Something has got into me these last weeks—I do not know why. I have pulled out my old books (and bought many new ones), have set the little tungsten bar on a pedestal and papered the kitchen with chemical charts. I read lists of cosmic abundances in the bath. On cold, dismal Saturday afternoons, there is nothing better than curling up with a fat volume of Thorpe’s Dictionary of Applied Chemistry, opening it anywhere, and reading at random. It was Uncle Tungsten’s favorite book, and now it is one of mine. On depressive mornings, I like to work out atomic radii or ionization potentials with my Grape-Nuts—their charm has come back, and they will get me going for the day.
I—BEFORE THE WAR
Many of my childhood memories are of metals: these seemed to exert a power on me from the start. They stood out, conspicuous against the heterogeneousness of the world, by their shining, gleaming quality, their silveriness, their smoothness and weight. They seemed cool to the touch, and they rang when they were struck.
I also loved the yellowness, the heaviness of gold. My mother would take the wedding ring from her finger and let me handle it for a while, as she told me of its inviolacy, how it never tarnished. “Feel how heavy it is,” she would add. “It’s even heavier than lead.” I knew what lead was, for I had handled the heavy, soft piping the plumber had left behind one year. Gold was soft, too, my mother told me, so it was usually combined with another metal to make it harder.
It was the same with copper—people mixed it with tin to produce bronze. Bronze! The very word was like a trumpet to me, for battle was the brave clash of bronze upon bronze, bronze spears on bronze shields, the great shield of Achilles. Or you could alloy copper with zinc, my mother said, to produce brass. All of us—my mother, my brothers, and I—had our own brass menorahs for Hanukkah. (My father, though, had a silver one.)
I knew copper, the shiny rose color of the great copper cauldron in our kitchen—it was taken down only once a year, when the quinces and crab apples were ripe in the garden and my mother would stew them to make jelly.
I knew zinc—the dull, slightly bluish birdbath in the garden was made of zinc—and tin, from the heavy tinfoil in which sandwiches were wrapped for a picnic. My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special “cry.” “It’s due to deformation of the crystal structure,” she said, forgetting that I was five and could not understand her—and yet her words made me want to know more.
There was an enormous cast-iron lawn roller out in the garden—it weighed five hundred pounds, my father said. We, as children, could hardly budge it, but he was immensely strong and could lift it off the ground. It was always slightly rusty, and this bothered me, for the rust flaked off, leaving little cavities and scabs, and I was afraid the whole roller might corrode and fall apart one day, reduced to a mass of red dust and flakes. I needed to think of metals as stable, like gold—able to stave off the losses and ravages of time.
I would sometimes beg my mother to bring out her engagement ring and show me the diamond in it. It flashed like nothing I had ever seen, almost as if it gave out more light than it took in. My mother showed me how easily it scratched glass, and then she told me to put it to my lips. It was strangely, startlingly cold—metals felt cool to the touch, but the diamond was icy. That was because it conducted heat so well, she said—better than any metal—so it drew the body heat away from one’s lips when they touched it. This was a feeling I was never to forget. Another time, she showed me how if one touched a diamond to a cube of ice it would draw heat from one’s hand into the ice and cut straight through it as if it were butter.
My mother told me that diamond was a special form of carbon, like the coal we used in every room in winter. I was puzzled by this—how could black, flaky, opaque coal be the same as the hard, transparent gemstone in her ring?
I would gaze into the heart of the coal fire, watching it go from a dim red glow to orange, to yellow, and blow on it with the bellows until it glowed almost white-hot. If it got hot enough, I wondered, would it blaze blue, be blue-hot?
I loved light, especially the lighting of the Sabbath candles on Friday nights, when my mother would murmur a prayer as she lit them. I was not allowed to touch them once they were lit—they were sacred, I was told, their flames were holy, not to be fiddled with. The little cone of blue flame at the candle’s center—why was it blue? Did the sun and stars burn in the same way? Why did they never go out?
My mother showed me other wonders—she had a necklace of polished yellow pieces of amber, and she showed me how, when she rubbed them, tiny pieces of paper would fly up and stick to them. Or she would put the electrified amber against my ear, and I would hear and feel a tiny snap, a spark.
My older brothers Marcus and David were fond of magnets, and enjoyed demonstrating them to me, drawing a magnet beneath a piece of paper on which were strewn powdery iron filings. I never tired of the remarkable patterns which rayed out from the poles of the magnet. “Those are lines of force,” my brother Marcus explained to me—but I was none the wiser.
Then there was the crystal radio I played with in bed, jiggling the wire on the crystal until I got a station loud and clear. And the luminous clocks—the house was full of them, because my Uncle Abe had been a pioneer in the development of luminous paints. These, too, like my crystal radio, I would take under the bedclothes at night, into my private, secret vault, and they would light up my cavern of sheets with an eerie, greenish light.
All these things—the rubbed amber, the magnets, the crystal radio, the clock dials with their tireless coruscations—gave me a sense of invisible rays and forces, a sense that beneath the familiar world of colors and appearances lay a dark, hidden world of mysterious laws and phenomena.
I grew up in London, before the war. My father and mother were both physicians. My father had his surgery in the house, with all sorts of medicines, lotions, and elixirs in the dispensary—it looked like an old-fashioned chemist’s shop in miniature—and a small lab with a spirit lamp, test tubes, and reagents for testing patients’ urine, like the bright-blue Fehling’s solution, which turned yellow when there was sugar in the urine. There were potions and cordials in cherry red and golden yellow, and colorful liniments like gentian violet and malachite green.
I badgered my parents constantly with questions. Where did color come from? Why did the platinum loop cause the gas to catch fire? What happened to the sugar when one stirred it into the tea? Where did it go? Why did water bubble when it boiled? (I liked to watch water set to boil on the stove, to see it quivering with heat before it burst into bubbles.)
Whenever we had “a fuse,” my father would climb up to the porcelain fuse box high on the kitchen wall, identify the fused fuse, now reduced to a melted blob, and replace it with a new one of an odd, soft wire. I had not known that a metal could melt, nor did I know why it had melted. Could a fuse really be made from the same material as a lawn roller or a tin can?
What was electricity, and how did it flow? Was it a sort of fluid like heat, which could also be conducted? Why did it flow through the metal but not the porcelain? This, too, called for explanation.
My questions were endless, and touched on everything, though they tended to circle around, return to, my obsession, the metals. Why were they shiny? Why smooth? Why cool? Why hard? Why heavy? Why did they bend, not break? Why did they ring? My mother tried to explain, but eventually, when I exhausted her patience, she would say, “That’s all I can tell you—you’ll have to quiz Uncle Dave to learn more.”
We had called him “Uncle Tungsten” for as long as I could remember, because he manufactured light bulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire. (His firm was called Tungstalite.) I often visited him in his old factory in Farringdon and watched him at work, in a wing collar, with his shirtsleeves rolled up. The heavy dark tungsten powder would be pressed, hammered, sintered at red heat, then drawn into finer and finer wire for the filaments. Uncle’s hands were seamed with the black powder, beyond the power of any washing to get out. After thirty years of his working with tungsten, I imagined, the heavy element was in his lungs and bones, in every vessel and viscus, every tissue of his body. I thought of this as a wonder, not a curse—his body invigorated and fortified by the mighty element, given a strength and enduringness almost more than human.
