With no hard evidence to support their audacious claims, both Janssen and Lockyer faced years of mockery during which irreverent scientists would quip to one another of this or that unknown concoction, ‘that’s helium’. Many spectroscopists doubted whether helium truly existed, and even Edward Frankland, the chemist who had assisted Lockyer in his experiments, continued to believe that some undiscovered emission of hydrogen was a more likely explanation of the yellow line. It was not until 1895 that Lockyer was finally vindicated, when William Ramsay was able to send him a discharge tube full of helium gas that he had gathered from the radioactive decay of a uranium mineral. Lockyer rejoiced: ‘the glorious yellow effulgence of the capillary, while the current was passing, was a sight to see’.
In the meantime, before Ramsay could come to the two men’s rescue, other astronomers had gaily begun reporting further discoveries of celestial elements that were beyond the reach of any confirmatory laboratory test. Coronium was claimed in 1869, and only in 1939 proved to be iron. Nebulium followed, but turned out to be an energized form of oxygen. It was Mendeleev’s organization of the periodic table–and the gradual filling of its vacant spaces since–that finally put an end to these wild claims. There remain many unidentified spectral lines in the annals of astronomy, but the chances that any of them are owing to an undiscovered element rather than to uncatalogued electronic excitations in known substances are now zero.
Less reputable investigators, however, have been keen to exploit the air of mystery that often clings to newfound elements–or elements, as it might be said of helium, uncomfortably stalled on the threshold of discovery. To the lay observer, after all, the coded evidence of the spectroscope surely appeared hardly more credible than the ravings of a cabalist. In a scientific age when people were asked to believe in invisible X-rays that could see through solid matter and radioactivity that could magically cause one element to be transmuted into another, any novelty seemed possible. And if elements were to be found beyond the range of human perception by looking to the heavens, then was it not reasonable also to seek for them closer to home by more congenial extra-sensory means?
The case of occultum presents this other side of the balance sheet–an elemental find claimed not by learned men of science but by self-avowed mystics, yet reliant, just like Lockyer’s claim to helium, on visual evidence produced by arcane means and only directly witnessed by a select few observers.
Occultum was the ‘discovery’ of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater. Besant was a leading light in the theosophist religious movement, a clairvoyant, a feminist activist and a leading political radical of the Victorian period. With Leadbeater, a former Anglican preacher, she wrote many books, among them one called Occult Chemistry, a fusion of these later interests with what she had learnt while studying chemistry as one of the first woman undergraduates at London University. This volume, first published in 1909 and later running to several editions, gave exhaustive and precise descriptions of the appearance of individual atoms of many of the elements as they appeared first to Leadbeater and then, under his tutelage, to Besant, viewed by the ‘third eye’ of clairvoyance. The atoms were illustrated by Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa, Leadbeater’s young Singhalese companion, who attended the chemical séances along with his white kitten. He did not see the atoms himself, but made beautifully detailed drawings of them based on Leadbeater’s and Besant’s descriptions. They looked uncannily like the spirogyra and spicular marine organisms illustrated by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, whose magnificent compendium Kunstformen der Natur had been published not long before.
Leadbeater and Besant launched their eccentric atomic project in 1895. Besant, remembering her student days, stated the importance of observation above all, and made a show of reporting neutrally what they claimed to see. They started with an attempt to observe ‘a molecule of gold’ but apparently found it ‘far too elaborate a structure to be described’. Leadbeater had better luck with hydrogen, which he announced had a countable number of minor atoms ‘arranged on a definite plan’. This simplest of elements ‘was seen to consist of six small bodies, contained in an egg-like form. It rotated with great rapidity on its own axis, vibrating at the same time, and the internal bodies performed similar gyrations.’ It was found to weigh eighteen anu, a unit of measurement devised by the occultists, who named it after the word for the indivisible unit of matter in Jain metaphysics. Leadbeater and Besant observed elements more elaborate than hydrogen but less daunting than gold and ‘weighed’ them too. Nitrogen and oxygen were found to measure 261 anu and 290 anu respectively. The agreement between these numbers and the two elements’ relative atomic weights, as determined by more conventional means, was quite remarkable.
That same year–the year, it should be remembered, when Ramsay confirmed the terrestrial existence of the elusive solar gas–they also observed an atom ‘so light, and so simple in its composition, we thought that it might be helium’. Unable to get hold of a verified sample of helium, however, they admitted they were unable to confirm this attribution. In 1907, Leadbeater and Besant did finally obtain some helium gas and subjected it to the mysterious scrutiny of the ‘third eye’. They pronounced themselves surprised that ‘it proved to be quite different from the object before observed, so we dubbed the unrecognised object Occultum, until orthodox science shall find it and label it in proper fashion’.
