Periodic Tales

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  Zinc inhabits a no-man’s-land between the metals of antiquity and the modern metals teased from possessive ores by the ingenuity of science and the might of the Industrial Revolution. Its ambiguous position is underlined by the fact that it has been used unwittingly for thousands of years in the form of brass (an alloy of copper and zinc, known long before zinc itself because their ores often occur together). Zinc would be quick to find application in its own right, but emerging as it did in this roundabout way, it had none of the cultural baggage that copper clearly had for Christopher Wren.

  To Schinkel, this blank history spoke of possibility. The architect became the champion of the zinc foundries that sprang up in the 1830s, using the metal for the statues and decorations on some of his later buildings, and exhorting other architects to do the same. Often stamped from sheets of the metal rather than cast, the ‘white bronze’ quickly became popular for statuary of all sorts, especially where weight or cost ruled out real bronze. It was not long before popular zinc figures of cemetery angels and garden deities were being pressed out daily. The trend spread to the United States when one Moritz Seelig fled the 1848 revolution in Germany to set up a zinc foundry in Brooklyn. He prospered as, like Schinkel in Berlin, mayors across America sought to embellish their towns with the grandest possible sculptural figures purchased on the smallest possible budgets. The statues of Justice and the Civil War memorials that now crumble gently in the parks and plazas of provincial American towns were largely selected from Seelig’s trade catalogues.

  Zinc has found a market in architecture but perhaps not yet a role. However, one remarkable Berlin building may change this.

  The commission for a new Jewish Museum in the German capital (a previous one had opened in 1933, three months before Hitler came to power) was won by Daniel Libeskind in 1989. Of the 165 competition entries, the young American’s design, based on the fragmented music of Schönberg, the writings of Walter Benjamin and motifs inspired by other Jewish intellectuals responsible for enriching German cultural life, struck the jury as the most brilliant and most complex–if possibly unbuildable. It proved quite buildable, though, and upon completion in 1999 was judged so remarkable a structure that it was opened to the public even before any exhibits were installed. Visitors paid to experience tunnel-like voids and twisted, ever-receding spaces that seemed to manipulate perspective and even gravity itself, producing effects as unsettling as any material environment can offer.

  The exterior is hardly less disconcerting. The building describes a jagged squiggle on the ground with sheer walls rising on all sides entirely sheathed in parallelograms of zinc. Strip windows slice diagonally across this façade and each other at apparently random angles tracing out what may be a deconstructed star of David or a zigzag path of wandering and loss.

  Libeskind has explained that he chose zinc in response to Schinkel’s call, and as an obvious gesture of harmonization with the adjoining Berlin Museum, whose windows are framed in zinc. But there is deeper symbolism that makes the material specially appropriate here. In dream interpretations, I discover, zinc is associated with migration. It is a natural choice for a building celebrating a citizenry of emigrants who have emigrated once more. This symbolism may perhaps be explained by zinc’s poor historical timing, arriving too late to find a partner in the alchemical dance that paired the metals with the bodies of the solar system. Copper, iron, tin and lead are each associated (somewhat differently, according to whose tradition you’re following) with a planet. But zinc dances alone. Zinc is also said to symbolize progress towards a goal, which seems apt for a building that is, in Libeskind’s words, ‘always on the verge of becoming’.

  More obvious is zinc’s connection with ceremonies of preservation and burial. When William Deedes, the journalist who provides the model for the central character in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, was sent to cover the Abyssinian War, he travelled with his possessions in a cedarwood trunk that was lined with zinc in order to keep out the ants. The metal is also often used to line coffins as a relatively cheap, safe alternative to lead: my chemical informant Andrea Sella has a powerful sensory memory from his Italian boyhood of burial preparations being accompanied by the sound of a blowtorch as it’s used to seal the zinc of the coffin before the lid is screwed shut. The German artist Joseph Beuys has employed zinc chests in some of his works as containers for fat. Although it is the fat that has received most of the critical attention, recognized along with felt as one of Beuys’s trademark materials, the zinc is significant too, chosen not least for its representation of opposites: as poison and salve, as a seal that ultimately crumbles. In this context, Libeskind’s building becomes a vast sarcophagus, a metaphorical container of the bodies of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, as well as a means of preserving their memory.

