by Oliver Sacks
But the real epiphany came for me in the Science Museum when I was ten, and I discovered the periodic table up on the fifth floor—not one of your nasty, natty, modern little spirals, but a solid rectangular one covering a whole wall, with separate cubicles for every element and the actual elements, whenever possible, in place: chlorine, greenish yellow; swirling brown bromine; jet-black (but violet-vapored) crystals of iodine; heavy, heavy slugs of uranium; and pellets of lithium floating in oil. They even had the inert gases (or “noble” gases, too noble to combine): helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon (but not radon—I guessed it was too dangerous). They were invisible, of course, inside their sealed glass tubes, but one knew they were there.
The actual presence of the elements reinforced the feeling that these were indeed the elemental building blocks of the universe, that the whole universe was here, in microcosm, in South Kensington. I had an overwhelming sense of Truth and Beauty when I saw the periodic table, a sense that this was not a mere human construct, arbitrary, but an actual vision of the eternal cosmic order, and that any future discoveries and advances, whatever they might add, would only reinforce, reaffirm, the truth of its order.
This feeling of grandeur, the immutability of nature’s laws, and of how they might prove graspable by us if we sufficiently sought them—this came to me overwhelmingly when I was a boy of ten, standing before the periodic table in the Science Museum in South Kensington. It has never left me, and fifty years later it is undimmed. My faith and life were set at that moment; my Pisgah, my Sinai, came in a museum.
First Love
In January 1946, when I was twelve and a half, I moved from my prep school in Hampstead, The Hall, to a much larger school, St. Paul’s, in Hammersmith. It was here, in the Walker Library, that I met Jonathan Miller for the first time. I was hidden in a corner, reading a nineteenth-century book on electrostatics—reading, for some reason, about “electric eggs”—when a shadow fell across the page. I looked up and saw an astonishingly tall, gangling boy with a very mobile face, brilliant, impish eyes, and an exuberant mop of reddish hair. We got talking together, and have been close friends ever since.
Prior to this time, I had had only one real friend, Eric Korn, whom I had known almost from birth. Eric followed me from The Hall to St. Paul’s a year later, and now he and Jonathan and I formed an inseparable trio, bound not only by personal but by family bonds, too (our fathers, thirty years earlier, had all been medical students together, and our families had remained close). Jonathan and Eric did not really share my love of chemistry—though a year or two earlier they had joined me in a flamboyant chemical experiment: throwing a large lump of metallic sodium into the Highgate Ponds on Hampstead Heath and watching excitedly as it took fire and sped round and round on the surface like a demented meteor, with a huge sheet of yellow flame beneath it—but they were intensely interested in biology, and it was inevitable, when the time came, that we would find ourselves together in the same biology class, and that all of us would fall in love with our biology teacher, Sid Pask.
Pask was a splendid teacher. He was also narrow-minded, bigoted, cursed with a hideous stutter (which we would imitate endlessly), and by no means exceptionally intelligent. By dissuasion, irony, ridicule, or force, he would turn us away from all other activities—from sport and sex, from religion and families, and from all our other subjects at school. He demanded that we be as single-minded as he was.
The majority of his pupils found him an impossibly demanding and exacting taskmaster. They would do all they could to escape from this pedant’s petty tyranny, as they regarded it. The struggle would go on for a while, and then suddenly there was no longer any resistance—they were free. Pask no longer carped at them, no longer made ridiculous demands upon their time and energy.
Yet some of us, each year, responded to Pask’s challenge. In return, he gave us all of himself—all his time, all his dedication, for biology. We would stay late in the evening with him in the Natural History Museum. We would sacrifice every weekend to plant-collecting expeditions. We would get up at dawn on freezing winter days to go on his January freshwater course. And once a year—there is still an almost intolerable sweetness about the memory—we would go with him to Millport for three weeks of marine biology.
