Periodic Tales

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  This was the system of the world that I chose–a system as complete as any other on offer. History, geography, the laws of physics, literature: each was all-embracing according to its lights. Everything that happens happens in history, has its place in geography, is reducible solely to the interaction of energy and matter. But it is also materially constituted of the elements, no more and no less: the Great Rift Valley, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Newton’s prism, the Mona Lisa; all impossible without the elements.

  At school around this time, we were reading The Merchant of Venice. I was Bassanio for one forty-minute session–not a bad role, though I loathed reading out loud. We came at length to the scene when it is Bassanio’s turn to select the one of three caskets that contains Portia’s likeness in order that he might win her hand in marriage. The unlucky boy who was Portia prattled on while I waited in dread for my entrance. ‘Let me choose / For as I am, I live upon the rack,’ I intoned with no feeling whatever. Then I was having to choose between the imaginary caskets. I am sure nobody could have gleaned anything of my character’s reasoning from my featureless voice as I rejected first the ‘gaudy gold’ and then the silver, ‘thou pale and common drudge / ’Tween man and man’, before plumping for ‘meagre lead’. But somewhere inside my head something clicked. Three of the elements! Was Shakespeare a chemist? (Later, I found that T. S. Eliot was a chemist too, a spectroscopist in fact: in The Waste Land, he presents a vivid image as a nail-studded ship’s timber ‘fed with copper / Burned green and orange’–green from the copper, orange from the sodium in the sea salt.)

  Dimly, I began to perceive that the elements told cultural stories. Gold meant something. Silver meant something else, lead something else again. Moreover, these meanings arose essentially from chemistry. Gold is precious because it’s rare, but it’s also considered gaudy because it is one of the few elements that naturally occurs in its elemental state, uncombined with others, glittering boldly rather than disguised as an ore. Was there, I wondered, such a mythology for all the elements?

  Their very names often spoke of history. Elements discovered during the Enlightenment had names based on Classical mythology–titanium, niobium, palladium, uranium, and so on. Those found during the nineteenth century, on the other hand, tended to reflect the fact that they–or their discoverers–were sons and daughters of some particular soil. The German chemist Clemens Winkler isolated germanium. The Swede Lars Nilson named his discovery scandium. Marie and Pierre Curie found polonium and named it–not without encountering some resistance–after Marie’s fondly remembered homeland. A little later, the scientific spirit grew more communitarian. Europium was named in 1901–and towards the end of that new century some humorous bureaucrat in one of Europe’s banks would decree that compounds of this element should be used for the luminescent dyes that are incorporated into euro bank notes for the easier detection of counterfeits. Who would have thought it? Even obscure europium has its cultural day.

  So the elements inhabit our culture. We should not really be surprised at this: they are the ingredients of every thing, after all. But we should be surprised at how seldom we notice this fact. This missed connection is partly the chemists’ fault for presuming to study and teach their subject in lofty isolation from the world. But the humanities are also to blame: I was astonished to find, for instance, that a biographer of Matisse could complete her work without saying what pigments the artist used. Perhaps this makes me unusual, but then again I’m sure Matisse cannot have been indifferent to the matter.

  The elements do not simply occupy fixed spaces in our culture as they do in the periodic table. They rise and fall on the tide of cultural whim. John Masefield’s famous poem ‘Cargoes’ lists eighteen commodities in its three short verses portraying three eras of global trade and plunder, eleven of them either elements in their pure state or materials which derive their value from the particular nature of one element ingredient, from the quinquereme of Nineveh with its calcareous white ivory to the dirty British coaster with its load of ‘Tyne coal, / Road-rails, pig-lead, / Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays’.

  From the moment of its discovery, each element embarks upon a journey into our culture. It may eventually come to be visible everywhere, like iron or the carbon in coal. It may loom large economically or politically while remaining largely unseen, like silicon or plutonium. Or it may, like europium, provide a grace note only appreciated by those in the know. When I wrote my school essays (‘Why does Bassanio choose the lead casket?’) it was with an Osmiroid pen, a brand name inspired by the osmium and iridium that its manufacturer used to harden the nibs.