  Zinc is also used for the hygienic transportation of bodies across national borders. The metal provides a two-way barrier. It is there to prevent the ingress of contamination that would hasten the body’s decay, but it also serves to seal in potentially infective matter. In a poem by Bertolt Brecht, ‘Burial of the Agitator in a Zinc Coffin’, it is also an impermeable layer that preserves a sinister mystery. The poem was set to music, along with another, ‘To the Fighters in the Concentration Camps’, by Hanns Eisler, a pupil of Schönberg, in his colossal German Symphony. The piece was intended to be performed at a music festival connected with the 1937 Paris Universal Exposition, but Nazi pressure forced the organizers to propose that the vocal parts be replaced by saxophones so that Brecht’s words would not be broadcast. Eisler naturally refused this suggestion and substituted an earlier composition in the festival programme. The German Symphony was heard for the first time only in 1959. Brecht’s poem begins: ‘Hier, in diesem Zink / liegt ein toter Mensch…’:

  Here in this zinc

  lies a dead person,

  or else his leg and his head,

  or still less of him,

  or nothing at all since he was

  an agitator.

  Paris has happier associations with zinc. Everywhere I turn I see rooftops made from pale sheets bent into curved mansards. At some point the material must have taken over from lead and slate, with the pleasing consequence that the roofs are no longer dark lids on top of the buildings, but dissolve effortlessly into the milky blue sky.

  At night, however, it is in the bars that the metal is supposed to be found. The English language has its share of elemental synecdoche–we use irons, we spend nickels and coppers, we once made carbons of important documents. But in Paris in its early twentieth-century heyday the bars became zincs. Jacques Prévert put the drunken ramblings of a zingueur, as the city’s zinc roofers were known, at a zinc bar into a poem, and Yves Montand turned it into a famous chanson, ‘Et la fête continue’. I find one of the few remaining zincs on the Left Bank just round the corner from the celebrated Deux Magots and the Café de Flore. Perhaps Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein once propped up this bar too. Now operated by a restaurant chain, the place knows its zinciness is its pedigree and flaunts it accordingly. The chairs are coated with metallic paint, the restaurant name cut out of sheet metal, the menus dressed in grey. The bones of some extravagant Art Nouveau ironwork still hold up the building. But of the authentic zinc there remains less than a barman’s arm’s length, now taken over for the maître d’s lectern, with its intricate bas relief of grapes and vine-leaves wrought in the dull grey metal. Across the room is a shiny new bar, but it gleams suspiciously brightly in the tones of another metal.

  Puzzled by this, I tracked down the only artisan still supplying and restoring these bars. At the Ateliers Nectoux round the back of La Défense, the suburban business district, Thierry Nectoux reveals that all his work is in fact done in tin, as it has been for three generations. ‘There’s never been zinc in the studio,’ he tells me. ‘Zinc can’t be put on countertops because it is not alimentaire [suitable for use with food], and it oxidizes. Also, it’s not easy to cut cold or to work or clean. Ti
n is completely the opposite.’ I could see some sense in this. Everybody remembers from school chemistry that zinc dissolves in acid–it would not get on well with spilt lemon juice or Coca-Cola.

  But if they are made of tin how did the bars come to be called zincs? Nectoux’s thoughts on the matter seem fanciful. One of his suggestions is that they acquired their name from the zingueurs who would drop in to these bars for a dose of vertigo-defying Dutch courage before work. This doesn’t sound right. Surely, zinc bars were called zincs because they were once truly made of zinc, and tin was an adulteration of this tradition. My French-speaking grandfather’s Larousse de Poche seems to confirm this hunch. Published in 1922 at the height of the zinc era, the dictionary acknowledges the colloquial meaning of the word as a counter over which wines are sold. It does not elaborate as to its origin, but nor does it say anything to suggest the bars weren’t genuinely made of zinc.