Millport, off the western coast of Scotland, had a beautifully equipped marine biology station, where we were always given a friendly welcome and inducted into whatever experiments were going on. (Fundamental observations were being made on the development of sea urchins at this time, and Lord Rothschild, now in the midst of his soon-to-be-famous experiments on the fertilization of sea urchins, was endlessly patient with the enthusiastic schoolboys who crowded around and peered into his petri dishes with the transparent pluteus larvae.) Jonathan, Eric, and I made several transects on the rocky shore together, counting all the animals and seaweeds we could on successive square-foot portions, from the lichen-covered summit of the rock (Xanthoria parietina was the euphonious name of this lichen) to the shoreline and tidal pools below. Eric was particularly and wittily ingenious, and once, when we needed a plumb line to give us a true vertical but did not know how to suspend it, he pried a limpet from the base of a rock, placed the tip of the plumb line beneath it, and firmly reattached it at the top as a natural drawing pin.
We all adopted particular zoological groups: Eric became enamored of sea cucumbers, holothurians; Jonathan of iridescent bristled worms, polychaetes; and I of squids and cuttlefish, octopuses, all cephalopods—the most intelligent and, to my eyes, the most beautiful of invertebrates. One day we all went down to the seashore, to Hythe in Kent, where Jonathan’s parents had taken a house for the summer, and went out for a day’s fishing on a commercial trawler. The fishermen would usually throw back the cuttlefish that ended up in their nets (they were not popular eating in England). But I, fanatically, insisted that they keep them for me, and there must have been dozens of them on the deck by the time we came in. We brought all the cuttlefish back to the house in pails and tubs, put them in large jars in the basement, and added a little alcohol to preserve them. Jonathan’s parents were away, so we did not hesitate. We would be able to take all the cuttlefish back to school, to Pask—we imagined his astonished smile as we brought them in—and there would be a cuttlefish apiece for everyone in the class to dissect, two or three apiece for the cephalopod enthusiasts. I myself would give a little talk about them at the Field Club, dilating on their intelligence, their large brains, their eyes with erect retinas, their rapidly changing colors.
A few days later, the day Jonathan’s parents were due to return, we heard dull thuds emanating from the basement, and going down to investigate, we encountered a grotesque scene: the cuttlefish, insufficiently preserved, had putrefied and fermented, and the gases produced had exploded the jars and blown great lumps of cuttlefish all over the walls and floor; there were even shreds of cuttlefish stuck to the ceiling. The intense smell of putrefaction was awful beyond imagination. We did our best to scrape off the walls and remove the exploded, impacted lumps of cuttlefish. We hosed down the basement, gagging, but the stench was not to be removed, and when we opened windows and doors to air out the basement, it extended outside the house as a sort of miasma for fifty yards in every direction.
Eric, always ingenious, suggested we mask the smell, or replace it, with an even stronger but pleasant smell—a coconut essence, we decided, would fill the bill. We pooled our resources and bought a large bottle of this, which we used to douche the basement, then distributed liberally through the rest of the house and its grounds.
Jonathan’s parents arrived an hour later and, advancing towards the house, encountered an overwhelming scent of coconut. But as they drew nearer they hit a zone dominated by the stench of putrefied cuttlefish—the two smells, the two vapors, for some curious reason, had organized themselves in alternating zones about five or six feet wide. By the time they reached the scene of our accident, our c
rime, the basement, the smell was insupportable for more than a few seconds. The three of us were all in deep disgrace over the incident. I especially, since it had arisen from my greed in the first place (would not a single cuttlefish have done?) and my folly in not realizing how much alcohol so many specimens would need. Jonathan’s parents had to cut short their holiday and leave the house (the house itself, we heard, remained uninhabitable for months). But my love of cuttlefish remained unimpaired.