Whenever I visited the factory, he would take me around the machines, or have his foreman do so. (The foreman was a short, muscular man, a Popeye with enormous forearms, a palpable testament to the benefits of working with tungsten.) I never tired of the ingenious machines, always beautifully clean and sleek and oiled, or the furnace where the black powder was compacted from a powdery incoherence into dense, hard bars with a gray sheen.
During my visits to the factory, and sometimes at home, Uncle Dave would teach me about metals, with little experiments. I knew that mercury, that strange liquid metal, was incredibly heavy and dense. Even lead floated on it, as my uncle showed me with a lead bullet and a bowl of quicksilver. But then he pulled out a small gray bar from his pocket, and, to my amazement, it sank immediately to the bottom. This, he said, was his metal: tungsten.
Uncle loved the density of the tungsten he made, and its refractoriness, its great chemical stability. He loved to handle it—the wire, the powder, but the massy little bars and ingots most of all. He caressed them, balanced them (tenderly, it seemed to me) in his hands. “Feel it, Oliver!” he would say, thrusting a bar at me. “Nothing in the world feels like sintered tungsten.” He would tap the little bars and they would emit a deep clink. “The sound of tungsten,” Uncle Dave would say. “Nothing like it.” I did not know whether this was true, but I never questioned it.
II—EXILE
In September, 1939, war broke out. It was expected that London would be heavily bombed, and parents were pressured by the government to evacuate their children to safety in the countryside. My brother Michael, five years older than I, had been going to a day school near our house in West Hampstead, and when it was closed at the outbreak of the war one of the assistant masters there decided to reconstitute the school, in a little village I will call Greystone. My parents (I was to realize many years later) were greatly worried about the consequences of separating a little boy—I was just six—from his family and sending him to a makeshift boarding school in the Midlands, but they felt they had no choice, and took some comfort that at least Michael and I would be together.
This, perhaps, might have worked out well—evacuation did work out reasonably well for thousands of others. But the school, as reconstituted, was a travesty of the original. Food was rationed and scarce, and our food parcels from home were looted by the matron. Our basic diet was swedes and mangel-wurzels—giant turnips and huge, coarse beetroots grown basically for cattle. There was a steam-pudding whose revolting, suffocating smell comes back to me (as I write, almost sixty years later) and sets me retching and gagging once again. The horribleness of the school was made worse for most of us by the sense that we had been abandoned by our families, left to rot in this awful place as an inexplicable punishment for something we had done.
The headmaster seemed to have become unhinged by his own power. He had been decent enough, even well liked, as a teacher in London, Michael said, but at Greystone, where he took over, he had quickly become a monster. He was vicious and sadistic, and beat many of us almost daily, with relish. “Willfulness” was severely punished. I sometimes wondered if I was his “darling,” the one selected for a maximum of punishment, but in fact many of us were so beaten we could hardly sit down for days on end. Once, when he had broken a cane on my eight-year-old bottom, he roared “Damn you, Sacks! Look what you have made me do!” and added the cost of the cane to my bill. Bullying and cruelty, meanwhile, were rife among the boys, and great ingenuity was exercised in finding out the weak points of the smaller children and tormenting them beyond bearable limits. I felt trapped at Greystone, without hope, without recourse, forever—and many of us, I suspect, were severely disturbed by being there.
And yet the old vicarage, with its spacious garden, where the school was housed, the old church next door to it, the village itself, and the countryside surrounding it were charming, even idyllic. The villagers were kind to these obviously uprooted and unhappy young boys from London. It was here in the village that I learned to ride horses, with a strapping young woman; she sometimes hugged me when I looked miserable. (My brother had read me parts of “Gulliver’s Travels,” and I sometimes thought of her as Glumdalclitch, Gulliver’s giant nurse.) There was an old lady to whom I went for piano lessons, and she would make tea for me. And there was the village shop, where I would go to buy gob-stoppers and, occasionally, a slice of Spam. There were even times in school which I enjoyed: making model planes of balsa wood, and a tree house with a friend, a red-haired boy of my own age.
During the four years I was at Greystone, my parents visited us at the school, but very rarely. There was one return visit to London, in December of 1940—a frightening one, because the Blitz was still at its height. One night, a thousand-pound bomb fell on the house next to ours. Fortunately, it failed to explode. All of us, the entire street, it seemed, crept away that night (my family to a cousin’s house)—many of us in our pajamas—walking as softly as we could. (Might vibration set the thing off?) The streets were pitch dark, for the blackout was in force, and we all carried electric torches dimmed with red crêpe paper. We had no idea if our houses would still be standing in the morning.
On another occasion, an incendiary bomb, a thermite bomb, fell behind our house, and burned with a terrible, white-hot heat. My father had a stirrup pump, and my brothers carried pails of water to him, but water seemed useless against this infernal fire—indeed, made it burn even more furiously. There was a vicious hissing and sputtering when the water hit the metal, and meanwhile the bomb was melting its casing, and throwing white-hot blobs and jets of molten metal in all directions. The lawn was as scarred and charred as a volcanic landscape the next morning, but littered, to my delight, with beautiful gleaming shrapnel. I had never seen melted iron or magnesium before.
There had been some religious feeling, of a childish sort, in the years before the war. When my mother lit the Sabbath candles, I would feel, almost physically, the Sabbath coming in, being welcomed, descending like a soft mantle over the earth. I imagined, too, that this occurred all over the universe—the Sabbath descending on far-off star systems and galaxies, enfolding them all in the peace of God.
But when I was suddenly abandoned by my parents (as I saw it) my trust in them, my love for them, was rudely shaken, and with this my belief in God, too. What evidence was there, I kept asking myself, for God’s existence? I determined on an experiment to resolve the matter decisively: I planted two rows of radishes side by side in the vegetable garden, and asked God to bless one or curse one, whichever He wished, so that I might see a clear difference between them. The two rows of radishes came up identical, and this was proof for me that no God existed. But I longed now even more for something to believe in.
As the beatings, the starvings, the tormentings continued, those of us who remained at school (many had been taken away by their parents, but Michael and I never complained) were driven to more and more extreme psychological measures—dehumanizing, derealizing, our chief tormentor. Sometimes, while being beaten, I would see him reduced to a gesticulating skeleton. (I had seen radiographs at home—bones in a tenuous envelope of flesh.) At other times, I would see him as not a being at all but a temporary vertical collection of atoms. I would say to myself, “He’s only atoms”—and, more and more, I craved a world that was “only atoms.” The violence exuded by the headmaster seemed at times to contaminate the whole of living nature, so that I saw violence as the very principle of life.
