The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
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Incidentally, I use the international spelling “aluminium” instead of the strictly American “aluminum” throughout this book. This spelling disagreement* traces its roots back to the rapid rise of this metal. When chemists in the early 1800s speculated about the existence of element thirteen, they used both spellings but eventually settled on the extra i. That spelling paralleled the recently discovered barium, magnesium, sodium, and strontium. When Charles Hall applied for patents on his electric current process, he used the extra i, too. However, when advertising his shiny metal, Hall was looser with his language. There’s debate about whether cutting the i was intentional or a fortuitous mistake on advertising fliers, but when Hall saw “aluminum,” he thought it a brilliant coinage. He dropped the vowel permanently, and with it a syllable, which aligned his product with classy platinum. His new metal caught on so quickly and grew so economically important that “aluminum” became indelibly stamped on the American psyche. As always in the United States, money talks.
14
Artistic Elements
As science grew more sophisticated throughout its history, it grew correspondingly expensive, and money, big money, began to dictate if, when, and how science got done. Already by 1956, the German-English novelist Sybille Bedford could write* that many generations had passed since “the laws of the universe were something a man might deal with pleasantly in a workshop set up behind the stables.”
Of course, very few people, mostly landed gentlemen, could have afforded a little workshop in which to do their science during the eras Bedford was pining for, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To be sure, it’s no coincidence that people from the upper classes were usually the ones doing things like discovering new elements: no one else had the leisure to sit around and argue about what some obscure rocks were made of.
This mark of aristocracy lingers on the periodic table, an influence you can read without an iota of knowledge about chemistry. Gentlemen throughout Europe received educations heavy in the classics, and many element names—cerium, thorium, promethium—point to ancient myths. The really funny-looking names, too, such as praseodymium, molybdenum, and dysprosium, are amalgams of Latin and Greek. Dysprosium means “little hidden one,” since it’s tricky to separate from its brother elements. Praseodymium means “green twin” for similar reasons (its other half is neodymium, “new twin”). The names of noble gases mostly mean “stranger” or “inactive.” Even proud French gentlemen as late as the 1880s chose not “France” and “Paris” when enshrining new elements but the philologically moribund “Gallia” (gallium) and “Lutetia” (lutetium), respectively, as if sucking up to Julius Caesar.
All this seems odd today—scientists receiving more training in antique languages than, well, in science—but for centuries science was less a profession than a hobby* for amateurs, like philately. Science wasn’t yet mathematized, the barriers for entry were low, and a nobleman with the clout of, say, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe could bully his way into scientific discussions, qualified or not.
Today Goethe is remembered as a writer whose range and emotive power many critics rank second only to Shakespeare’s, and beyond his writing, he took an active role in government and in policy debates in nearly every field. Many people still rank him as the greatest, most accomplished German ever to live. But I have to admit that my first impression of Goethe was that he was a bit of a fraud.
One summer in college, I worked for a physics professor who, though a wonderful storyteller, was forever running out of really basic supplies like electronic cables, which meant I had to visit the departmental supply room in the basement to beg. The dungeon master there was a German-speaking man. In keeping with his Quasimodo-like job, he was often unshaven and had shoulder-length, tendriled hair, and his big arms and chest would have seemed hulking had he stood taller than five feet six. I trembled every time I knocked on his door, never knowing what to sputter back when he narrowed his eyes and said, more a scoff than a question, “He duzzno have any cohackzial cable?”
My relationship with him improved the next semester when I took a (required) course he co-taught. It was a lab, which meant tedious hours building and wiring things, and during the dead time he and I talked literature once or twice. One day he mentioned Goethe, whom I didn’t know. “He’s the Shakezpeare of Germany,” he explained. “All the stuck-up German azzholes, all the time they quote him. It’s dizgusting. Then they say, ‘What, you don’t know Goethe?’ ”
He had read Goethe in the original German and found him mediocre. I was still young enough to be impressed by any strong convictions, and the denunciation made me suspicious of Goethe as a great thinker. Years later, after reading more widely, I came to appreciate Goethe’s literary talent. But I had to admit my lab director had a point about Goethe’s mediocrity in some areas. Though an epochal, world-changing author, Goethe couldn’t hold back from making pronouncements in philosophy and science, too. He did so with all the enthusiasm of a dilettante, and about as much competence.
In the late 1700s, Goethe devised a theory of how colors work, to refute Isaac Newton’s theory; except Goethe’s relied as much on poetry as science, including his whimsical thesis that “colors are the deeds of light, deeds and sufferings.” Not to huff like a positivist, but that statement has absolutely no meaning. He also laded his novel Elective Affinities with the spurious idea that marriages work like chemical reactions. That is, if you throw couple AB into contact with couple CD, they all might naturally commit chemical adultery and form new pairs: AB + CD → AD + BC. And this wasn’t just implied or a metaphor. Characters actually discuss this algebraic rearrangement of their lives. Whatever the novel’s other strengths (especially its depiction of passion), Goethe would have been better off cutting out the science.