Orthodox science never did find it, of course; occultum duly went the way of coronium and nebulium. Yet Besant and Leadbeater cannot simply be dismissed as cranks. They consorted with scientists. They observed and measured, and recorded their observations and measurements, with great thoroughness, just as scientists do. Furthermore, leading scientists were not unknown to dabble in alternative religion. William Crookes, the discoverer of thallium, was a fellow of the Theosophical Society himself and on occasion provided samples and advice to the occult chemists.
On the other hand, Besant’s and Leadbeater’s research does fail the first test of experimental science inasmuch as nobody has been able to replicate their results. Recently, Michael McBride, a chemist at Yale University, looked again at their data and subjected it to a statistical analysis. He found that the agreement between their figures for relative atomic weights of the elements and those accepted by science was not just close, it was too close to be true: any genuine experimental procedure would have produced a wider spread of data. McBride clears Besant and Leadbeater of fraud, however. He believes instead that a collective delusion led them to associate their ‘observed’ values with the established ones.
They plainly did not see individual atoms as they claimed, yet compared with so much else happening in chemistry and physics at the time, you could argue that this actually made their results appear more scientific rather than less so. (X-rays, also discovered in 1895, would eventually enable scientists to ‘see’ atoms.) The plausibility of Besant’s and Leadbeater’s claims is further enhanced by the detail of their accounts, their insistence on the pieties of science (‘it is very desirable that our results should be tested by others who can use the same extension of physical sight’), and their irresistible illustrations; illustrations which look like strange sea creatures, yes, but also–and this is uncanny–very like the diagrams of the orbits of electrons around atoms and molecules that were much later devised as an aid to understanding the nature of chemical bonding. Though it was certainly not its tellers’ intention, the story of occultum might almost be considered as a satire on the rhetoric of scientific presentation, gussied up as it is with its technical terms, lengthy exegeses and elaborate visualizations of what, in fact, cannot be seen.
There are moments when Besant’s and Leadbeater’s imagined system of the elements based on the recurrence of certain subatomic shapes comes across as plain crazy, as when they write, for example: ‘Manganese offers us nothing new, being composed of “lithium spikes” and “nitrogen balloons.”’ Yet the great Crookes, admittedly careful in his praise, recommended that ‘their work wo
uld be useful at least in suggesting to scientists the kind of elements they might still discover in the as yet unfinished periodic table’. In the event, their visions came closest to reality in atomic physics. Besant and Leadbeater believed that even the simplest atom, hydrogen, was composed of many subatomic particles, and that both the atoms and their constituent particles were constantly spinning and vibrating–all phenomena that would be observed by physics during the next few decades, the spin of the electron revealed, in fact, by examining the detail of the helium spectrum.
The intangibility of helium finally got to Lockyer. Not satisfied with Ramsay’s gift, he sought to obtain his own sample of the element and in 1899 wrote off for promising source materials. In reply, the superintendent of wells and baths at Harrogate sent Lockyer some salts from his spa. The waters of such places were known by now to fizz not only with hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide but also with small amounts of the inert gases. Carefully collecting the gas released by the salts, Lockyer at last held in his hand the element he had detected more than thirty years before.
Part Three: Craft
To the Cassiterides
The Phoenicians sailed far and wide in search of tin. They probably obtained the metal first from sources in Crete and Turkey, then, ranging west, from Etruria in Italy and Tarshish in southern Spain, and east, from as far away as the Malay peninsula, where much tin is still smelted today. But their most fabled source was the islands known as the Cassiterides.
The Phoenicians flourished in the land that is now Syria and Lebanon for more than a millennium beginning around 1500 BCE, promoting trade and technological development but leaving few records of their doings. It is the Greek writer Herodotus who is largely responsible for the myth of the Cassiterides, the place to which the metal is for ever linked by the name of its ore, cassiterite. Though he personally doubted the islands’ existence, he nevertheless wrote them into his Histories around 430 BCE, and so, true or not, into history:
Of the extreme tracts of Europe towards the west I cannot speak with any certainty; for I do not allow that there is any river, to which the barbarians give the name of Eridanus, emptying itself into the northern sea, whence (as the tale goes) amber is procured; nor do I know of any islands called the Cassiterides, whence the tin comes which we use. For in the first place the name Eridanus is manifestly not a barbarian word at all, but a Greek name, invented by some poet or other; and secondly, though I have taken vast pains, I have never been able to get an assurance from an eye-witness that there is any sea on the further side of Europe. Nevertheless, tin and amber do certainly come to us from the ends of the earth.
Yet there is sea on the farther side of Europe, and the Cassiterides must exist, for tin was indeed brought to the Mediterranean from the west, the trade being run from the Phoenician port-state of Carthage. But where in the west? The mystery may be deliberate. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History writes that the metal came from ‘Lusitania’ and ‘Gallaecia’ and was also ‘brought from the islands of the Atlantic sea in barks covered with hides’, while the Greek geographer Strabo, writing 400 years after Herodotus, suggests that the Phoenicians may have deceived their enemies as to where these valuable resources lay, but hazards that these islands lay off the Iberian coast ‘to the north of the port of the Artabrians’. But there are no such islands. Later scholars have interpreted Classical accounts as references to the north-western extremity of Spain itself, or Brittany, or the islands at the mouth of the Loire and the Charente in the Bay of Biscay. But these places have no tin. So far, so unreliable, and after all, as one modern metallurgical text tartly reminds us, ‘how many historians of our day could tell us whence we derive our tin?’
