Periodic Tales

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  If Ytterby is a place of pilgrimage, who are its pilgrims? The mine closed in 1933. But chemists and mineralogists have continued to seek it out. In 1940, Brian Mason of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC found the mine partly flooded, although there were still large blocks of pegmatite, the feldspar quartz that bears the black, triangular-faced crystals of gadolinite, lying around. A few years later, he went back and was disappointed to find the site had been taken over and fenced off for use as an oil depot and there was no longer any public access. In his account of his visits, he lists twenty-five minerals, which between them contained quantities of yttrium, tantalum, niobium, beryllium, manganese, molybdenum and zirconium as well as more common mineral elements such as aluminium and potassium.

  Mike Morelle, the schoolmaster responsible for inculcating my own fascination with the elements, came across the mine by chance in 1960, when he was invited to stay at a business colleague’s holiday home in Ytterby. Walking in the woods near by, he found himself in a rocky pit that reminded him of the V2 rocket crater that had appeared outside his bedroom window one morning in 1945. The slopes were overgrown, and there was no obvious mine entrance, but he noticed a few signs of former quarrying activity. Only later did he learn from his host of the chemical significance of the site.

  Jim Marshall at the University of North Texas and his wife, Jenny, have toured the world seeking out the sites associated with the discovery of each element in a vacation project that has turned into a ten-year obsession. Their objective is to visit every relevant mine, laboratory and chemist’s home. The idea took root when the Marshalls reached the end of the line in a genealogical investigation that had given them a taste for purposed European travel. What better way to continue in the same vein than to contrive a project that would oblige them to visit some of Europe’s most pleasant cities and a smattering of rugged out-of-the-way locations, with each site’s inclusion always justified by its connection with the overall mission? The itinerary would be long enough to be daunting, but sufficiently contained to be achievable in the end. Naturally, they have visited the great cities such as Paris, Berlin, London, Edinburgh and Copenhagen, and also obscure spots such as Strontian and the gloomy Transylvanian mine where tellurium was first found. The Marshalls’ ‘walking tour of the elements’ seems to offer the perfect touristic marriage of the urbane and the sublime, so that, on the gallium trail, for example, they find themselves both in Lecoq de Boisbaudran’s Cognac and in the misty Pyrenean mountains where he obtained the zinc blende from which he extracted the element. Sadly, though, as their written and photographic records of these trips attest, they often find these sites unmarked, neglected or built over. Jim and Jenny finally reached Ytterby in 2007.

  On my own journey, I have been asking the chemists and the historians of science I meet whether they too have been to Ytterby. Few have. Andrea Sella was taken on a ferry cruise across the Gulf of Bothnia to Sweden while attending a conference in Gadolin’s city of Turku, but he bunked off the proffered side trip to Ytterby in favour of a day’s sightseeing in Stockholm. Even my local guides, Hjalmar Fors and Anders Lundgren, have not made the excursion to the birthplace of so many elements.

  In art and literature, the studio and the writer’s desk retain a certain fascination. But it does not matter where Newton and Einstein were when they revolutionized the laws of physics; it merely matters that they did so. You can visit the family home in Lincolnshire to which Newton retreated when the plague swept through Cambridge where he made his most important discoveries. In the garden is an apple tree which, it is tentatively claimed, is grafted from the one that famously dropped its fruit on to the great man’s head. But it offers no insight into Newton’s revelation concerning the law of gravity; it is just an apple tree. I hoped Ytterby would be different. Here, after all, it was not the chance presence of some human genius that made it significant. This was not Stratford-upon-Avon or Dove Cottage. The meaning had to lie in the place, in the unique material constitution of one patch of geography.

