Periodic Tales

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  Unexpectedly, there are three chemical actors upon the copper stage: small pieces of tungsten and titanium as well as the molybdenum. Fiona opens the valve on a nearby gas cylinder that pumps inert argon gas through the chamber. Max switches on the current–453 amps, fed from a thrumming electric welder of the type used in building steel bridges. The tungsten–the only electrical conductor that would not melt–serves as the ‘striker’ that will complete the circuit and ignite the flame. Next, the small piece of titanium is sacrificed in what feels like a ritual but is simply a precautionary way of mopping up any oxygen remaining in the chamber which might otherwise spoil the molybdenum. Then Max brings the flame to each chunk of grey molybdenum in turn. Viewing the proceedings through a thick plate of dark glass, I see the metal glow orange and pucker up into a bead. The orange fades as each bead cools before, miraculously, a bright gleam seems to force its way through the sooty surface. The three elements have all responded differently to their shock–one transformed, one destroyed, one unmoved. The drama is complete. When they have cooled, Max trickles the shining beads of molybdenum into my hand, dimpled like overcooked peas. They are brighter than iron and a little greyer than chromium. I tuck them away to add to my own periodic table.

  Among the Carbonari

  As long ago as 1939, a man styling himself ‘The Last Charcoal Burner’ was said to be making his living by supplying the grill rooms of London hotels. Yet he was not the first pretender to this title, nor the last. Obadiah Wickens of Tonbridge in Kent and Harry Clark of East Sussex each purported to be the last before him. And in the Forest of Dean, Edward Roberts, who had been calling himself the last charcoal burner as early as 1930, was still plying his trade in the 1950s. Perhaps it is long hours spent pondering the stifled flame of their fires that inspires such doomy claims.

  These days, I am able to find a charcoal burner without difficulty. It would even be straightforward to track one down in my own thinly wooded county of Norfolk, but instead I have chosen to pay a visit to Jim Bettle, who works in the woods of Blackmoor Vale, where Thomas Hardy set The Woodlanders. This book has indelible, though not exactly fond, memories for me, being the novel I was required to study for O Level. Jim picks me up near his home in Hazelbury Bryan, and we drive for a few miles before turning up a hillside track and passing through locked gates on to private roads until we reach the wood where one of his kilns should be ready for emptying.

  In a late addition to the preface of The Woodlanders, Hardy responded mischievously to the many enquiries he had received from readers regarding the location of ‘Little Hintock’, the village where the action of the book takes place. Even he did not know quite where it was; he said: ‘To oblige readers I once spent several hours on a bicycle with a friend in a serious attempt to discover the real spot; but the search ended in failure.’ Although the academic wisdom has it that Little Hintock is based on a village called Minterne Magna some miles to the west, Jim has reason to believe that the place is in fact Turnworth, which is the hamlet nearest to where we are heading.

  Unlike Hardy’s woodlanders, who were obliged to scrape a livelihood from the living fuel that grew around them, Jim turned to charcoal-burning by choice. Having seen that the local golf courses and estates habitually just burnt wood off as waste, he felt he could do better, and began to investigate potential markets for locally prepared charcoal. In 1996, he bought his first kiln and went into business. Jim recounts a conversation with his Business Link advisor, who was full of admiration for his ambition, but spoilt the effect somewhat when, after an hour’s discussion, she asked him where he was going to be digging up his charcoal. ‘It’s amazing how many people don’t know that charcoal is wood,’ he says. Charcoal is almost pure carbon–purer than most coal–and when efficiently burnt releases more heat than wood burnt in an open fire. It is also largely lacking in the sulphur and oils that make coal so unpleasant.

  We arrive at our destination, Bonsley Wood, high on the hill south of Blandford. Jim’s kiln is a steel drum two or three metres in diameter covered by a thin steel lid. Round its edge are eight little hatches that control the rate of burning once the fire is set. It sits harmoniously enough in a hazel clearing, its rust walls blending with the autumn colours. Jim and his helpers will typically set up a kiln where the surrounding wood to be coppiced–undergrowth of hazel, birch and ash mostly–will support a dozen or more burns. Then they will move it to another location. They do this two or three times during the season with each of their kilns. It is mid October when we meet, and this particular kiln will now be put to bed for the winter; the 135th burn of the year. Other woods are burnt to make charcoal for specialist markets: artists favour willow charcoal; laboratories, which use charcoal as a neutral absorbent, prefer pine. Manufacturers of pyrotechnics buy several different charcoals to give their explosive mixtures just the right oomph.