  During its gradual assimilation, we come to understand the element better. The experience of those who mine it, smelt it, shape it and trade it gives it meaning. It is through these muscular processes that an element’s weight is felt and its resistance is gauged, so that Shakespeare can then refer to gold and silver and lead in the ways that he does knowing that his audience will understand him.

  It is not only the ancient elements that are culturally involved. Contemporary artists and writers have used relatively newfound elements such as chromium and neon to send particular signals just as Shakespeare used the elements known in his day. These elements, which fifty years ago signified the innocent glamour of the consumer society, now seem to us tawdry and full of empty promise. The place once occupied by ‘chrome’ is now perhaps taken by a newer element, ‘titanium’, which brands fashionable clothing and computer equipment. In such cases, the element’s meaning detaches itself almost completely from the element itself: how many more platinum blondes and platinum credit cards (neither incorporating any platinum) there must be than platinum rings. Even some highly recherché elements undergo this shift. ‘Radium’ was once popular, sometimes in substance, sometimes in name alone, for all manner of health remedies. There are no longer Osmiroid pens, but there is an Iridium telephone company.

  If I were to reassemble my periodic table now, I would still want to include a specimen of each element, but I would also want to trace its cultural journey. I feel that the elements leave great streaks of colour across the canvas of our civilization. The black of charcoal and coal, the white of calcium in chalk and marble and pearl, the intense blue of cobalt in glass and china slash boldly through place and time, geography and history. Periodic Tales is the start of that collection.

  It is therefore a book of stories: stories of discovery and of discoverers; stories of rituals and values; stories of exploitation and celebration; stories of superstition as well as science. It is not a chemistry book–it contains as much history, biography and mythology as chemistry, and generous helpings of economics, geography, geology, astronomy and religion besides. I have purposely avoided discussing the elements in their periodic table sequence or giving a systematic description of their properties and uses. Other books do this well. I believe that the periodic table has become an icon too powerful for its own good. The ordered grid of squares with its raggedy edges, the strange names and cryptic symbols, the way the elements follow a sequence as fixed yet as apparently arbitrarily as the letters of the alphabet: all these things are strangely compelling. They provide limitless raw material for television quizzes: what element lies directly south-east of zinc?* Who cares? Even chemists do not use the table in this way.

  The elements provide the real interest. The periodic table that I once thought of as unquestionable I know now does not really exist. A few chemists might deny it, but it is only a construct, a mnemonic that arrays the elements in a particularly clever way so as to reveal certain commonalities among them. Yet there’s no actual law against arranging the elements by different rules. In his famous song ‘The Elements’, the American satirist Tom Lehrer reordered them purely for the sake of rhyme and scansion, to fit the tune of Arthur Sullivan’s patter song, ‘I am the very model of a modern major-general’, from The Pirates of Penzance.

  I wish to discover the cultural themes that group the elements anew, to draw
up the periodic table as if sorted by an anthropologist. To this end, I have chosen five major headings: power, fire, craft, beauty and earth.

  As Masefield’s poem shows, imperial might has always depended on possession of the elements. The Roman Empire was built on bronze, the Spanish on gold, the British on iron and coal. The balance of the twentieth-century superpowers was maintained by a nuclear arsenal based on uranium and the plutonium made from it. In ‘Power’, I consider some of these elements that have been amassed as riches and, ultimately, used as a means of exerting control.

  In ‘Fire’, I discuss those elements whose burning light or corrosive action are the key to our understanding of them. We may remember from school that sodium, for example, is an element that entertainingly explodes on contact with water, but we know it above all as the ubiquitous mango-yellow colour of our street lamps–a very particular light that many writers have seized upon as the index of a general urban malaise.