What could I do, in these circumstances, other than seek a private place, a refuge where I might be alone, absorb myself without interference from others, and find some sense of stability and warmth? My situation was perhaps similar to that which Freeman Dyson describes in his autobiographical essay “To Teach or Not to Teach”:
For me, the refuge I found at first was in numbers. My father was a whiz at mental arithmetic, and I, too, even at the age of six, was quick with figures—and, more, in love with them. I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chaotic world. There was in numbers and their relation something absolute, certain, not to be questioned, beyond doubt. (Years later, when I read “1984,” the climactic horror for me, the ultimate sign of Winston’s disintegration and surrender, was his being forced, under torture, to deny that two and two is four. Even more terrible was the fact that eventually he began to doubt this in his own mind—that, finally, numbers failed him, too.)
I particularly loved prime numbers, the fact that they were indivisible, could not be broken down, were inalienably themselves. (I had no such confidence in myself, for I felt I was being divided, alienated, broken down more and more every week.) Why did primes come when they did? Was there any pattern, any logic to their distribution? Was there any limit to them, or did they go on forever? I spent innumerable hours factoring, searching for primes, memorizing them. They afforded me many hours of absorbed, solitary play, in which I needed no one else.
I made a grid, ten by ten, of the first hundred numbers, with the primes blacked in, but I could see no pattern, no logic to their distribution. I made larger tables, increased my grids to twenty squared, thirty squared, but still could discern no obvious pattern.
The only real holidays I had during the war were visits to a favorite aunt in Cheshire, in the midst of Delamere Forest, where she had founded the Jewish Fresh Air School for “delicate children.” All the children, indeed, had little gardens of their own, squares of earth a couple of yards wide, bordered by stones. I wished desperately that I could go there, rather than Greystone—but this was a wish I never expressed (though I wondered if my clear-sighted and loving aunt did not divine it).
On my visits, Auntie Len always delighted me by showing me all sorts of botanical and mathematical pleasures. She showed me the spiral patterns on the faces of sunflowers in the garden, and suggested I count the florets in these. As I did so, she pointed out that they were arranged according to a series—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.—each number being the sum of the two that preceded it. And if one divided each number by the number that followed it (1/2, 2/3, 3/5, 5/8, etc.), one approached the number 0.618. This series, she said, was called a Fibonacci series, after an Italian mathematician who had lived centuries before. The ratio of 0.618, she added, was known as the Divine Proportion or Golden Section, an ideal geometrical proportion found in many plants and shells, and often used by architects.
She would take me for long, botanizing walks in the forest, where she had me look at fallen pinecones, to see that they, too, had spirals based on the Golden Section. She showed me horsetails growing near a stream, had me feel their stiff, jointed stems, and suggested that I measure these when I got back to school, and plot the lengths of the successive segments as a graph. When I did so, and saw that the curve flattened out, she explained that the increments were “exponential,” and that this was the way growth usually occurred. These ratios, these geometric proportions, she told me, were to be found all over nature—numbers were the way the world is put together. Numbers, my aunt said, are the way God thinks.
The association of plants, of gardens, with numbers assumed a curiously intense, symbolic form for me. I started to think in terms of a kingdom or a realm of numbers, with its own geography, languages, and laws; but, even more, of a garden of numbers, a magical, secret, wonderful garden in which I could wander and play to my heart’s content. It was a garden hidden from, inaccessible to, the bullies and the headmaster; and a garden, too, where I somehow felt welcomed and befriended. Among my friends in this garden were not only primes and Fibonacci sunflowers but perfect numbers (such as 6 or 28, the sum of their factors excluding themselves); Pythagorean numbers, whose square was the sum of two other squares (such as 3, 4, 5 or 5, 12, 13); and “amicable numbers”—pairs of numbers (such as 220 and 284) in which the factors of each added up to the other. And my aunt had shown me that my garden of numbers was doubly magical—not just delightful and friendly, always there, but part of the plan on which the whole universe was built.
III—UNCLE TUNGSTEN
I returned to London in the summer of 1943, after four years of exile, a ten-year-old boy, withdrawn and disturbed in some ways but with a passion for metals, for plants, and for numbers.
I delighted in being able to visit Uncle Tungsten again, and I think he also delighted in having his young protégé back, for he would spend hours with me in his factory and his lab, answering questions as fast as I could ask them.
He had several glass-fronted cabinets in his office, one of which contained a series of electric light bulbs: there were several Edison bulbs from the early eighteen-eighties, with filaments of carbonized thread; a bulb from 1897, with a filament of osmium; and several bulbs from a few years later, with spidery filaments of tantalum tracing a zigzag course inside them.
Then there were the more recent bulbs—these were Uncle Dave’s special pride and interest, for some he had pioneered himself—with tungsten filaments of all shapes and sizes. There was even one labelled “Bulb of the Future?” It had no filament, but the word “Rhenium” was inscribed on a card beside it.
I had heard of platinum, but the other metals—osmium, tantalum, rhenium—were new to me. Uncle kept samples of them all, and some of their ores, in a cabinet next to the bulbs. As he handled them, he would expatiate on their unique, sovereign properties and qualities, how they had been discovered, how they were refined, and why they were so suitable for making filaments.
He would bring out a pitted gray nugget: “Dense, eh?” he would say, tossing it to me. “That’s a platinum nugget. This is how it is found, as nuggets of pure metal. Most metals are found as compounds with other things, in ores. There are very few other metals which occur native like platinum—just gold, silver, and copper, and one or two others.” These other native metals had been known, he said, for thousands of years, but platinum had been “discovered” only two hundred years ago, for though it had been prized by the Incas for centuries, it was unknown to the rest of the world. When the explorers brought it back, in the eighteenth century, the new metal enchanted all of Europe—it was denser, more ponderous than gold, and, like gold, it was “noble” and never tarnished. It had a lustre exceeding that of silver. (Its Spanish name, platina, meant “little silver.”)
Native platinum was often found with two other metals, iridium and osmium, which were even denser, harder, more refractory. Here Uncle pulled out samples for me to handle, mere flakes, no larger than lentils, but astoundingly heavy. These were “osmiridium,” a natural alloy of osmium and iridium, the two densest substances in the world. There was something about heaviness, density—I could not say why—which gave me a thrill, and an immense sense of security and comfort. Osmium, moreover, had the highest melting point of all the platinum metals, so it was used at one time, Uncle said, to replace the platinum filaments in light bulbs.
The great virtue of the platinum metals was that they were as noble and workable as gold but had much higher melting points. Crucibles made of platinum could withstand the hottest temperatures; beakers and spatulas of it could withstand the most corrosive acids. Uncle Dave often used platinumware in his own lab, sometimes alloyed with other platinum metals to give it greater hardness, and a still higher melting point. He pulled out a small crucible from the cabinet, beautifully smooth and shiny. It looked new. “This was made around 1840,” he said. “A century of use, and almost no wear.”
Uncle Dave saw the whole earth, I think, as a gigantic natural laboratory, where heat and pressure caused not only vast geologic movements but innumerable chemical miracles. “Look at these diamonds,” he would say. “They were formed thousands of millions of years ago, deep in the earth, under unimaginable pressures.”