Another Atlantic promontory is rich in tin, but then Cornwall is no island. Perhaps we are taking the third-hand reports of ships’ lookouts too literally. For Mediterranean scribes, it would have been a superfluous act of imagination to give definite shape to any extensive land reported from voyages into the endless ocean that lay beyond the Straits of Gibraltar; how much more fabulous simply to conjure an island. And more plausible too, for who would believe it more likely that the Phoenician ships had simply doubled back on themselves to discover no more than the far side of a continent they already knew?
Tin has been exploited in Cornwall since at least 2000 BCE, obtained from river-beds or by setting fires directly against the rock to melt it out, and thus was long established by the time Phoenician traders heard of it. Yet the idea that the Cassiterides, known to the ancient world so specifically as the Tin Islands, and ‘ten in number’ according to Strabo, were truly islands rather than parts of a larger mass of land cannot be so easily discarded. The logical assumption that they may be the Isles of Scilly seems to fall at the first hurdle–they possess very little tin. I ask Richard Herrington at the Natural History Museum in London what he makes of the competing theories. He favours the idea that the tin did come from Cornwall and that the Isles of Scilly served as a convenient trading centre. Here, inshore craft–Pliny’s ‘barks covered with hide’–might meet the large ships of the Phoenician traders who, sailing north past Cape Finisterre (‘Artabria’), might just consider the Scilly islands as lying off the coast of Spain. This scenario at least reconciles the historians’ descriptions with the mineralogical facts. The Phoenicians need never have seen the British mainland.
There is another dimension to the mystery of the Cassiterides–their name. The standard view is that the islands are named after the valuable ore found there, but some have wondered whether the boot is not on the other foot, and the ore takes its name from a pre-existing name of the islands–much as it is believed that the Latin word for copper, cuprum, may derive from Cyprus, the place which was the Mediterranean world’s main source of this element. This seems rather unlikely–the Sanskrit word for tin, kastira, points to an Indic etymology based on Asian sources of the metal. But this ancient root does at least underline the claim of Cornwall to be among the very oldest known sources of tin.
I have a modern map which, although it does not claim Cornwall as the Cassiterides, does show it to be a land of tin. It is a ‘metallogenic’ map of the British Isles–it tells where the nation’s treasure is buried. The land area is tinted in pastel colours to represent the major geological periods, and on top of this are scattered little coloured lozenges like a spilt pick’n’mix. The scatter is notably uneven. It divides the country sharply in two: the bland Mesozoic to the south and east, and the Celtic regions to the north and west, where the geology rushes backwards in time through the Carboniferous to the Cambrian period and beyond. The coloured shapes cluster in these latter regions, denoting the presence of elements such as strontium at Strontian in Argyllshire, Welsh gold and many others. The shapes are designed to give an idea of the extent of each deposit and even to show which way the strata run. The spine of Cornwall is festooned with orange rectangles, which signify the presence of tin, tungsten, copper, molybdenum and arsenic. The largest rectangles are at the very end of the Cornish peninsula (although there are none on the Isles of Scilly). I decide I must make my own voyage to the Cassiterides.
It is immediately obvious that I am in a land of more interesting geology as I cross into Cornwall. Everywhere is evidence of quarrying and mining, white scars in the hillsides left by china clay workings, pointed slag heaps, the occasional mineshaft or chimney. The oldest, and now most picturesque, tin mines are on the rocky north coast of the Land’s End peninsula. The area is now designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, placing them, incredibly, on a par with Easter Island and the Pyramids. Strangely, the ruined stone buildings live up to this honour, their conical stone chimneys and the blocky verticality of their shaft houses producing their own austere geometry.
There are many of these constructions littering the rugged landscape, but the surface buildings are the least of it. Underground, as I learn from an intricate wire model the size of a large room at Geevor mine, lies a complicated grid of tunnels and shafts, a veritab
le underground city, constructed to follow the tin lodes wherever they led, sometimes even out under the sea. A tour of Geevor gives me a proper sense of the tin miner’s lot. On the surface are the sheds where the ore was broken up and graded, the huge sloping rooms of shaking rhomboidal tables where heavy ore was sifted from the light, and the Piranesian horror of the calciner where arsenic was roasted off. Finally, we are taken down Wheal Mexico, one of the oldest parts of the mine workings, whose hard granite walls still ooze lurid blue copper. When we come ‘back to grass’, I am struck in a conceited twenty-first-century way by the incongruity of the breathtaking scenery with the hell of work below ground.
Periodic Tales Page 19