  Each kiln has capacity for a tonne and a half of wood but will yield only a quarter of a tonne of charcoal. This simple fact of charcoal’s physical nature immediately explains the itinerant life of the charcoal burner. It is far more efficient for him to burn the wood where the wood grows than to transport it for burning in some remote permanent kiln. This in turn confers his marginal position in society, a man apart from the community, always on the move, hidden by trees, and perhaps of no fixed abode.

  The wood is carefully arranged for each firing. First, a core of charcoal from the previous burn is piled up in the centre. Long timbers called runners are then laid out from the top of this heap towards the vents to ensure an airway to the heart of the fire. After that, other timbers are carefully layered in, interleaved with more charcoal. Smaller pieces of wood are placed towards the rim of the kiln, and larger ones at the centre where it is hotter, so that all the wood burns evenly. Although Jim’s kilns are steel, this careful selection and arrangement of the wood and charcoal is part of the traditional method of charcoal-burning that goes back to ancient times, when the wood was stacked in a shallow pit dug into the ground and then covered with turf to control the rate of burning.

  The fire is lit by igniting the charcoal at the centre and allowed to flare up before the steel lid is put on. This restricts the amount of oxygen let into the kiln and prevents the carbon in the wood from being consumed altogether and converted into carbon dioxide gas. From now on, there is no flame and very little smoke as the wood is carefully burnt to charcoal. The rate of burn is governed by the eight vents around the foot of the drum, which are alternately fitted with long chimneys so that they act as flues, or left alone to serve as air intakes. Jim and his men swap the chimneys round during the course of the burn to ensure that all the wood inside the kiln receives equal heat.

  At the kiln we are to empty, the fire was set two days ago and then starved of all air from the following morning, which has given it twenty-four hours to cool. Jim and a helper lift off the lid. The charcoal is not all black as I had expected. Freshly prepared, it lies in large smooth limbs with a sheen like brushed steel. Many pieces still hold the shape of the branch or trunk of the tree that went in. In some cases, it is almost possible for me to identify the species of timber. The job is simply to reach into the kiln and lift out the pieces. Twisted in the hands, they break into fragments suitable for bagging as barbecue fuel. The charcoal is indeed surprisingly light–I find it takes many gathered handfuls to fill a ten-kilogramme paper sack.

  It may be too much to claim that charcoal-burning is undergoing a revival. There are only a few score men like Jim in the country. ‘It’s quite challenging to remain in business,’ Jim admits. Imported charcoal, consumer ignorance and centralized purchasing by the retailers are some of the problems. But the economic, environmental and moral arguments surely lie in his favour over the long haul. Demand for charcoal has risen greatly in Britain as people have become more enthusiastic about barbecues, but, Jim claims, more than ninety per cent of the charcoal supplied for this market comes from abroad, much of it as the by-product of uncontrolled timber extract
ion in the tropical forests of West Africa, South-east Asia and Brazil. Jim’s timber is sustainably sourced–he has a coppicing lease from the Forestry Commission–but he says it would cost his small-scale operation too much to get the accreditation that would allow him to prove this to consumers by putting the Forest Steward-ship Council symbol (seen on the copyright page of this book, for example) on his charcoal sacks. Meanwhile, British barbecue chefs unwittingly play their part in the razing of the Amazon, unaware that the very word ‘Brazil’ refers to burnt timber, the country having been named by the Portuguese after brasa, meaning ‘hot coals’, in reference to the red of the brazilwood trees that are being cleared at a rate of 10,000 square kilometres (four times the area of Dorset) every year.