  The sky is a pale grey and the trees are dripping from recent drizzle as my bus snakes its way through the Stockholm suburbs along sliproads cut into pink and grey rock. Soon everything manmade seems to arise from this geology–the aggregate that surfaces the road, the steel barriers along its edge, the metal siding of the industrial estates, the rough-hewn stone and ochre stucco of the more imposing buildings, the red clapboard of the houses (called Falu röd after the Falun mines, whose cuprous ores are used to make the pigment). Everywhere, rounded boulders thrust their way through the late spring vegetation, as if it is they that are alive and burgeoning and will soon overwhelm the grass and bushes, and not the other way around.

  As the bus surges on, I think about how chemistry seems to have become an almost clandestine activity. The alchemists are discredited and cold in their graves, yet the science of the elements seems to have gained little respect or respectability. Chemistry’s heroes and heroines are neglected. The subject is increasingly taught hypothetically in schools, with experiments often no longer performed either by pupil or by teacher, but merely described or seen on a DVD. Chemicals are things to be feared, the necessary ones kept in their place under the kitchen sink (and designated ‘chemicals’, as if the sink itself and its contents are not chemicals too). I’d struggled to get hold of the simple substances and apparatus I needed for my own modest experiments; I’d visited a fireworks factory hidden behind a hedge in a layby with no company sign to advertise it; I’d heard from academics driven out of their urban laboratories to remote waste land in order to do their experiments. It seemed an odd way to increase scientific knowledge and spread understanding. The elements–many of them–are obtainable if you know where to look, but this knowledge itself is made to seem dangerous, as if it is only to be gained at the price of knowing some secret code: sulphur is to be found at the garden shop; magnesium at the ship’s chandler; antimony at the artists’ supplier. Surely the universal elements should belong to all humanity.

  The bus crosses a couple of inlets and drops me off. I am the only one to disembark. The drizzle starts again, and I now understand why the walking map I have bought in preparation for the final stage of my journey comes in a plastic sleeve. I had hoped for a journey of epic dimensions, and am a little dismayed to find that Resarö is these days comfortably within commuting distance of Stockholm. The map shows the settlement of Ytterby and an angular G for ‘gruva’–mine–at the tip of the island. I trudge along for a mile or so against the rain. The field-fares are making excited ratcheting noises in the trees. Wild geraniums grow in the verge. Soon, rock-strewn meadows give way to an idyllic suburbia, and the rain eases. The sound of children playing fills the air. Houses and gardens appear with little vegetable patches dotted with blueberry bushes and onion flowers. Blue-and-yellow pennants skip merrily in the breeze from tall poles in many of the gardens.

  I follow signs to a café which I find in a boatyard. The café is no more than an open-sided hut with a handkerchief of decking looking out over the water. The paper napkins are weighed down with a piece of the pink stone. I ask the owner if he knows of the Ytterby mine and its hoard of elements. He does, but hasn’t been there himself. ‘I’ve only lived on Resarö for five years. I’m not the explorer type.’

  I walk on past a street called Yttriumvägen and know I must be getting close. A little further on, two boulders of the pink rock have been placed at the side of the road. A scree path leads steeply up between them through birches and pines. To one side of the path stand the metal posts of a sign that has been removed, but a small plastic badge stapled to an adjacent tree announces that I have arrived at a ‘Natur minne’. The path is pure white and rose quartz as if in a fairy tale. I scramble up. At the top, I find a lumpy vertical expanse of rock as big as the front of a house. Ytterby gruva. The rock is grey and pink and white and black. At the foot of this little cliff the remains of somebody’s campfire have been safely ringed by stones of the various colours.
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  The site scarcely resembles a mine of any sort. There are no workings, no spoil heaps, not even any detectable opening into the earth. It is too compact to be called desolate. The landscape is picturesque rather than ravaged or scarred. Wild strawberries cling to the crevices in the rock. I wonder if this can really be the womb that gave birth to so many elements–for yes, in the lore of the miners who once laboured here and everywhere, the earth is indeed the mother, and the ores embryos growing in her belly that they must help to bring into the world.