  Banalization

  The waters had begun to rise decades before, but the surge tide of literary modernism really broke in 1922 with the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land. That year also saw the first performance in a Bloomsbury drawing room of a musical entertainment called Façade: music by the twenty-year-old composer William Walton lolloped along to Dadaesque words by Edith Sitwell, the poet and doyenne of English eccentrics, who enunciated her part through a megaphone from behind a curtain. The twenty-odd auditors of the private recital were variously baffled and exhilarated. The public premiere the following year was met, predictably enough, with general ridicule.

  It was during this period of wild experiment that Edith’s younger brother Osbert commissioned a sculpture of his sister from another member of their set, Maurice Lambert. Castings of the head, somewhat less than life size, now reside at Renishaw Hall, the Sitwell ancestral home in Derbyshire, and in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The head itself is small and oval, supported by an elongated, gently curving neck. The modish angular crop of the hair and sharp nose give the work a perhaps not unintended resemblance to a Saxon helmet. But any primitivism is offset by the material: the heads are cast in aluminium.

  Neither the Sitwells of the present generation nor Edith’s biographer knows who chose aluminium. Nor does the biographer of Maurice and his composer brother Constant Lambert. When Maurice Lambert sculpted the head of Walton a couple of years later, it was conventionally made in bronze, from which we can infer that aluminium is more likely to have been Edith’s idea than Lambert’s. Suffice it to say that the choice of material inadvertently reflected the majority critical opinion that Edith Sitwell’s artistic project was both lightweight and quite unnecessarily modern.

  In Britain, you almost had to be an eccentric to see merit in aluminium. It was left to nations less ambivalent in their attitude to technological novelty to find ways of putting the metal to more functional use. While the British fought the class war with their silver and their pewter, the French and the Americans turned aluminium into objects that were swiftly recognized as icons of progress and modernity–things on legs, such as the furniture of Charlotte Perriand and Charles Eames; things on wheels, such as the Airstream trailer and the first Citroëns 2CV. Aluminium cut the ties to the past and brought new hope of mobility and liberation. The Greyhound bus, with its signature ribbed aluminium trim and its blatant promise of freedom, was the creation of a French émigré to New York, the flamboyant industrial designer Raymond Loewy.

  Long before it could attain this popular appeal, aluminium enjoyed a brief spell of imperial patronage. This now ubiquitous material–as vital to us as steel and more visible than any of the metals known in antiquity–was only isolated as recently as the 1820s, and it was not until the 1850s that an even remotely commercial way was found to separate it from its ore, bauxite, named after Les Baux in Provence, where it is still possible to see the bleached quarry works on the hill above the town. The process developed by Henri Sainte-Claire Deville in Paris involved heating compounds of aluminium with sodium metal, which was itself exceptionally hard to obtain, and this made his aluminium hugely expensive. Though it scarcely seems credible now, aluminium was hailed as a new precious metal to be placed along with gold and silver–its sheer cost and exoticism compensating for its low density and diffuse shine–and it was worked and flaunted in ways that reflected this status.

  Deville achieved his breakthrough at an opportune moment. Paris was excited by rumours of the new ‘silver from clay’. Deville presented a clutch of little ingots of aluminium for the first time at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855, where they were admired by the Emperor Napoleon III, who promptly gave his financial encouragement to the chemist. The metal was then priced at 3,000 francs a kilogramme and worth a dozen times its weight in silver. But this was if anything an incentive rather than a deterrent to the greatest craftsmen of the day. The renowned goldsmith Christofle became interested in the new material and made some of the first handcrafted items of tableware and jewellery. The emperor is said to have given banquets at which the most honoured guests were given aluminium cutlery while the hoi polloi had to make do with silver and gold. Napoleon’s son and heir, the Prince Imperial Eugène, born in 1856, was given an aluminium rattle, a clear signal that the country should embrace the new. The brass eagles adorning the flagstaffs of the imperial guard were recast in aluminium, a gesture presumably appreciated by their bearers. Although craftsmen like Christofle exploited the metal for ornamental purposes mainly because it was regarded as precious, Napoleon saw that it was aluminium’s lightness that could be its most valuable property. We may see hints of this promising future in a few objects made at this time that straddle the worlds of function and ornament, such as medals and opera glasses. But at the height of the Industrial Revolution, with iron the engineering wonder of the day, it is no surprise that the greater potential of aluminium was not more widely recognized.