Perhaps there was a chemical reason for this, as well as a biological one, for cuttlefish (like many other mollusks and crustaceans) have blue blood, not red, because they evolved a completely different system for transporting oxygen from the one we vertebrates did. Whereas our red respiratory pigment, hemoglobin, contains iron, their bluish-green pigment, hemocyanin, contains copper. Iron and copper each have two different “oxidation states,” and this means that they can easily take up oxygen in the lungs, move it to a higher oxidation state, and then relinquish it, in the tissues, as needed. But why employ just iron and copper when there was another metal—vanadium, a neighbor of theirs in the periodic table—that had no less than four oxidation states? I wondered if vanadium compounds were ever exploited as respiratory pigments, and got most excited when I heard that some sea squirts, tunicates, were extremely rich in the element vanadium and had special cells, vanadocytes, devoted to storing it. Why they contained these was a mystery; they did not seem to be part of an oxygen-transport system.
Absurdly, impudently, I thought I might solve this mystery during one of our annual excursions to Millport. But I got no further than collecting a bushel of sea squirts (with the same greed, the same inordinacy, that had caused me to collect too many cuttlefish). I could incinerate these, I thought, and measure the vanadium content of their ash (I had read that this could exceed 40 percent in some species). And this gave me the only commercial idea I have ever had: to open a vanadium farm—acres of sea meadows, seeded with sea squirts. I would get them to extract the precious vanadium from seawater, as they had been doing very efficiently for the last three hundred million years, and then sell it for £500 a ton. The only problem, I realized, aghast at my own genocidal thoughts, would be the veritable holocaust of sea squirts required.
Humphry Davy: Poet of Chemistry
Humphry Davy was for me—as for most boys of my generation with a chemistry set or a lab—a beloved hero; a boy himself in the boyhood of chemistry; an intensely appealing figure, as fresh and alive after a hundred years in his way as anyone we knew. We knew all about his youthful experiments—from nitrous oxide (which he discovered, described, and became slightly addicted to as a teenager); to his often reckless experiments with alkali metals, electric batteries, electric fish, explosives. We imagined him as a Byronic young man with wide-set, dreaming eyes.
It happened that I was thinking of Humphry Davy when I saw a notice of David Knight’s 1992 biography, Humphry Davy: Science and Power, and I immediately sent for it. I had been in a nostalgic mood, recalling my own boyhood: my twelve-year-old self most romantically and deeply in love—more deeply, perhaps, than ever again—with sodium and potassium and chlorine and bromine; in love with a magical shop in whose dark interior I could purchase chemicals for my lab; with the heavy, encyclopedic volume of Mellor (and where I could decipher them, the Gmelin handbooks); with London’s Science Museum in South Kensington, where the history of chemistry, especially its beginnings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was laid out; in love, perhaps most of all, with the Royal Institution, much of which still looked and smelled exactly as it must have when the young Humphry Davy worked there, and where one could browse among and ponder his actual notebooks, manuscripts, lab notes, and letters.
Davy is, as Knight remarks, a wonderful subject for a biographer, and there have been many biographies of him in the last century and a half. But Knight—trained as a chemist, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Durham, and former editor of the British Journal for the History of Science, has produced a work that is not only grand and scholarly but full of human insight and sympathy, too.
Davy was born in 1778 in Penzance, the eldest of five children, to an engraver and his wife. He went to the local grammar school and enjoyed its freedom. (“I consider it fortunate that I was left much to myself as a child, and put upon no particular plan of study,” he noted.) He left school at sixteen and was apprenticed to a local apothecary-surgeon, but he was bored by this and aspired to something larger. Chemistry, above all, started to attract him: he read and mastered Lavoisier’s great Elements of Chemistry (1789), a remarkable achievement for an eighteen-year-old with little formal education. Grand visions started revolving in his mind: Could he be the new Lavoisier, perhaps the new Newton? One of his notebooks from this time was labeled “Newton and Davy.”
