Periodic Tales

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  These shiny embellishments may be functional but, purposely so or not, they are also rhetorical pronouncements from the centre of government. Both Napoleon III’s cutlery and Washington’s monument are explicit tokens of commitment to modernity by the state. Other elements, such as neon and chromium, as we shall see later, became signs of aspiration and hope for the future, but these were to be popular enthusiasms, cheap, cheerful and democratically spread through the land. Aluminium was a plaything and a project of leaders. But it would not remain so for long.

  The history of aluminium is ‘a process of banalization’, according to the company history of the state producer L’Aluminium Français. During a single century, aluminium usage has travelled from the singular to the general and from the general to the banal–a progress that iron and copper completed over millennia. The greatest step in this journey was the one necessary for it to begin at all, the one that was to knock aluminium off its pedestal as a precious metal. Fittingly, the breakthrough was achieved simultaneously by a Frenchman and an American. Paul Héroult and Charles Martin Hall were both in their early twenties in 1886 when they separately perfected a process that used an electric current instead of the chemical power of sodium to release aluminium from its ore. The metal is still made electrolytically today. As the price of aluminium fell far below that of silver, and eventually below even copper, makers like Christofle lost interest in it, and it could begin to fulfil its true destiny as the new industrial wonder metal. The sophisticated method of making it underlined its credentials as something utterly modern: linked umbilically to the ‘second industrial revolution’ triggered by the wide availability of electricity, aluminium was set to be the very embodiment of the technological twentieth century.

  America and France may have pioneered the development of aluminium, but they disagreed over its spelling. Even the great editor H. L. Mencken is at a loss to explain this. In The American Language he is forced to confess: ‘How aluminium, in America, lost its fourth syllable I have been unable to determine, but all American authorities now make it aluminum and all English authorities stick to aluminium.’ Other sources suggest it may have been the doing of Charles Hall. The patents he took out for his electrolytic refining process referred to ‘aluminium’ while his commercial publicity material touted the merits of ‘aluminum’, whether by intent or typographical error is not known. The shorter word spread and stuck in the United States; in France, Britain and the rest of Europe, the extra syllable remained.

  But perhaps the boot should be on the other foot. Rather than asking how the name was shortened, we should go in search of the British fusspot who insisted on the extra syllable in the first place. Humphry Davy, who repeatedly tried to isolate the metal, himself christened it aluminum straightforwardly enough after its ore alumina (an improvement on his first thought, alumium). But then in 1812, an anonymous reviewer of Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy writing in the Quarterly Review objected to the ‘less classical sound’ of this word and, conveniently forgetting the precedents of platinum, molybdenum and the recently named tantalum, cast the die for aluminium as being in tune with the many other elements terminating in -ium.

  The Hall–Héroult process provided the spark. Aluminium, the most abundant metallic element in the earth’s crust, could now be put into the service of man, thanks to the rapidly expanding power of electricity. The most visible early applications were in transport, where the metal’s low weight was a great advantage. The French car manufacturers Renault and Citroën, always famous for their innovative designs, investigated aluminium thoroughly in the 1920s. They used it at first not to replace heavy steel panels but for wheels and decorative features such as hubcaps (which the French charmingly call enjoliveurs, meaning prettifiers). The metal was employed on a larger scale to sheath industrial machinery and on custom-built transport such as railway carriages and delivery vans. A Pullman railway coach displayed at the Chicago Century of Progress Exhibition in 1933 weighed just half what a standard steel coach weighed. The Paris Universal Exposition in 1937 featured an Aluminium Pavilion, and the metal was copiously incorporated into the Alexander III and Alma bridges and elsewhere around the City of Light.