Even Goethe’s masterwork, Faust, contains hoary speculation on alchemy and, worse (alchemy is at least cool), a bootless Socratic dialogue between “Neptunists” and “Plutonists”* on how rocks form. Neptunists like Goethe thought rocks precipitated from minerals in the ocean, the realm of the god Neptune; they were wrong. Plutonists—who were named after the underworld god Pluto and whose argument was taken up, in a rather unsubtle dig, by Satan himself in Faust—argued correctly that volcanoes and heat deep within the earth form most rocks. As usual, Goethe picked the losing side because it pleased him aesthetically. Faust remains as powerful a tale of scientific hubris as Frankenstein, but Goethe would have been crushed after his death in 1832 to learn that its science and philosophy would soon disintegrate and that people now read his work strictly for its literary value.
Nevertheless, Goethe did make one lasting contribution to science generally and the periodic table specifically—through patronage. In 1809, as a minister of the state, Goethe had the responsibility to pick a scientist for an open chair in chemistry at the University of Jena. After hearing recommendations from friends, Goethe had the foresight to select another Johann Wolfgang—J. W. Döbereiner. He was a provincial man with no chemistry degree and a poor résumé, having given chemistry a shot only after failing in the drug, textile, agricultural, and brewing industries. Döbereiner’s work in industry, however, taught him practical skills that a gentleman like Goethe never learned but much admired during an age of great industrial leaps. Goethe soon developed a strong interest in the young man, and they spent many happy hours discussing hot chemistry topics of the day, such as why red cabbage tarnishes silver spoons and what the ingredients in Madame de Pompadour’s toothpaste were. But the friendship couldn’t quite erase vast differences in background and education. Goethe, naturally, had received a broadly classical education, and even today he is often hailed (with a touch of hyperbole) as the last man who knew everything, which was still possible back when art, science, and philosophy overlapped a great deal. He was also a much-traveled cosmopolitan. When Goethe tapped him for the post in Jena, Döbereiner had never even left Germany before, and gentlemen intellects like Goethe remained far more typical scientists than bu
mpkins like the lesser J.W.
It’s fitting, then, that Döbereiner’s greatest contribution to science was inspired by one of the rare elements, strontium, whose name is neither Hellenic nor based on something in Ovid. Strontium was the first flicker that something like the periodic table existed. A doctor discovered it in a hospital lab in London’s red-light district in 1790, not far from Shakespeare’s old Globe Theatre. He named it after the origin of the minerals he was studying—Strontian, a mining village in Scotland—and Döbereiner picked up his work twenty years later. Döbereiner’s research focused (notice the practicality) on finding precise ways to weigh elements, and strontium was new and rare, a challenge. With Goethe’s encouragement, he set out to study its characteristics. As he refined his figures on strontium, though, he noticed something queer: its weight fell exactly between the weights of calcium and barium. Moreover, when he looked into the chemistry of strontium, it behaved like barium and calcium in chemical reactions. Strontium was somehow a blend of two elements, one lighter and one heavier.
Intrigued, Döbereiner began to precisely weigh more elements, scouting around for other “triads.” Up popped chlorine, bromine, and iodine; sulfur, selenium, and tellurium; and more. In each case, the weight of the middle element fell halfway between its chemical cousins. Convinced this was not a coincidence, Döbereiner began to group these elements into what today we’d recognize as columns of the periodic table. Indeed, the chemists who erected the first periodic tables fifty years later started with Döbereiner’s pillars.*
Now, the reason fifty years passed between Döbereiner and Dmitri Mendeleev without a periodic table was that the triad work got out of hand. Instead of using strontium and its neighbors to search for a universal way to organize matter, chemists (influenced by Christianity, alchemy, and the Pythagorean belief that numbers somehow embody true metaphysical reality) began seeing trinities everywhere and delving into triadic numerology. They calculated trilogies for the sake of calculating trilogies and elevated every three-in-one relationship, no matter how tenuous, into something sacred. Nevertheless, thanks to Döbereiner, strontium was the first element correctly placed in a larger universal scheme of elements. And Döbereiner never would have figured all this out without first the faith and then the support of Goethe.
Then again, Döbereiner did make his patron look like even more of a genius for supporting him all along when, in 1823, he invented the first portable lighter. This lighter relied on the curious ability of platinum to absorb and store massive amounts of burnable hydrogen gas. In an era when all cooking and heating still required fire, it proved an unfathomable economic boon. The lighter, called Döbereiner’s lamp, actually made Döbereiner almost as famous worldwide as Goethe.
So even if Goethe made a poor show of things in his own scientific work, his writing helped spread the idea that science was noble, and his patronage nudged chemists toward the periodic table. He deserves at least an honorary position in the history of science—which, in the end, might have satisfied him. To quote no less a personage than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (apologies to my old lab director!), “The history of science is science itself.”