He liked to pull out the native metals from his cabinet—twists and spangles of rosy copper, wiry silver, latticed gold. “Think how it must have been,” he said, “seeing metal for the first time—sudden glints of reflected sunlight, sudden shinings in a rock or at the bottom of a stream!”
He would conjure up the first smelting of metal, how cavemen might have used rocks containing a copper mineral—green malachite, perhaps—to surround a cooking fire and suddenly realized as the wood turned to charcoal that the green rock was bleeding, turning into a red liquid: molten copper.
It took a much hotter fire, a white-hot fire, to obtain tungsten. Uncle Dave handed me a little ingot. “Tungsten,” he said. “No one realized at first how perfect a metal tungsten was. It has the highest melting point of any metal, it is tougher than steel, and it keeps its strength at high temperatures—an ideal metal!”
Uncle had a variety of tungsten bars in his office—some he used as paperweights, but others had no discernible function whatever, except to give pleasure to their owner and maker. And, indeed, by comparison steel bars, and even lead, felt light and somehow porous, tenuous. “These lumps of tungsten have an extraordinary concentration of mass,” he would say. “They would be deadly as weapons—far deadlier than lead.”
But sooner or later Uncle’s soliloquies and demonstrations before the cabinet all returned to tungsten’s mineral ores. One of these, scheelite, was named after the great Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who was the first to show that it contained a new element. The ore was so dense that miners called it “heavy stone,” or “tung-sten,” the name subsequently given to the element itself. Scheelite was found in beautiful orange crystals that fluoresced bright blue in ultraviolet light. Uncle Dave kept specimens of scheelite and other fluorescent minerals in a special cabinet in his office. The dim light of Farringdon Road on a November evening, it seemed to me, would be transformed when he turned on his Wood’s lamp, and the luminous chunks in the cabinet suddenly glowed orange, turquoise, crimson, green.
Though scheelite was the largest source of tungsten metal, the metal had first been obtained from a different mineral, called wolframite. Indeed, tungsten was sometimes called wolfram, and still retained the chemical symbol of W. This thrilled me, because my own middle name was Wolf. Heavy seams of the tungsten ores were often found along with tin ore, and the tungsten made it more difficult to isolate the tin. This was why, my uncle continued, they had originally called the metal wolfram—for, like a hungry animal, it “stole” the tin. I liked the name wolfram, its sharp, animal quality, its evocation of a ravening, mystical wolf—and thought of it as a tie between Uncle Tungsten, Uncle Wolfram, and myself, O. Wolf Sacks.
Names fascinated me—their sounds, their associations, the sense they gave of people and places. The names of the elements were filled with such evocations, but there were only a few dozen of these, whereas the number of minerals ran into the hundreds or thousands. These were all beautifully laid out, with their names and formulas, in the cabinets of the Geology Museum, in South Kensington, where, later, I would go whenever I could.
The older names gave one a sense of antiquity and alchemy: corundum and galena, orpiment and realgar. (Orpiment and realgar, two arsenic sulfides, went euphoniously together, and made me think of an operatic couple, like Tristan and Isolde.) There was pyrites, fool’s gold, in brassy, metallic cubes, and chalcedony and ruby and sapphire and spinel. Zircon sounded Oriental; calomel, Greek—its honeylike sweetness, its “mel,” belied by its poisonness. There was the medieval-sounding sal ammoniac. There was cinnabar, the heavy red sulfide of mercury, and massicot and minium, the twin oxides of lead.
Then there were minerals named after people. One of the most common minerals, much of the redness of the world, was the hydrated iron oxide called goethite. (Was this named in honor of Goethe, or did he discover it? I had read that he had a passion for mineralogy and chemistry.) Many minerals were named after chemists—gaylussite, scheelite, berzelianite, bunsenite, liebigite, moissanite, crookesite, and the beautiful, prismatic “ruby-silver,” proustite. There was samarskite, named after a mining engineer, Colonel Samarski. There were other names that were evocative in a more topical way: stolzite, a lead tungstate, and scholzite, too. Who were Stolz and Scholz? Their names seemed very Prussian to me, and this, just after the war, evoked an anti-German feeling. I imagined Stolz and Scholz as Nazi officers with barking voices, swordsticks, and monocles.
Other names appealed to me mostly for their sound, and for the images they conjured up. I loved classical words and their depiction of simple properties—the crystal forms, colors, shapes, and optics of minerals—like diaspore and anastase and microlite and polycrase. A great favorite was cryolite—ice stone, from Greenland, so low in refractive index that it was transparent, almost ghostly, and, like ice, became invisible in water.
On one visit, Uncle Dave showed me a large bar of aluminum. After the dense platinum metals, I was amazed at how light it was, scarcely heavier than a piece of wood. “I’ll show you something interesting,” he said. He took a smaller lump of aluminum, with a smooth, shiny surface, and smeared it with mercury. All of a sudden—it was like some terrible disease—the surface broke down, and a white substance like a fungus rapidly grew out of it, until it was a quarter of an inch high, then half an inch high, and it kept growing and growing until the small piece of aluminum was completely eaten up. “You’ve seen iron rust, oxidizing, combining with the oxygen in the air,” Uncle said. “But here, with the aluminium, it’s a million times faster. That big bar is still quite shiny, because it’s covered by a fine layer of oxide, and that protects it from further change. But rubbing it with mercury destroys the surface layer, so then the aluminium has no protection, and it combines with the oxygen in seconds.”
I found this magical, astounding, but also a little frightening—to see a bright and shiny metal reduced so quickly to a crumbling mass of oxide. It made me think of a curse or a spell, the sort of disintegration I sometimes saw in my dreams. It made me think of mercury as evil, as a destroyer of metals. Would it do this to every sort of metal?
“Don’t worry,” Uncle answered. “The metals we use here, they’re perfectly safe. If I put this little bar of tungsten in the mercury, it would not be affected at all. If I put it away for a million years, it would be just as bright and shiny as it is now.” In a precarious world, tungsten, at least, was stable.
As the youngest of almost the youngest (I was the last of four, and my mother the sixteenth of eighteen), I was born nearly a hundred years after my maternal grandfather, and never knew him. He was born Mordechai Fredkin, in 1837, in a small village in Russia. As a youth, he managed to avoid being impressed into the Cossack Army, and fled Russia, using the passport of a dead man named Landau. He was sixteen. As Marcus Landau, he made his way to Paris, and then Frankfurt, where he married. (His wife was sixteen, too.) Two years later, in 1855, now with the first of their children, they moved to England.
