periodic table of the elements is one of those graphic images that seem to root themselves for ever in our memories. The one I remember is from school, hung on the wall behind the teacher’s desk like an altar screen, its glossy yellowing paper testament to years of chemical attack. It’s an image I haven’t been able to shake off, despite scarcely venturing into a laboratory for years. Now I have it on my own wall.
Or at least a version of it. The familiar stepped skyline is there, and the neatly stacked boxes, one for each element. Each box contains the symbol and atomic number appropriate to the element in that position. However, all is not quite as it should be in this table. For where the name of each element should appear, there is another name entirely, one that is nothing to do with the world of science. The symbol O represents not the element oxygen but the god Orpheus; Br is not bromine but the artist Bronzino. Many of the other spaces are taken, for some reason, by figures from 1950s cinema.
This periodic table is a lithograph by the British artist Simon Patterson. Patterson is fascinated by the diagrams that are the means by which we organize our world. His way of working is to recognize the importance of the thing as an emblem of order but then to play havoc with its contents. His best-known work is a London Underground map with the stations along each line renamed after saints and explorers and football players. Strange things happen at the intersections.
It is no surprise that he should wish to play the same game with the periodic table. He has grim memories of how it was taught by rote at his school. ‘It was convenient to teach it that way, but I could never remember it,’ Simon tells me. Yet he remembered the idea of it. Ten years after leaving school, he produced a series of variations on the table in which the symbol for each element kicks off a false association. Cr is not chromium but Julie Christie, Cu not copper but Tony Curtis; and then even this cryptic system is sabotaged: Ag, the symbol for silver, is not Jenny Agutter, say, or Agatha Christie, but of course Phil Silvers. There are teasing moments of apparent logic in this new tabulation: the sequential elements beryllium and boron (symbols Be and B) are the Bergmans, Ingrid and Ingmar respectively. The acting brothers Rex and Rhodes Reason appear adjacent to one another, co-opting the symbols for rhenium (Re) and osmium (Os). Kim Novak (Na; sodium) and Grace Kelly (K; potassium) share the same column in the table–both were Hitchcock leading ladies. But in general there is no system, only the connections you make for yourself: I was tickled to see, for example, that Po, the symbol for polonium, the radioactive element discovered by Marie Curie and named by her for her native Poland, denotes instead the Polish director Roman Polanski.
I now love the ludic irreverence of this work, but my school-age self would have been quite scornful of such nonsense. While Simon was dreaming up wild new connections, I was merely absorbing the information I was meant to absorb. The elements, I understood, were the universal and fundamental ingredients of all matter. There was nothing that was not made out of elements. But the table into which the Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev had sorted them was even more than the sum of these remarkable parts. It made sense of the riotous variety of the elements, placing them sequentially in rows by atomic number (that is to say, the number of protons in the nuclei of their atoms) in such a way that their chemical relatedness suddenly leapt out (this relatedness is periodic, as revealed in the alignment of the columns). Mendeleev’s table seemed to have a life of its own. For me, it stood as one of the great and unquestionable systems of the world. It explained so much, it seemed so natural, that it must always have been there; it couldn’t possibly be the recent invention of modern science (although it was less than a century old when I first saw it). I acknowledged its power as an icon, yet I too began to wonder in my own tentative way what it really meant. The table seemed in some funny way to belittle its own contents. With its relentless logic of sequence and similarity, it made the elements themselves, in their messy materiality, almost superfluous.
Indeed, my classroom periodic table provided no picture of what each element looked like. The realization that these ciphers had real substance struck me only at the vast illuminated table of the chemical elements they used to keep at the Science Museum in London. This table had actual specimens. In each rectangle of the already familiar grid squatted a little glass bubble beneath which a sample of the relevant element glimmered or brooded. There was no knowing whether they were all the real thing, but I noted that the curators had omitted to include many of the rare and radioactive elements, so it seemed safe to assume that the rest were authentic. Here it was vividly clear what we had been told at school: that the gaseous elements were mostly to be found in the top rows of the table; that the metals occupied the centre and left, with the heavier ones in the lower rows–they were mostly grey, although one column, containing copper, silver and gold, provided a streak of colour; that the non-metals, more variegated in colour and texture, lay over in the top right corner.