  But it was only when sheets of the stuff were pressed and bent into seductive curves for aerodynamic performance that the romance of it was truly unleashed. Aluminium was taken up more widely for the skin and skeletal structure of passenger aircraft quite suddenly in 1931 after the fatal crash of a wooden-framed airliner carrying a famous football coach to Los Angeles. Aircraft such as the Douglas DC-3, the glamorous transport of Hollywood stars, inspired terrestrial imitations in the form of cars and buses and mobile homes whose lustrous, bulging forms provided the glimmer of a better life after the Depression. The decor at the Radio City Music Hall in New York is dominated by curving horizontal bands of aluminium. But the Airstream trailer went farthest in reaching for the skies, aping even the rivet lines of aircraft panels along its contoured skin. At a time when trailers in Europe looked, in the view of one design critic, more like gypsy caravans ‘lacking only a thatched roof’, this American design, developed with help from one of the creators of the Spirit of St Louis, the aeroplane in which Charles Lindbergh had flown from New York to Paris in 1927, revelled in its buxom aluminium nakedness.

  Aluminium moved swiftly into the home, taken up with enthusiasm by industrial designers and by housewives, who appreciated its low weight and the fact that it didn’t need polishing. The metal could be treated in new ways which added to its modernistic appeal. The most representative treatment, made famous by the designs of Russel Wright, was spin-casting, in which the molten metal was poured into a rotating mould. Mary McCarthy went so far as to praise Wright by name and ‘the wonderful new spun aluminium’ in her novel The Group. Aluminium took over in kitchen utensils that would formerly have been made of pewter. Because it retained heat better than copper or cast iron, it was also perfect for ‘stove-to-table’ pots and pans, a boon in servantless households. Everywhere, the smooth round forms, frequently accentuated by the horizontal lines of the spinning process and a final brushing, spoke of the streamlined new order of things.

  After the Second World War, new demand was matched by new capacity, and aluminium began to be considered for the construction of entire homes. At Wichita in Kansas, the visionary designer-poet Richard Buckminster Fuller turned over an entire aircraft factory to producing his domed aluminium houses, an achievement he celebrated by penning this ditty:

  Roam home to a dome

  Where Georgian and Gothic once stood

  Now chemical bonds alone guard our blondes

  And even the plumbing looks good

  Based on a circular plan, Fuller’s houses looked like habitable versions of the vessels designed by Russel Wright a decade before. In France, Jean Prouvé, a pioneer architect in metal prefabrication, used aluminium panels in emergency housing for people made homeless by the war, and went on to devise flat-pack metal homes for the last generation of colonial overseers in French West Africa. Even the British built thousands of aluminium-panelled houses in the 1940s, though they were joyless huts in comparison with the stylish prototypes of the French and Americans.

  Fuller’s round houses never caught on, but the aluminium of which they were made was too cheap and practical to ignore. The unstylish legacy of this bold post-war experiment rests in thousands of acres of corrugated aluminum siding that was sold door-to-door during the 1950s and 1960s, and clamped to American homes as the latest thing in weather protection, at least until it was superseded by the next such fad, vinyl. The fictional escapades of two such salesmen are the subject of the 1987 film Tin Men. That the metal they were selling, so recently the prize of emperors, was now disparaged as mere tin is a sure sign that the process of ‘banalization’ was complete.

  The journey from ploughshares to swords and back to ploughshares is unique to aluminium, which has a high scrap value compared with other common metals because its electrolytic extra
ction from bauxite is so energy-intensive. Just as Napoleon III dreamt that his aluminium cutlery might be converted into battle gear, so Lord Beaverbrook appealed through his newspaper empire for the British people to hand in their aluminium utensils to be ‘turned into Spitfires and Hurricanes’. After the war, the priorities were abruptly reversed, and the catalogue of the 1946 exhibition, Britain Can Make It, explained how wartime production methods would lead the country back from ‘Spitfires to saucepans’.