  Trying to survive in business has necessarily turned Jim into something of an environmental campaigner. But perhaps there is also something about the commodity he deals in that kindles the activist in him. For black carbon–charcoal or coal–has always been stuff for rebel causes. It is won by the poor to warm the rich. As long ago as 1662, John Evelyn gave a discourse to his fellow members of the Royal Society on trees and woodland culture called ‘Sylva’, in which he noted that all the charcoal made in the forests went for iron, for gunpowder and for ‘London and the Court’. (Evelyn knew his business as his own family had a licence to make gunpowder for the crown.)

  There is always a frisson between the getters and the consumers, the winners of the fuel and the winners in the end, that reminds us that energy is power. Coal miners’ strikes are traditionally the bloodiest and most intractable of all industrial disputes. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell lionizes coal miners as the ‘grimy caryatids’ propping up the national economy. His famous description, both admiring and appalled, of a coal mine paints the men as ‘splendid’, the quantities hefted as ‘monstrous’, the noise as ‘frightful’, but the coal itself as merely black, an undifferentiated commodity to be attacked and demolished. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence’s Connie, Lady Chatterley, fears ‘the industrial masses’ and holds the miners in awe and dread; they are ‘Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon…Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world!’ Emile Zola’s novel Germinal gives a graphic portrait of the collier’s life in nineteenth-century France with a bitter strike at the heart of its story. After the defeated miners have returned to work, the eldest son of the principal family is killed in an underground explosion, and his body is brought up to the surface, reduced to ‘black charcoal, calcined, unrecognizable’. We are what we mine.

  Charcoal burners and the foresters for whom they often work excite similar fears and admiration, the more so since they at least appear to operate with a degree of autonomy, but also because the woods where they freely wander have always been the domain of outlaws. In the medieval period, the forests that covered much of Britain belonged to the king. ‘Forest courts’ decreed severe penalties ranging from death for taking the king’s deer to blinding or castration for lesser offences. Even the taking of windfall timber was forbidden after the king usurped commoners’ traditional rights and took control of ever more woodland for hunting. Charcoal burners needed a royal licence to burn timber for fuel and for use in forging iron. Charcoal-burning was thus one of the few more or less legitimate things one could claim to be doing in the forest if challenged by the king’s men.

  Tales of Robin Hood abound with disguises, including disguises as charcoal burners. A more authenticated medieval story concerns Fulk FitzWarin, a Shropshire gentleman sent in childhood to the court of Henry II, later dispossessed and driven to live as an outlaw. At court, he quarrels with the boy prince John. Later, when the outlawed Fulk learns that John, now king, is near by in Windsor Forest, he disguises himself as a charcoal burner in order to lure him deeper into the woods, saying that he has seen a magnificent stag. When he has the king at his mercy, he forces him to promise that he will restore his inheritance. John reigned at the beginning of the thirteenth century and decreed that the forest forges be shut down, perhaps after one too many encounters of this sort. Magna Carta, the English bill of rights that King John was forced to accept in 1215, was motivated in part by popular rejection of these draconian woodland powers.

  The idea of strange men from the woods passing out gifts probably strikes us as creepy today, but it is a thread that runs from the myth of Robin Hood to the originally green-robed Santa Claus, who arises partly from the ‘green man’ of pagan religion. The association is not only with the trees but with their combustion products. In the Basque country, Santa Claus takes the form of the fat charcoal burner, Olentzero, who brings wooden toys that he has carved in his charcoal sack.

  The redistribution of wealth and power was also one objective of the Carbonari, revolutionary precursors of the Risorgimento that would lead to the unification of Italy in 1871. They began as a secret society in the Kingdom of Naples, formed to resist French occupation during the Napoleonic Wars, taking their name from the Italian for charcoal burner, carbonaro. Their flag was red, blue and black for charcoal, only later becoming the red, white and green of modern Italy. The impulses of the Carbonari were patriotic, liberal and secular. After the defeat of Napoleon, they directed their efforts against their new over-lords, the Austrians and the allied Papal States. The movement spread and, in 1820, after a number of failed uprisings, the Carbonari staged patriotic rebellions in several Italian cities. Shortly after eight in the evening of Friday 8 December 1820, the poet Lord Byron, then living in Ravenna, was caught up in one of these dramas when a powerful local Carbonari chief was assassinated. In Don Juan, he describes–‘This is a fact, and no poetic fable’–how he heard shots and ran out of his home to find the man lying in the street: ‘for some reason, surely bad, / They had slain him with five slugs’. Though he distances himself from the crime–‘The man was gone: in some Italian quarrel’–Byron was himself active in the Carbonari movement, having been elected a capo, and was involved in buying and storing arms.