My mother’s father was, by all accounts, a man drawn equally to the spiritual and the physical. He was by profession a boot and shoe manufacturer, a shochet (a kosher slaughterer), and later a grocer—but he was also a Hebrew scholar, a mystic, an amateur mathematician, and an inventor. He had a wide-ranging mind: he published a newspaper, the Jewish Standard, in his basement, from 1888 to 1891; he was interested in the new science of aeronautics, and corresponded with the Wright brothers, who paid him a visit when they came to London in the early nineteen-hundreds. (Some of my uncles could still remember this.) He had a passion, my aunts and uncles told me, for intricate arithmetical calculations, which he would do in his head, while lying in the bath. But he was drawn, above all, to the invention of lamps—safety lamps for mines, carriage lamps, street lamps—and he patented many of these in the eighteen-seventies. When I was very small, my mother would take me to the Science Museum, in South Kensington, up to the top floor, where there was a simulacrum of a coal mine, its dim, low passages lit by fitful beams. There she would show me the Landau safety lamp on display, right next to the more famous Humphry Davy lamp.
A polymath and an autodidact himself, Grandfather was passionately keen on education—and, most especially, a scientific education—for all his children, for his nine daughters no less than for his nine sons. Whether it was this or the sharing of his own passionate enthusiasms, seven of his sons were eventually drawn to mathematics and the physical sciences—including the two I was closest to, Uncle Dave and Uncle Abe.
IV—STINKS AND BANGS
My parents and my brothers had introduced me, even before the war, to some kitchen chemistry: pouring vinegar on a piece of chalk in a tumbler and watching it fizz; then pouring the heavy gas this produced, like an invisible cataract, over a candle flame, putting it out straightaway. Or taking red cabbage, pickled with vinegar, and adding household ammonia to neutralize it. This would lead to an amazing transformation, the juice going through all sorts of colors, from red to various shades of purple, to turquoise and blue, and finally to green. I enjoyed these experiments, I wondered what was going on, but I did not feel a real chemical passion—a desire to compound, to isolate, to decompose, to see substances changing, familiar ones disappearing and new ones appearing in their stead—until I returned from Greystone, remet Uncle Dave, and saw his lab and his passion for experiments of all kinds.
Now, after hearing him talk about chemistry, and starting to read about chemistry and chemists myself, I longed to have a lab of my own.
As a start, I wanted to lay hands on cobaltite and niccolite, and compounds or minerals of manganese and molybdenum, of uranium and chromium—all those wonderful elements that were discovered in the eighteenth century. I wanted to pulverize them, treat them with acid, roast them, reduce them—whatever was necessary—so I could extract their metals myself. I knew, from looking through a chemical catalogue at the factory, that one could buy these metals already purified, but it would be far more fun, far more exciting, I reckoned, if I was able to make them myself. This way, I would enter chemistry, start to discover it for myself, in much the same way its first practitioners did—I would live the history of chemistry in myself.
It was through reading Mary Elvira Weeks’s “Discovery of the Elements”—a book published just before the war—that I got a vivid idea of the lives of many chemists, the great variety, and sometimes vagaries, of character they showed; and the relation (sometimes) between their characters and their work. Here I found quotations from the early chemists’ letters, which portrayed their excitements (and despairs) as they fumbled and groped their way to their discoveries, losing the track now and again, getting caught in blind alleys, though ultimately reaching the goal they sought.
If Humphry Davy was the first chemist I had ever heard of, he was also the one I most warmed to. I loved reading of his experiments with explosives and electric fish; his discovery of incandescent metal filaments and electric arcs; of catalysts (it was only now that I realized why we had a platinum loop above the gas stove); of the physiological effects of nitrous oxide, laughing gas; and, above all, of his using the just invented electric battery to isolate the alkali and alkaline-earth metals in a single miraculous year. He appealed to me especially because he was boyish and impulsive, the way he danced with joy all around his lab when he first isolated potassium, in 1807, and saw the shining metallic globules burst and take fire. Davy moved me to emulation—to sampling the effects of nitrous oxide for myself (my mother kept a cylinder of it in her obstetric bag), and making my own sodium and potassium by electrolysis.
I was awed, too, by the figure of Mendeleev—his passionate search for order among the elements (more than sixty were known by the eighteen-fifties, a rich chaos), and his final discovery of such an order (supposedly in a dream) in 1869. When I first saw the Periodic Table, it hit me with the force of revelation—it embodied, I was convinced, eternal truths, the eternal and necessary order of the elements. I thought of Mendeleev as a sort of Moses, bearing the tablets of the God-given Periodic Law.
And then, in a different mode, there was Marie Curie, who had spent four backbreaking years in a shed extracting a pinch of “her” element, radium, from four stubborn tons of pitchblende. Radium, my mother would say, was a magical element, with unique powers to harm and cure. She herself had worked with radium therapy at the Marie Curie Hospital, in London, and had met Marie Curie on one occasion. (I was intrigued when she told me of the radium “bomb” at the hospital, and the fine gold needles full of radon which were inserted into tumors.) Eve Curie’s biography of her mother—which my mother gave me when I was ten—was the first portrait of a scientist I read, and Marie Curie was added to my pantheon of heroes. (Fifty-five years later, in 1998, at a meeting in New York to celebrate the centenary of the Curies’ discovery of polonium and radium, I met Eve Curie, now in her nineties, and asked her to sign the book.)
It was through reading these accounts that I first realized one could have heroes in real life. There seemed to me an integrity, an essential goodness, about a life dedicated to science. I had never given much thought to what I might be when I was “grown up”—growing up was hardly imaginable—but now I knew: I wanted to be a chemist. A sort of eighteenth-century chemist coming fresh to the field, looking at the whole, undiscovered world of natural substances and minerals, analyzing them, plumbing their secrets, finding the wonder of new and unknown metals.
And so I set up a little lab of my own at home. There was an unused back room I took over, originally a laundry room, which had running water and a sink and drain and various cupboards and shelves. Conveniently, this room led out to the garden—so that if I concocted something that caught fire, or boiled over, or emitted noxious fumes, I could rush outside with it and fling it on the lawn. The lawn soon developed charred and discolored patches, but this, my parents felt, was a small price to pay for my safety—their own, too, perhaps. But seeing occasional flaming globules rushing through the air, and the general turbulence and abandon with which I did things, they were alarmed, and urged me to plan experiments and to be prepared to deal with fires and explosions. Eventually, after I had filled the house one day with vile-smelling (and very toxic) hydrogen sulfide, they insisted that I install a small fume cupboard, and a special drain for corrosive liquids—and that with dangerous experiments I wear gloves and goggles.
Uncle Dave advised me closely on the choice of apparatus—test tubes, flasks, graduated cylinders, funnels, pipettes and burettes, a Bunsen burner, crucibles, watch glasses, a platinum loop, a desiccator, a blowpipe, a range of spatulas, a balance. He advised me, too, on basic reagents, some of which he gave me from his own lab, along with a supply of stoppered bottles of all sizes—bottles of varied shapes and colors (dark green or brown for light-sensitive chemicals), with perfectly fitting ground-glass stoppers.