  In the end, any cultural meaning that an element acquires derives from its fundamental properties. This is seen most clearly in the case of those elements that craftspeople have chosen as their raw material. It is the centuries or millennia of hammering and drawing, casting and polishing that have given many of the metallic elements their meaning. ‘Craft’ explains why we regard lead as grave, tin as cheap and silver as radiant with virginal innocence.

  Humankind has manipulated the elements not only for their utility, but also for the sheer joy of the look of them. ‘Beauty’ shows how the compounds of many of the elements, and the light of others, colour our world. Finally, in ‘Earth’, I travel to Sweden to discover how particular places have marked many of the elements, and how those places are marked in turn by the fluke of finding an element there.

  My own journey has led me to mines and artists’ studios, to factories and cathedrals, into the woods and down to the sea. I have recreated early experiments in order to make a few of the elements for myself. I have been pleased to find the elements in abundance in fiction, too, where Jean-Paul Sartre sees fit to remark upon the constancy of the melting point of lead (335 degrees centigrade, he says) and Vladimir Nabokov finds mandalic significance in the carbon atom ‘with its four valences’. Wandering through Shoreditch in London on my way to see Cornelia Parker, an artist who has made it her business to remind us of the cultural significance of many of the elements, I was captivated by a sculpture in a shop window by some other artists of a nuclear power station wittily cast like lime jelly in glowing uranium glass. It was clear. The elements do not belong in a laboratory; they are the property of us all. Periodic Tales is a record of the journey with the elements that I was never encouraged to take when I was a chemist. Come along: there will be fireworks.

  Part One: Power

  El Dorado

  In 2008, the British Museum commissioned a life-size sculpture of the model Kate Moss. The artwork, called Siren, is made entirely of gold and is said to be the largest gold sculpture created since the days of ancient Egypt, though it’s impossible to check whether this is true. Siren was placed on show in the museum’s Nereid Gallery near a statue of a bathing Aphrodite. My immediate impression on seeing Kate Moss’s otherwise familiar image is how tiny she looks, accentuated by the fact that she is knotted in a particularly uncomfortable-looking yoga position, though this may be an optical illusion–we are unused, after all, to seeing so much of the shining metal at once. The gold, I am disappointed to find, is not polished to a high gloss but has a steely brushed finish, which elicits a high sparkle from the grains in the textured surface, not the burnished glow I had expected to see. There are signs of pitting in the casting, which a different goldsmith might have taken care of. The unique qualities of the metal that have made it precious to cultures since antiquity seem poorly served. Only the face is perfectly smooth, and is immediately reminiscent of the funerary mask of Tutenkhamun. The lifeless staring visage has the disturbing effect, entirely unexpected given the high public profile of its subject, of plucking the spectator out of time: this is no longer a rendering of the twenty-first-century celebrity, but a depersonalized, detemporalized figure whose sharp nose and pouting lips belong less to a living person than to a death mask or votive figure.

  The price put on the statue was £1.5 million. It was the whim of the artist, Marc Quinn, that the work be fabricated from gold of equal mass to the model’s fifty-kilogramme body, so that in addition to appearing life-size, it could be said to represent her weight in gold, perhaps raising in the mind of the astute onlooker thoughts of ransom and slavery. In solid gold, I calculate, Kate would be shrunk to the size of a garden ornament. Quinn’s piece must therefore be hollow, which may also be an artistic comment of some kind. Although gold is the only declared material from which the work is made, I figure there must be some sort of armature to support the weight of the soft metal, which would otherwise slump out of shape. Afterwards, I look up the price of gold. Although Siren went on display during a period of global financial upheaval, when the price of gold had doubled, it was still only £15,000 a kilo, giving the artwork a scrap value, as it were, of £750,000. Presumably the rest of the £1.5 million is to cover labour.