  Looking more closely, I begin to notice signs of human interference–a line of holes drilled into the rock by miners who never came back to prise away the next block, and here and there iron spikes and eyes driven into the cliff side that once supported the gantries used to transport the stone down the hillside. Yet there seem to be just these few metres of worked rock wall. The rounded boulders lying near by are completely undisturbed, with the same glaciated polish they acquired thousands of years ago. Climbing up on one, I gaze out over the treetops at a vista of small islands receding endlessly into the sea. Now something like exaltation steals upon me. I feel the roundness of the world and all its substance beneath my feet.

  Time to start hammering. I have brought with me a magnifying glass and a small but powerful magnet to test any specimens I find. But I am ill-equipped to attack the exposed rock. My pathetic tapping on the quartz cliff–‘hard, rebellious quartz’, Mark Twain had called it–gives me an immediate sense of the huge labour involved in this branch of mining. It is far harder than coal, and entirely unrelieved by softer material. As well as hammers and chisels–and later Alfred Nobel’s dynamite–the miners used fire and ice to crack the stone, piling up great timber bonfires against the rock face and then dashing it with freezing water. I scan the ground for fragments broken off by winter frosts to add to my haul. I pick up a clean piece of white quartz and a piece each of the pink, grey and black rock. Then my eye is caught by a glittering trail of what I take at first to be snail slime (the slugs are out in force on this damp day), but turns out to be tiny shards of another mineral. I locate the fissure from which the pieces are falling, and find it stuffed with fragile thin plates like filo pastry which break off at the same angle like art blades. The surface of each layer has a bright, tinny shine. I have never before seen anything so obviously metalliferous coming straight out of the ground.

  After a couple of hours rummaging about, I have amassed what I consider to be a representative selection of minerals, including quartz, feldspar, a grey sulphurous-smelling rock and a promising blackish stone noticeably denser than the rest, which is iridescent like anthracite, but is clearly metal-bearing.

  On the shore near the mine there is a little jetty from where the minerals were shipped around the Baltic Sea and beyond, and where, doubtless, curious specimen hunters landed in the days before commuter buses. The local rotary club has erected a sign commemorating the observant lieutenant Arrhenius who started the scientific gold rush that led to the naming of six elements after this place. The area is now hemmed in by smart holiday homes, none more than 100 years old, most rather newer. I try to imagine it in Arrhenius’s day, with the noise of quarrying ringing through the pines, competing with the squeal of the gulls. Despite the rocks and the undergrowth, it cannot have been wild even then. It was an easy landing by boat, and the mine was a quick scramble up the hill. I paid my visit on a cool day in June. What was the place like in February when the easterlies blew in across the sea from Russia? Perhaps it was bitter. Or perhaps there was comfort in the camaraderie of the mine and some shelter from the wind, even a little warmth to be gleaned when the fires were lit against the rocks. What makes this place special is not sublime landscape or the adventure of getting here. It is something immediate and corporeal. It is the substance of the soil, the rock revealed in its naked variety, and the knowledge that so many of the elements are native right here–uniquely as it was once thought and as Gadolin feared, although now only emblematically so. This earth, for me, is the source of all the elements and of our understanding of them, the fons et origo of all the varieties of matter.

  I leave Resarö with my mineral haul and walk on to the adjoining island of Vaxholm, a genteel resort dominated by the sixteenth-century fort that squats on an islet across a narrow channel from the town. The fort contains a small display about the Ytterby mine, with historic photographs and, I am pleased to see, specimens of yttrium, erbium, terbium and ytterbium supplied by Max Whitby’s elements clearinghouse. Clustered proudly round the little glass bottles of the metals, like parents round their children, are their source minerals–pyrrhotite, biotite, anderbergite, allanite, chalcopyrite, molybdenite so soft it can be used as a pencil, and uranium-rich fergusonite, the scars made by its radioactive emanations visible on the surrounding feldspar like tiny sunrays scratched into the mineral surface. I worry that none of these specimens looks much like the little stones I have scavenged, and also that I might now be carrying dangerously radioactive material. The display includes a glossy black lump of the famous gadolinite, which certainly doesn’t look like anything I found at the mine. The photographs were taken in 1893 during the mine’s heyday, and show quite a major operation, with tunnels, timber buildings and rails laid for ore wagons. I had seen little surviving evidence of this industry. I learn that the site, once owned by the celebrated Rörstrand porcelain company, is now protected by the state as a ‘geological treasure’. Too late, I read that it is forbidden to collect the minerals.