With that, I had to start my own collection. It would not be easy. Few of the elements are found in their pure state in nature. Usually, they are chemically locked up in minerals and ores. So instead, I began to cast about the house, taking advantage of the centuries during which man has extracted them from these ores and pressed them into service. I broke open dead light bulbs and surgically snipped free the tungsten filaments, placing the wriggling wires into a little glass vial. Aluminium came from the kitchen in the form of foil, copper from the garage as electrical wire. A foreign coin that I’d heard was made of nickel–though not an American nickel, which I knew was mostly copper–I cut up into coarse chunks. It was worth more to me like this. It made it more, well, elemental. I discovered that my father had some gold leaf kept from his youth, when he used it for decorative lettering. I removed some of it from the drawer where it had lain in darkness for thirty years and allowed it to shine once more.
This was a definite improvement on the Science Museum. I could not only see my specimens close up, but feel whether they were warm or cold to the touch and heft them in my hand–a bright little ingot of tin, which I had cast in a small ceramic bath from a melted roll of solder, was astonishingly heavy. I could make them ring or rattle against the glass and appreciate their characteristic timbres. Sulphur had a primrose colour with a slight sparkle, and could be poured and spooned like caster sugar. For me, its beauty was in no way tainted by its slightly pungent odour. I have reminded myself of this smell just now, with a tin of sulphur bought from a garden shop, where it is sold to fumigate greenhouses. The dry, woody aroma is on my fingers as I type, to me not hellish as the Bible teaches, but evocative simply of childhood experimental enquiry.
Other elements needed more work. Zinc and carbon came from batteries–zinc from the casing, which serves as one electrode, and carbon from the rod of graphite inside it that provides the other. So did mercury. More expensive, mercury batteries were used to run various electronic gadgets. By the time they had run down, the mercuric oxide that powered them had been reduced to metallic mercury. I chopped off the ends of the batteries with a hacksaw and scooped out the sludge into a flask. By heating the flask, I was able to distil off the metal, watching as tiny glistening droplets condensed from the thick toxic fumes and then merged into a single hyperactive silvery bead. (The experiment would be banned now for health reasons, as are these batteries.)
A few of the elements you could still buy, in those innocent days, at a dispensing chemist’s. I got my iodine in this way. Others came from a small chemicals supplier in Tottenham long since driven out of business by restrictions on the sale of what were of course the raw materials for bombs and poisons–as well as everything else. Although my parents were happy enough to indulge my obsession by driving me there, these tr
ips along the farther reaches of the Seven Sisters Road to the shabby counter beneath the thundering railway arches, with its aromas as promising as any spice market, always had a clandestine feel about them.
I made good progress with my table. I had drawn the grid out on a backboard of plywood and hung it on the bedroom wall. As I got it, I dropped each new sample into a uniform vial and clipped it into position on the grid. The pure elements themselves were often chemically rather useless. I saw that. The useful chemicals–the ones that reacted or exploded or made beautiful colours–were mostly the chemical combinations of elements known as compounds, and these I kept in a cupboard in the bathroom where I did my experiments. The elements were a collector’s obsession. They had a beginning and a compelling sequence. They seemed also to have an end. (Little did I know then of the ferocious cold war between American and Soviet scientists, who were striving to add to the 103 I had fixed in my head by synthesizing new ones.) As a collector, my aim, however unattainable it was destined to be, was of course to complete the set. But it was far more than collecting for collecting’s sake. Here I was assembling the very building blocks of the world, of the universe. My collection had none of the artifice of stamps or football cards, where the rules of the game are set arbitrarily by other collectors or, worse still, by the companies producing the items in the first place. This was fundamental. The elements were for ever. They had come into being in the moments after the Big Bang, and would be here long after humankind has perished, after all life on earth, even after the planet itself has been consumed by its own ballooning red sun.