  I watch as people queue to take photographs of the golden Moss, either simply snapping her image or sometimes placing their partner in the shot next to her, making who knows what sort of comparison. I am curious to know what has drawn them to the sculpture. Which is more powerful: the cult of celebrity or the cult of gold? What is really the siren here? It is mainly men who have come to worship this modern Aphrodite. A few purport to admire the sculptural qualities of the work. Some are indeed drawn by the power of celebrity, but are fans of Quinn more than Moss. I ask the girlfriend of one temporarily distracted Polish man what she thinks of it. ‘It is beautiful,’ she concedes, as if to say otherwise would be unacceptable, ‘but it doesn’t belong here.’ Another woman photographing it with her phone is briskly dismissive: ‘I need some gold for my mobile–it’s wallpaper.’

  More than any of the ancient elements, gold has been judged to possess a timeless allure. None of the elements discovered by modern science has challenged this supremacy. But what, if anything, is truly special about this metal?

  Gold is characteristically yellow. In a flower, one might find this yellow attractive or not–beauty is a matter of taste, after all. But in gold, apparently, the unique combination of this colour with the lustre of metal leaves us no other option than to be drawn to it. Even the sociologist Thorstein Veblen, whom one might expect to maintain some professional caution in the matter, falls for the stuff. In a chapter on the ‘pecuniary canons of taste’ in his classic text The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), he writes that gold has a ‘high degree of sensuous beauty’ as if that were an objective fact, and never mind the eye of the beholder.

  There is then the fact that this colour and lustre endure, because gold resists corrosion by the air, by water and indeed by almost all chemical reagents. Pliny the Elder thinks it is this unique quality of endurance, and specifically not its colour, that explains our love of gold: ‘it is the only metal that loses nothing by contact with fire’, he observes. It is this endurance that gives gold its association with immortality, and so with royal lines and divinity. The Buddha is gilded as an indication of enlightenment and perfection, and the metal’s incorruptibility inspires a torrent of other ideals: the golden section, the golden mean, the golden rule.

  Gold is special also because of its great density, its malleability and ductility–it can be beaten as thin as hair and ‘long enough to encircle a whole village’, as one West African proverb puts it. It is surely the case that gold’s heaviness, in particular, signifies value in the way that dense materials often do, regardless of their actual composition, because their relative weight transmits a sense of sheer quantity. Gold’s resistance to chemical attack–in other words its ability to retain its pure state–signifies value too, because we naturally place value in things that endure. It is these economically impor
tant secondary attributes of the element that give Veblen cause to comment on it at all. And it is this muddled equation between beauty and value that lies at the heart of our understanding of gold.

  Though gold was known to the ancients, being the only metal typically found in the elemental state, it was too soft for making weapons and was perhaps not much used at first, even for ornamental purposes. Even where it is relatively abundant, such as in parts of Australia and New Zealand, aboriginal peoples have often ignored it. In Europe, Africa and Asia, however, the metal was generally highly prized and was soon taken up for jewellery and then for coin. The first coins were stamped out of electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver, in Lydia in the seventh century BCE. Around 550 BCE King Croesus minted purer silver and gold coins, and from then on the yellow metal was man’s chosen element for the expression of great wealth. Backed by state authority, Croesus’ coinage boosted trade and banking. For gold to hold its greater value as coin against native electrum it had to be pure, and its purity had to be ascertainable by assay. With this, gold became subject to comparative testing and valuation as well as absolute worship.

  Six hundred years later, Pliny is scathing about the corrupting effect of gold, which he wished ‘could be completely banished from life’. He damns equally those who wear it and those who trade with it: ‘The first person to put gold on his fingers committed the worst crime against human life.’ ‘The second crime against mankind was committed by the person who first struck a gold denarius.’ The difficulty lies not with the material itself, but with man’s transforming hands upon it. Natural gold may contain the light of the sun, but minted gold becomes a ‘symbol of perversion and the exaltation of unclean desire’. Sir Thomas More confirms this moral distinction in his Utopia, reserving its gold not for finery but for making chamberpots.