  I am eager to learn more about my trophies when I return to London. Somewhere, I fancy, must be a mineralogist who can take one glance at my handful of stones and tell me all about them, like the wine taster who is able to name not merely the region and the year of a wine, but the vineyard and even the slope where the grapes were grown.

  I take them first to Zoe Laughlin, the friend who opened my ears to the sonic characteristics of the elements with her tuning-fork experiment, who runs a materials library at King’s College London. In the few days since my return from Sweden, some of the specimens appear to have changed. The sulphurous aroma has dissipated from the grey stone, and the flaky mineral with the tinny shine now looks more transparent, like sheets of cellophane. Zoe tells me it is mica (the Swedish word for it is glimmer). She passes a Geiger counter over the specimens in turn; to my relief, they raise barely a crackle. Nor do they reveal any fluorescent ingredients when viewed under ultraviolet light. This rules out uranium in the ore, which would glow brightly under this illumination. The preliminary surmise is that I am unlikely to have bagged any gadolinite or other minerals rich in rare earths.

  Now I need a mineralogist’s opinion. The Natural History Museum runs a service–miraculous in these days when everything must turn a profit–which permits any member of the public to walk in and request an analysis of unusual minerals they have found. Minerals curator Peter Tandy hoicks his spectacles on to his head and begins to examine my stones. Most of his customers, he tells me, are people who believe they have found a meteorite (they are almost always wrong). One time, he found himself genuinely puzzled by a silvery lump of metal that somebody had brought in with just this hope, until a colleague took one quick look at it and recognized it as the remains of a wartime Italian hand grenade and called the bomb squad. He identifies most of my specimens at a glance, and takes them away for analysis by X-ray diffraction, which will identify which mineral species they are from the crystal structure. A few weeks later, Peter has disappointing news for me. I’ve not brought back anything noteworthy at all.

  I am sorry, of course, that I have not come away from Ytterby weighed down with yttrium and the half-dozen other elements first identified in its rocks. But then, as I say, I am not a natural collector. My aim in this book has been to show that the elements are all around us, both in the material sense that they are in the objects we treasure and under our kitchen sinks, but also around us more powerfully in a figurative sense, in our art and literature and language, in our hist
ory and geography, and that the character of these parallel lives arises ultimately from each element’s universal and unvarying properties. It is through this cultural life rather than through experimental encounter in a laboratory that we really come to know the elements individually, and it is a cause for sadness that most chemistry teaching does so little to acknowledge this rich existence.

  We should cherish and celebrate our necessary involvement with the elements. We may not wish to start our own periodic table, but we should at least try to be happier about the unavoidable fact that we depend in one way or another upon almost all of them. The scientist and environmental activist James Lovelock once said he would be willing to store all the high-level waste from a nuclear power station in a concrete bunker on his land. But perhaps we should spread it around: we should all have a little piece of spent uranium to keep in the garden as a memento of our reliance upon it for our energy.

  Too much? Maybe. But what of all the other elements? The copper that invisibly brings the electricity generated by the nuclear reaction of that uranium into our homes? The rare earths in the phosphor screens of the devices brought to life by this electricity? What of the carbon and calcium that engrave all human history with their black and white? And what of the other elements that colour our world? First and last, our dependence on the elements is biological, as we are reminded when we review the sodium salt content of a TV dinner or pop a supplement pill containing selenium–the latest, by the way, in a long line of elements to be singled out as a fashionable nutrient. We eat them or avoid them, dig them up or bury them, but we rarely stop to appreciate the elements for what they are.