Goethe valued the intellectual beauty of science, and people who value beauty in science tend to revel in the symmetries of the periodic table and its Bach-like repetitions with variation. Yet not all the table’s beauty is abstract. The table inspires art in all guises. Gold and silver and platinum are themselves lovely, and other elements, such as cadmium and bismuth, bloom into bright, colorful pigments in minerals or oil paints. Elements play a strong role in design, too, in the making of beautiful everyday objects. New alloys of elements often provide some subtle edge in strength or flexibility that transforms a design from functional to phenomenal. And with an infusion of the right element, something as humble as a fountain pen can achieve a design that—if it’s not too embarrassing to say it (and for some pen aficionados, it’s not)—inches close to majesty.*
In the late 1920s, the legendary Hungarian (and later American) designer László Moholy-Nagy drew an academic distinction between “forced obsolescence” and “artificial obsolescence.” Forced obsolescence is the normal course of things for technologies, the roughage of history books: plows gave way to reapers, muskets to Gatling guns, wooden boat hulls to steel. In contrast, artificial obsolescence did and increasingly would dominate the twentieth century, Moholy-Nagy argued. People were abandoning consumer goods not because the goods were superannuated, but because the Joneses had some newer, fancier design. Moholy-Nagy—an artist and something of a philosopher of design—couched artificial obsolescence as materialistic, infantile, and a “moral disintegration.” And as hard as it is to believe, the humble pen once seemed an example of people’s gluttonous need for something, anything, advanced and all too now.
The career of the pen as Frodo’s ring began in 1923 with one man. At twenty-eight, Kenneth Parker convinced the directors of the family business to concentrate the firm’s money in a new design, his luxury Duofold pen. (He smartly waited until Mr. Parker, his dad, the big boss, had left for a long sea voyage around Africa and Asia and couldn’t veto him.) Ten years later, in the worst days of the Great Depression, Parker gambled again by introducing another high-end model, the Vacumatic. And just a few years after that, Parker, by then boss himself, was itching for another new design. He had read and absorbed Moholy-Nagy’s theories of design, but instead of letting the moral reproach of artificial obsolescence hem him in, Parker saw it in true American fashion: a chance to make a lot of money. If people had something better to buy, they would, even if they didn’t need it. To this end, in 1941 he introduced what’s widely considered the greatest pen in history, the Parker 51, named after the number of years the Parker Pen Company had been operating when this wonderful and utterly superfluous model hit the stores.
It was elegance herself. The pen’s caps were gold- or chrome-plated, with a gold-feathered arrow for the pen’s clasp. The body was as plump and tempting to pick up as a cigarillo and came in dandy colors such as Blue Cedar, Nassau Green, Cocoa, Plum, and Rage Red. The pen’s head, colored India Black, looked like a shy turtle’s head, which tapered to a handsome, calligraphic-style mouth. And from that mouth extended a tiny gold nib, like a rolled-up tongue, to dispense ink. Inside that sleek frame, the pen ran on a newly patented plastic called Lucite and a newly patented cylindrical system for delivering a newly patented ink—ink that for the first time in penmanship history dried not by evaporation, while sitting on the paper, but by penetrating into the paper’s fibers, drying via absorption in an instant. Even the way the cap snapped onto the pen body received two patents. Parker’s engineers were scribal geniuses.
Aficionados often cite the Parker 51 as the greatest pen in history—as well as one of the most stylish designs ever, in any field. The pen’s tip was fashioned from the rare and durable element ruthenium. (Jim Mamoulides, www.PenHero.com)
The only mole on this beauty was the tip of the gold nib, the part that actually touched the paper. Gold, a soft metal, deforms under the rigorous friction of writing. Parker originally capped the nib with a ring of osmiridium, an alloy of iridium and osmium. The two metals were suitably tough but scarce, expensive, and a headache to import. A sudden shortage or price hike might doom the design. So Parker hired a metallurgist away from Yale University to find a replacement. Within a year, the company filed for another patent for a ruthenium tip, an element little better than scrap until then. But it was a tip, finally, worthy of the rest of the design, and ruthenium began capping every Parker 51 in 1944.*
Now, honestly, despite its superior engineering, the Parker 51 was probably about equal to most pens in its basic job—delivering ink onto paper. But as design prophet Moholy-Nagy could have predicted, fashion trumped need. With its new tip, the company convinced consumers, through advertising, that human writing instruments had reached their apotheosis, and people began throwing away earlier Parker models to grab this one. The 51—“the world’s m
ost wanted pen”—became a status symbol, the only thing the classiest bankers, brokers, and politicians would sign checks, bar tabs, and golf scorecards with. Even Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur used 51s to sign the treaties that ended World War II in Europe and the Pacific in 1945. With such publicity, and with the optimism that washed over the world at the end of the war, sales jumped from 440,000 units in 1944 to 2.1 million in 1947—an amazing feat considering that the 51 cost at least $12.50 at the time and ran up to $50 ($100 to $400 today), and that the refillable ink cartridge and durable ruthenium tip meant that no one had to replace the pen.
Even Moholy-Nagy, though likely distressed at how smoothly his theories had translated into marketing, had to whistle at the 51. Its balance in the hand, its look, its creamy delivery of ink—Moholy-Nagy swooned, and once cited it as the perfect design. He even took a job consulting for Parker starting in 1944. After that, rumors persisted for decades that Moholy-Nagy had designed the 51 himself. Parker continued to sell various models of the 51 through 1972, and though twice as expensive as its next-cheapest competitor, it had outsold every pen ever made up to that point, reaping $400 million in sales (a few billion dollars today).