  In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen chooses an aluminium and a silver spoon to illustrate his dictum that the utility of objects valued for their beauty ‘depends closely upon the expensiveness of the articles’. The utility Veblen refers to is social rather than functional; he’s saying we tend to value things more highly when we know they are expensive. By the 1890s, when Veblen was writing the work that would give us the expression ‘conspicuous consumption’, aluminium was cheap; the aluminium spoon might cost ten or twenty cents, the silver spoon as many dollars. We know the lighter aluminium spoon is easier to use, yet we prefer the silver because it ‘gratifies our taste’. The insubstantial weight, machine manufacture and general plainness all betray the aluminium spoon as the one we should spurn.

  In 1855, though, Napoleon III’s patronage entirely reversed the situation. For a brief moment in the unlikely halls of the Louvre Palace, it was aluminium that was skilfully wrought, caressed for its lightness and admired for its mysterious pallor. The emperor did not want this state of affairs to persist any longer than it had to, however. He was fired by the idea that the new metal could be used to make armour and weapons, and in 1856 a prototype aluminium helmet was set before the French Academy of Sciences. The assembled sages judged it robust and serviceable–and, a little beside the point, beautiful too. But reluctantly they had to report that it was also far too expensive. It would be nearly a century before Napoleon’s hopes for aluminium as a utilitarian metal would be fulfilled.

  The United States Congress ‘nearly put a shiny lining of aluminium foil atop the Washington Monument’, according to Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything, ‘to show what a classy and prosperous nation we had become’. In fact, the monument is capped with aluminium, although the job was done with none of the symbolic intent that Bryson implies. It took some doing. Congress set the ball rolling in 1783, at first merely giving its approval for an equestrian statue of the general who had led them to independence. Six years later, George Washington became the nation’s first president, serving in that office for eight years. By the time Washington died in 1799, the city named
after him was growing into its pomp. The Capitol building was rising, the first pearl in a necklace of neoclassical temples to democracy, and the thought crept in that something more majestic was required to honour the father of the country. The cornerstone for the colossal marble obelisk we see today at the axial intersection of the Mall was eventually laid in 1848, and the monument finally dedicated in 1885.

  The topmost twenty-two centimetres of what was then the tallest manmade structure in the world were made up by a lightning-conducting pyramid of cast aluminium, its point as sharp as a pencil. Various metals had been considered, including copper, bronze and brass, which would then be plated with platinum. Colonel Thomas Casey of the US Army Corps of Engineers chose aluminium ‘because of its whiteness and the probability that its polished surfaces would not tarnish upon exposure to air’. A spider’s web of copper lightning rods runs hidden from view from the aluminium point down to the ground. Although there was no declared attempt to send any form of cultural signal by setting aluminium in this beacon position, the moment lives in memory, and especially in the corporate memory of the American aluminium industry, which still trades on its Washington connection. At a dollar an ounce, aluminium by now cost about the same as silver–as luck would have it, the price began to tumble as soon as the monument was completed. In December 1884, though, when the little aluminium pyramid was briefly displayed to the public in New York before its final installation, it was still definitely regarded as a precious metal: the exhibition was at Tiffany’s, the famous Fifth Avenue jeweller. Christmas shoppers took it in turns to leapfrog the futuristic menhir that would soon soar higher in the sky than any other artefact of man.