Every month or so, I stocked my lab with visits to a chemical-supply shop, Griffin & Tatlock, far out in Finchley. The shop was housed in a large shed set at a distance from its neighbors (who viewed it, I imagined, with a certain trepidation, as a place that might explode or exhale poisonous fumes at any moment). I would hoard my pocket money for weeks—occasionally one of my uncles, approving my secret passion, would slip me a half crown or so—and then take a succession of trains and buses to the shop. The cheaper chemicals were kept in huge stoppered urns of glass. The rarer, more costly substances were kept in smaller bottles. Hydrofluoric acid—dangerous stuff, used for etching glass—could not be kept in glass, so it was sold in special small bottles made of gutta-percha, a sort of rubbery substance. Beneath the serried urns and bottles on the shelves were great carboys of acid—sulfuric, nitric, aqua regia; globular china bottles of mercury (it was incredibly dense, and seven pounds of it would fit into a bottle the size of a fist); and slabs and ingots of the commoner metals. The shopkeepers soon got to know me—an intense and rather undersized schoolboy, clutching his pocket money, spending hours amid the jars and bottles—and though they would warn me now and then, “Go easy with that one!” they always let me have what I wished.
My first taste was for the spectacular—the frothings, the incandescences, the stinks and the bangs, which almost define an entry into chemistry. One of my guides was J. J. Griffin’s “Chemical Recreations,” an 1850-ish book I had found in a secondhand bookshop. Griffin started recreational, and gradually got more systematic. I worked my way through “Alteration of Vegetable Colours by Acids and Alkalis,” “Experiments with Coloured Liquors and Sympathetic Inks,” “Chemical Metamorphoses,” and then got on to the serious stuff. There was a special chapter on “Chemistry for Holidays,” with the “Volatile Plum-Pudding” (“when the cover is removed . . . it leaves its dish and rises to the ceiling”), “A Fountain of Fire” (using phosphorus—“the operator must take care not to burn himself”), and “Brilliant Deflagration” (here, too, one was warned to “remove your hand instantly”). I was amused by the mention of a special formula (sodium tungstate) to render ladies’ dresses and curtains incombustible—were fires that common in Victorian times?—and used it to fireproof a handkerchief for myself.
Chemical exploration, chemical discovery, if full of excitement, was full of surprises and dangers, too. I was struck by the range of accidents that had befallen the pioneers. Few naturalists had been devoured by wild animals or stung to death by noxious plants or insects; few physicists had lost their eyesight looking at the heavens, or broken a leg on an inclined plane; but chemists had lost their eyes, their limbs, and sometimes their lives, usually by causing explosions or producing inadvertent toxins. Davy, for instance, had been nearly asphyxiated by nitric oxide, had poisoned himself with nitrogen peroxide, and had severely inflamed his lungs with hydrofluoric acid, prior to his dangerous experiments with nitrogen trichloride.
Bunsen, investigating cacodyl cyanide, lost his right eye in an explosion, and very nearly lost his life. Several experimenters, trying to make diamond from graphite in intensely heated, high-pressure “bombs,” threatened to blow themselves and their fellow-workers to kingdom come.
Mary Elvira Weeks’s book on the discovery of the elements devoted an entire section to “The Fluorine Martyrs.” All the early experimenters, I read, had “suffered the frightful torture of hydrofluoric-acid poisoning,” and at least two of them died in the process. After reading this, I was too scared to open the hydrofluoric acid I had bought.
Attracted by the sounds and flashes and smells coming from my lab, my two older brothers, Marcus and David, now medical students, sometimes joined me in experiments—the ten-year age difference between us hardly mattered at these times. On one occasion, as I was experimenting with hydrogen and oxygen, there was a loud explosion, and an almost invisible sheet of flame, which blew off Marcus’s eyebrows completely. But Marcus took this in good part, and he and David often suggested other experiments.
We mixed potassium perchlorate with sugar, put it on the back step, and banged it with a hammer. This caused a most satisfying explosion.
We made a “volcano” together with ammonium dichromate, setting fire to a pyramid of the orange crystals, which then flamed, furiously, becoming red-hot, throwing off showers of sparks in all directions, and swelling portentously, like a miniature volcano. Finally, when it had died down, there was, in place of the neat pyramid of crystals, a huge, fluffy pile of dark-green chromic oxide.
Another early experiment, suggested by David, was pouring oily, concentrated sulfuric acid on a little sugar, which instantly turned black, heated, steamed, expanded, forming a monstrous pillar of carbon that rose high above the rim of the beaker. “Beware,” David said as I gazed at this transformation. “You’ll be turned into a pillar of carbon if you get the acid on yourself.”
The first recorded individual who discovered an element, it seems, was Hennig Brandt, of Hamburg, who obtained phosphorus (apparently with some alchemical ambition in mind) from urine in 1669. He adored the strange, luminous element, and called it “cold fire” (kaltes Feuer), or, in a more affectionate mood, “mein Feuer.” Throughout the eighteenth century it was made from bones.
I decided to obtain my phosphorus direct from Griffin & Tatlock. When it came, as a bundle of pale, waxy sticks which one had to keep under water, it had, nonetheless, a persistent garlicky smell—and this, I imagined, was the irremovable residue of its beastly, slaughterhouse origins. It was important to keep it in its brown bottle, because the beautiful, almost colorless translucent sticks became ugly and yellow and opaque with the light—another example of the mysterious power of light.
Phosphorus attracted me strangely, dangerously, because of its luminosity—I would sometimes slip down to my lab at night to gaze at it—the “cold fire” that had so fascinated its discoverer (and had caused him, and others, such terrible burns). A whole series of experiments, of enchantments, spread out from this. As soon as I had my fume cupboard set up, I put a piece of white phosphorus in water and boiled it, dimming the lights so that I could see the steam coming out of the flask, glowing a soft greenish-blue.
If one ignited phosphorus in a bell jar (using a magnifying glass), the jar would fill with a “snow” of phosphorus pentoxide. If one did this over water, the pentoxide would hiss, like red-hot iron, as it hit the water and dissolved, making phosphoric acid.
Another, rather beautiful experiment was boiling phosphorus with caustic potash in a retort—I was remarkably nonchalant in boiling up such virulent substances; lucky, too, in that I never really hurt myself—and this produced phosphoretted hydrogen (the old term), or phosphine. As the bubbles of phosphine escaped, they took fire spontaneously, forming beautiful rings of white smoke.
By heating white phosphorus, I could transform it into a much stabler form—red phosphorus, the phosphorus of matchboxes. I had learned as a small child that diamond and graphite were different forms, allotropes, of the same element, and I vividly remembered how my shining tin soldiers had been transformed one winter into a gray dust: “tin pest.” Now, in the lab, I could effect some of these changes for myself, turning white phosphorus into red phosphorus, and then (by condensing its vapor) back again. These transformations made me feel like a magician.
While I darted about these exotic experiments I also went steadily through my small repertoire of chemicals, trying to learn their basic properties and reactions, and the basics of forming and decomposing compounds.
I decomposed water, using a large battery, much as Humphry Davy had done at the start of the nineteenth century; and then I recomposed it, sparking hydrogen and oxygen together. There were many other ways of making hydrogen with acids or alkalis—with zinc and sulfuric acid or aluminum bottle caps and caustic soda.