And yet, in a way, it was less with Newton than with Newton’s friend and contemporary Robert Boyle that Davy’s affinities lay. For while Newton had founded a new physics, Boyle had founded the equally new science of chemistry and disentangled it from its alchemical precursors. It was Boyle, in his 1661 Sceptical Chymist, who threw out the metaphysical four elements of the ancients and redefined “elements” as simple, pure, undecomposable bodies made up of “corpuscles” of a particular kind. It was Boyle who saw the main business of chemistry as analysis (and who introduced the word “analysis” in a chemical context), breaking down complex substances into their constituent elements and seeing how these could combine. Boyle’s enterprise gathered force in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when more than a dozen new elements were isolated in quick succession.
But a peculiar confusion attended the isolation of these elements. The Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele obtained a heavy greenish vapor from hydrochloric acid in 1774 but failed to realize that it was an element. He saw it instead as “dephlogisticated muriatic acid.” Joseph Priestley, isolating oxygen the same year, called that gas “dephlogisticated air.” These misinterpretations arose from a half-mystical theory that had dominated chemistry throughout the eighteenth century and, in many ways, prevented its advance. “Phlogiston” was, it was believed, an immaterial substance given off by burning bodies; it was the material of heat.
Lavoisier, whose Elements was published when Davy was eleven, overthrew the phlogiston theory and showed that combustion did not involve the loss of a mysterious “phlogiston” but resulted instead from the combination of what was burned with oxygen from the atmosphere (or oxidation).
Lavoisier’s work stimulated Davy’s first, seminal experiment at the age of eighteen, when he melted ice by friction, thus showing that heat was energy, and not a material substance like caloric. “The non-existence of caloric, or the fluid of heat, has been proved,” he exulted. Davy embodied the results of his experiments in a long work titled “An Essay on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light,” which included a critique of Lavoisier and of all chemistry since Boyle, as well as a vision of a new chemistry that he hoped to found, one purged of all the metaphysics and phantoms of the old.
News of the young man and his revolutionary new thoughts about matter and energy, reached Thomas Beddoes, then a professor of chemistry at Oxford. Beddoes invited Davy to his laboratory in Bristol, and here Davy did his first major work, isolating the oxides of nitrogen and examining their physiological effects.*1
Davy’s period at Bristol saw the start of his close friendship with Coleridge and the Romantic poets. He was writing a good deal of poetry himself at the time, and his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together. Joseph Cottle, who had published Coleridge and Southey, felt that Davy was a poet no less than a natural philosopher, and that either, or both, represented his singularity of perception: “It was impossible to doubt, that if he had not shone as a philosopher, he would have become conspicuous as a poet.” Indeed, in 1800, Wordsworth asked Davy to oversee the publicati
on of the second edition of his Lyrical Ballads.
At this time there still existed a union of literary and scientific cultures; there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come. There was indeed, between Coleridge and Davy, a close friendship and a sense of almost mystical affinity and rapport. The analogy of chemical transformation leading to the emergence of wholly new compounds was central to Coleridge’s thinking, and at one point he planned to set up a chemical laboratory with Davy. The poet and the chemist were fellow warriors, analyzers and explorers of a principle of connectedness of mind and nature.*2
Coleridge and Davy seemed to see themselves as twins: Coleridge the chemist of language, Davy the poet of chemistry.
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CHEMISTRY WAS CONCEIVED, in Davy’s time, to embrace not only chemical reactions proper but the study of heat, light, magnetism, and electricity—much of what was later to be separated off as “physics.” (Even at the end of the nineteenth century, the Curies first regarded radioactivity as a “chemical” property of certain elements.) And though static electricity was known in the eighteenth century, no sustained electric current was possible until Alessandro Volta invented a sandwich of two different metals with brine-dampened cardboard in between, which generated a steady electric current—the first battery. Davy later wrote that Volta’s paper, published in 1800, acted like an alarm bell among the experimenters of Europe, and for Davy, it suddenly gave form to what he would now see as his life’s work.