  The Carbonari organized themselves along similar lines to the freemasons. The idea that they wore charcoal sacking and that their leader sat on a throne made of a charcoal bundle was merely an inspired piece of invented tradition to go with the romantic image of free men plotting liberty and independence in the forests of the Abruzzi. In reality, they were farmers and labourers, but also tailors, and even members of the junior clergy, who merely felt a certain solidarity with the sooty-faced practitioners of one of the most ancient crafts. The Italian Carbonaro was as ignorant of charcoal-making as the freemason is of stonework.

  Carbon enjoys its economic centrality not because it is the only fuel, but because it is the only solid fuel with the convenient, and in fact essential, property that it burns away to nothing. In 1860, Michael Faraday devoted one of the Royal Institution Christmas lecture series that he had made famous to ‘The Chemical History of a Candle’ and explained to his youthful audience how the product of all carbon combustion is carbon dioxide, a gas that leaves no residue. Nearly fifty years before, he himself had seen this demonstrated in the most dramatic fashion in Florence by his mentor Humphry Davy, who burnt a diamond away to nothing using ‘the great burning glass of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany’. In this behaviour, carbon is unlike almost all other combustible materials. If carbon left behind it the solid waste that metals leave when they burn–that is to say, an oxide heavier than the original material–the volume of waste from our hearths would be insupportable.

  Gas though it is, even carbon dioxide has to go somewhere, of course. Faraday recognized this chemical quirk as an economic miracle, but he was not insensitive to what we would now call the carbon emissions of the Victorian city. ‘A candle will burn some four, five, six, or seven hours. What, then, must be the daily amount of carbon going up into the air in the way of carbonic acid [carbon dioxide]!’ A man in a day converts seven ounces of carbon from sugar in his body, Faraday calculated, and a horse seventy-nine ounces. ‘As much as 5,000,000 pounds, or 548 tonnes
, of carbonic acid is formed by respiration in London alone in twenty-four hours.’ Faraday marvelled that plants were able to take up all this carbon dioxide, ignorant as he was of the level of the gas already building up in the earth’s atmosphere. London’s carbon emissions are today estimated as 44 million tonnes of carbon a year, 220 times the amount due to respiration alone in Victorian times.

  Plutonium Charades

  Glenn Seaborg was arguably the greatest element discoverer of them all. He produced plutonium in 1940, curium and americium in 1944, berkelium and californium in 1949 and 1950 and had a hand in several others. His tally surpasses that of William Ramsay, who discovered the inert gases, and beats the serial discoverers of new metals, Humphry Davy and, more significantly perhaps, the great Jöns Jacob Berzelius of Stockholm.

  For Seaborg, like so many discoverers of the elements, had Swedish blood in his veins. His father’s name was Americanized from Sjöberg, his mother was Swedish, and Swedish was the first language in the house where he grew up in Ishpeming in northern Michigan, a region of the United States favoured by Scandinavian immigrants who must immediately have felt at home walking along earthen streets of packed iron ore.

  Seaborg’s high-school years had been punctuated by news of chemists around the world excitedly claiming to have found the last few elements that would plug the remaining gaps in Mendeleev’s periodic table. The names they proposed invariably declared a geographic allegiance: alabamine, russium, virginium, moldavium, illinium, florentium, nipponium. By the time Seaborg was seventeen and graduating from school in 1929, the periodic table seemed complete up to uranium, with ninety-two protons in the nucleus of each atom, and therefore atomic number ninety-two. Although some of these claims were erroneous or at least premature, it was eventually confirmed that the elements we now know as technetium, astatine, promethium and francium had been successfully synthesized in radiation laboratories.