But it seemed a shame to have the hydrogen just bubble off and go to waste. To stopper my flasks, I got some tight-fitting rubber bungs and corks, some with holes in the middle for glass tubes. One of the things I had learned in Uncle Dave’s lab was how to soften glass tubing in a gas flame, and gently bend it to an angle (and, more exciting, to blow glass as well, gently puffing into the molten glass to make thin-walled globes and shapes of all sorts). Now, using glass tubing, I could light the hydrogen as it emerged from the stoppered flask. It had a colorless flame—not yellow and smoky, like the flames of gas jets or the kitchen stove. Or I could feed the hydrogen, with a gracefully curved piece of glass tubing, into a soap solution, to make soap bubbles filled with hydrogen; the bubbles, far lighter than air, would rush up to the ceiling and burst.
I made oxygen, too. I wanted to make it by heating mercuric oxide—this was the original way, I read, by which Joseph Priestley had first made it, in 1774—but I was afraid, until the fume cupboard was installed, of toxic mercury fumes. Yet it was easy to prepare by heating an oxygen-rich substance like deep purple-red potassium permanganate. I remember thrusting a glowing wood chip into a test tube full of oxygen, and seeing how it flared up, flamed, with an intense brilliance.
There were some metals that were so reactive they could actually tear the oxygen out of water, leaving the hydrogen to bubble off. Magnesium did this, if the water was hot—this was why one could not put out an incendiary bomb with water. And potassium did so explosively, even in cold water.
Sodium was cheaper, and not quite as violent as potassium, so I decided to look at its action outdoors. I obtained a good-sized lump of it—about three pounds—and made an excursion to Highgate Pond, in Hampstead Heath, with two of my friends, Eric Korn and Jonathan Miller. When we arrived, we climbed up a little bridge, and then I pulled the sodium out of its oil with tongs, and flung it into the water beneath. It took fire instantly, and sped around and around on the surface like a demented meteor, with a huge sheet of yellow flame above it. My friends still have vivid memories of this. We all exulted—this was chemistry with a vengeance!
V—BRILLIANT LIGHT
This first interest in chemistry, this desire to interrogate and explore everything in sight, led to a different feeling after a couple of years—a need to integrate my knowledge, to understand. Not just to throw sodium into water but all the alkali metals, to see how they compared, to plot the trends, physical and chemical, as one went through them all, from lithium to sodium to potassium to rubidium to caesium. Weighing and measuring became crucially important, convincing me of the fixed proportions in which elements combined, drawing me to atomic theory and the concept of atomic weights.
Reading Dalton, who proposed the atomic hypothesis, reading about his atoms (I saw his own wooden models of these in the Science Museum), put me in a sort of rapture, conceiving that the chemical reactions one saw macroscopically, in the lab, with all their puzzling constancies and exactitudes, were the consequence of activities almost infinitely small—single atoms, with distinctive weights and characters, combining with each other one by one—and imagining that if one had a microscope powerful enough, and powers of perception quick enough, this was what one would actually see. Until now, there had been only a vague, mysterious sense of an invisible microworld; Dalton’s atoms gave the imagination something concrete to chew on, made this tangible and real.
It was only when I had the concept of atomic weight firmly in mind, along with the concept of atoms’ combining power, or valency, that I could appreciate the startling beauty, the obvious truth, of the Periodic Table—for me, now, the most beautiful thing in the world. By arranging all the elements in a simple grid of intersecting “Periods” and “Groups,” the Table showed, at a glance, how all of them were related to one another, and how one could predict the existence and properties of as yet undiscovered elements simply by knowing their place in the Table, for when one arranged the elements in order of atomic weight their properties echoed one another periodically. Thus each period started with an alkali metal and ended with an inert gas, and then one shuttled back to the next period, starting with a heavier alkali metal and ending with a heavier inert gas. The periods contained eight elements apiece at first, then expanded to eighteen, then thirty-two—a mysterious but surely fundamental numerical series. I could not help thinking back to the grids, the tables of primes, I used to make, where I sought so desperately for order but found none. The Periodic Table, by contrast, was a Jacob’s ladder, a numinous spiral, going up to, coming down from a Pythagorean heaven.
This almost religious feeling about the Periodic Table afforded me a very deep, cosmic sense of security and stability, a conviction that the physical universe, at least, was lawful, orderly, harmonious. This certainty did much to alleviate the terrifying uncertainties that had so undone me in my years at Greystone.
Besides spending time with Uncle Dave and in my lab, I began to spend time with another of my mother’s brothers, Uncle Abe. He was a few years older than Dave, and more disposed to physics than to chemistry: the great discoveries of X-rays, radioactivity, the electron, and quantum theory had all occurred in his formative years.
Though Abe and Dave were alike in some ways (both had the broad Landau face, with wide-set eyes, and the unmistakable, resonant Landau voice—characteristics still marked in the great-great-grandchildren of my grandfather), they were very different in others. Dave was tall and strong, with a military posture (he had served in the Great War, and in the Boer War before that), always carefully dressed. He would wear a wing collar and highly polished shoes even when he worked at his lab bench. Abe was smaller, somewhat gnarled and bent (in the years that I knew him), brown and grizzled, like an old shikari, with a hoarse voice and chronic cough; he cared little what he wore, and usually had on a sort of rumpled lab smock.
Both Uncle Dave and Uncle Abe were intensely interested in light and lighting, but with Dave it was “hot” light, and with Abe “cold” light. Uncle Dave had drawn me into the history of incandescence, of the rare earths and metallic filaments that glowed and incandesced brilliantly when heated. He had inducted me into the energetics of chemical reactions—how heat was absorbed or emitted during the course of these; heat that sometimes became visible as fire and flame.
Through Uncle Abe, I was drawn into the history of “cold” light—luminescence—which started perhaps before there was any language to record things, with observations of fireflies and glow-worms and will-o’-the-wisps and luminous seas, and of St. Elmo’s fire, the eerie luminous discharges that could stream from a ship’s masts, giving its sailors a feeling of bewitchment.
Abe’s first love was the investigation of fluorescence and phosphorescence—the power of certain substances to absorb radiant energy like ultraviolet or X-rays and reëmit it as light in the visible range—and he had developed and patented a luminous paint containing radium which was used in military gunsights during the First World War (and may have been decisive, he told me, in the Battle of Jutland).
His attic was a wondrous place, full of electric machines and induction coils, batteries and magnets, and sealed vacuum tubes (Geissler tubes) of rarefied gases which when electrified would light up with brilliant colors—neon red, helium yellow. It was here, with Abe, that I learned about electricity and color and fluorescence; with Abe (and his ten milligrams of radium bromide) that I learned something about the wonders and dangers of radioactivity. (His own hands were covered with radium burns and malignant warts, from his long, careless handling of radioactive materials.) It was with Abe, too, that I learned about spectroscopy—putting different elements into the colorless flame of a Bunsen burner and looking at the radiant spectra they emitted; seeing how these were unique to each element. Spectroscopy became one of my delights as a boy. Most especially, Abe dwelt on the mysterious spacing of the spectral lines, how (at least in hydrogen) they followed a simple formula, and how this was to remain tantalizingly unexplained for almost thirty years, like the periodicity of the elements in the Periodic Table itself.
It was through Uncle Abe that I learned of the incredible scientific events of 1913. It was “the year the world changed,” he would always say, with Bohr’s quantal model of the atom and Moseley’s X-ray spectrography of the elements confirming between them the Periodic Table, providing an electronic understanding of the chemical properties of the elements (as well as the spacing of their spectral lines), in terms of a new and radical theory of the atom.
Prior to this, as Bohr remarked, spectra seemed as beautiful and meaningless as butterflies’ wings, but now, in the words of another great pioneer, Arnold Sommerfeld, they were revealed as “a true atomic music of the spheres.” Uncle Abe spoke of the sense of brilliant light, of sudden, profound understanding, that came to many chemists and physicists at this time, and how it was suddenly overwhelmed by the terribleness of the Great War.
VI—THE END OF THE AFFAIR
With the ending of the war, other triumphs were soon to come: an understanding of why metals were lustrous, why they conducted heat and electricity, the nature of color, of luminescence, of density, of magnetism—all the questions I had puzzled over as a boy. There was an exuberance at this. But the promise held a threat, too: What would become of classical chemistry now? What need was there for it, if the new theory was so powerful?
I had dreamed of becoming a chemist, but the chemistry that really stirred me was the lovingly detailed, naturalistic, descriptive chemistry of the nineteenth century, not the new chemistry of the quantum age, which, so far as I understood it, was highly abstract and, in a sense, closer to physics than to chemistry. Chemistry as I knew it, the chemistry I loved, was either finished or changing its character, advancing beyond me.
From this point, chemistry seemed to recede from my mind—my love affair, my passion for it, came to an end. There were, perhaps, other factors as well. I had been living (it seems to me in retrospect) in a sort of sweet interlude, having left behind the horrors and fears of Greystone. I had been guided to a region of order, and a passion for science, by two very wise, affectionate, and understanding uncles. My parents had been supportive and trusting, had allowed me to put a lab together and follow my own whims. School, mercifully, had been indifferent to what I was doing—I did my schoolwork, and was otherwise left to my own devices. Perhaps, too, there was a biological respite, the special calm of latency.
But now all this was to change: adolescence rushed upon me, like a typhoon, buffeting me with insatiable longings. And at school I left the undemanding classics “side,” and moved to the pressured science side instead. I had been spoiled, in a sense, by my two uncles, and the freedom and spontaneity of my apprenticeship. Now, at school, I was forced to sit in classes, to take notes and exams, to use textbooks that were flat, impersonal, deadly. What had been fun, delight, when I did it in my own way became an aversion, an ordeal, when I had to do it to order. In his essay “To Teach or Not to Teach,” Freeman Dyson speaks of different sorts of people: students who are best given independence, allowed and encouraged to develop in their own way, and those who profit most from structured teaching, from school. I was clearly one who flourished best alone.
Was it, then, the end of chemistry? My own intellectual limitations? Adolescence? School? Or was it, more simply, that I was growing up, and that “growing up” makes one forget the lyrical, mystical perceptions of childhood, the glory and the freshness of which Wordsworth wrote, so that they fade into the light of common day?
After all, it was “understood,” by the time I was fourteen, that I was going to be a doctor; my parents were doctors, my brothers in medical school. My parents had been tolerant, even pleased, with my early interests in science, but now, they seemed to feel, the time for play was over. One incident stays clearly in my mind. In 1947, a couple of summers after the war, I was with my parents in our old Humber touring the South of France. Sitting in the back, I was talking about thallium, rattling on and on about it: how it was discovered, along with indium, in the eighteen-sixties by the brilliant-colored green line in its spectrum; how some of its salts, when dissolved, could form solutions nearly five times as dense as water; how thallium indeed was the platypus of the elements, with paradoxical qualities that had caused uncertainty about its proper placement in the Periodic Table—soft, heavy, and fusible, like lead, chemically akin to gallium and indium, but with dark oxides like those of manganese and iron, and colorless sulfates like those of sodium and potassium. As I babbled on, gaily, narcissistically, blindly, I did not notice that my parents, in the front seat, had fallen completely silent, their faces bored, tight, and disapproving—until, after twenty minutes, they could bear it no longer, and my father burst out violently: “Enough about thallium!”
No doubt anyone would have responded the same way. But now, the message came through, it was time to grow up, to be serious, to work—these words were used again and again—for the training of a doctor was long, hard, and demanding.
The old lab bench has now become a thing of the past. When I paid a visit not long ago to the old building in Finchley which had been Griffin & Tatlock’s home a half century ago, it was no longer there. Such shops, such suppliers, which had provided chemicals and simple apparatus and unimaginable delights for generations, have now all but vanished.
And yet the old enthusiasm, which I had thought dead at fourteen, survives, clearly, deep inside me, and surfaces every so often, in odd associations and impulses. A sudden desire for a ball of cadmium, or to feel the coldness of diamond against my face. The license plates of cars immediately suggest elements, especially in New York, where so many of them begin with U, V, W, and Y—that is, uranium, vanadium, tungsten, and yttrium. It is an added pleasure, a bonus, a grace, if the symbol of an element is followed by its atomic number, as in W74 or Y39. Flowers, too, bring elements to mind: the color of lilacs in spring for me is that of divalent vanadium.
I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the Periodic Table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. The location of tungsten, at the intersection of Group VI and Period 6, becomes synonymous here with the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Sixth Street. (There is no such intersection in New York, of course, but it exists, is conspicuous, in the New York of my dreams.) I dream of eating hamburgers made of scandium. Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals—my old and valued friends—Tantalum, Tungsten, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, and Gold.
Yet it is not just dreams and associations, nostalgic yearnings, that prick my imagination now but hearing of the new achievements of chemistry—a chemistry that, if less personal than the old, has come to embrace the whole world and the universe. In my day, elements stopped with No. 92, uranium, but now elements up to 118 have been made. These new elements exist only in the lab, and may not occur anywhere else in the universe. The very latest of them, though still radioactive, belong to a long-sought “island of stability,” where their atomic nuclei are almost a million times stabler than those of the preceding elements. We have seen moon rocks and Mars rocks, containing minerals never before seen. We wonder about giant planets with cores of metallic hydrogen, stars made of diamond, and stars with crusts of iron helide. The inert gases have been coaxed into combination, and I have seen a fluoride of xenon, unthinkable in the nineteen-forties. A totally unexpected new form of carbon has been made, forming exquisite, soccerball-shaped giant molecules (buckminsterfullerene, “bucky-balls” for short). Scandium is now used in the fins of missiles—and in bicycles. The rare-earth elements, which both Uncle Tungsten and Uncle Abe so loved, have now become common and found countless uses in fluorescent materials, phosphors of every color, high-temperature superconductors, and tiny magnets of an unbelievable strength.
These things, and a thousand others, excite me, stir me, set the imagination running in every direction; and they show me that, though I and the world may have changed beyond recognition, the boy who loved chemistry is still kicking inside. ♦