  Perhaps this did happen, although for the most part people were unaware of it. At an antiques fair in Dorset, I spotted a Picquot Ware tea-set made in the 1950s from ‘Magnailium lustre’, and bought it. It was unused, and the metal had an unusual lilac sheen. But what was ‘magnailium’ (apart from another metal with an apparently superfluous i)? The vendor had suggested to me that the set was made from melted-down wartime aircraft parts. I liked the way the design seemed to capture aluminium’s downward spiral into domesticity from higher callings. The word ‘magnailium’ was presumably a composite of aluminium and magnesium. The latter metal being two-thirds as dense, the two were combined during the war to make an alloy that was lighter and stronger, if considerably more expensive, than pure aluminium.

  But I had my doubts. For a start, the pieces seemed rather heavy, even allowing for the thick-walled castings. And then there was the label: ‘Designed by Jean Picquot. Fashioned by craftsmen’. Who was this designer I had never heard of, and who was not listed in the usual design references? He or she soon turned out to be the imaginary friend of the stolidly English-sounding manufacturer of the wares, Burrage & Boyde, a figment of suavity presumably conjured up in order to capitalize on the reputation aluminium had acquired in the hands of the innovative French.

  By now I was thoroughly sceptical. I decided a simple test was needed to resolve the mystery of magnailium. Choosing the milk jug, the only piece of the set without a wooden handle, I first weighed it and then immersed it in water, using the displacement to estimate the volume of metal. Dividing one by the other would give me the material’s density, which would be an important clue as to the metals it was made from. The density came out at around 3.9, more than double magnesium’s 1.7 and greater even than aluminium alone at 2.7. My magnailium was clearly no fancy aerospace alloy. It had to be aluminium combined with a heavier metal such as a standard alloy with copper. I preferred the myth, however, and comforted myself with the thought that at least a few of the metal atoms in my tea-set may have flown in the Battle of Britain.

  ‘Turn’d to barnacles’

  When it was built, the American presidential residence in Washington, DC, was coated in a damp-repellent mixture of slaked lime and glue, and people started to call it the White House. Tombs were likewise brushed with lime to protect them from the ravages of the weather. Whited sepulchres–were ever two words as lost without one another as ‘whited’ and ‘sepulchre’?–occur in St Matthew’s gospel as an image of hypocrisy, and refer to those tombs ‘which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness’.

  Whiteness is freedom from colour and an escape from the rainbow chaos of life. Lime’s whiteness is a scourging simplicity, the purity of an ideal, the finality of a death. Whiting is the action of adding a layer of lime-wash, yet it is also a subtraction, a gesture towards liberation, a brushing away of earth and the earthly, a disencumbrance, a literal lightening and also the lightening of a load. The cleansing and preserving action of whitewashing ritually repeats the throwing of lime into the grave with the corpse. Our bodies decay, our bones are left, picked clean and bleached of all colour. We fade to white.

  Lime is oxide of calcium. It is made simply by heating chalk, limestone or sea shells to drive off carbon dioxide. The strongly alkaline white powder that results then slowly absorbs water and carbon dioxide from the air, these irresistible actions being the key to its many long-established applications. Lime is used in burials because of this hygroscopic property: it draws out moisture from the body and reduces the risk of disease from putrefaction. Saturated with water, or slaked, it becomes whitewash. Lime in mortar quickly dries, replacing the water it loses with carbon dioxide, causing the soft white powder to turn to durable stone. So central was this action to the routines of life and death that lime, the Romans’ calx, gave its name to the alchemists’ and early chemists’ generic term for burning in air or roasting, calcination. Lavoisier gave lime a place on his list of the elements, ranking it as one of the ‘salifiable simple earthy substances’, even as he guarded his hunch that the white substance was not itself a pure element but was hiding within it a new metal that science was as yet unable to extract. Calcium was only prised free from its indispensable oxide in 1808 when Humphry Davy subjected it to the electrolysis he had already employed in the discovery of potassium and sodium. The metal was not made on a large scale for another 100 years.

  Calcium, then, is the element at the chemical heart of lime, limestone, chalk and many minerals besides, such as calcite and gypsum. Calcium may not be the only element to form predominantly or entirely white compounds, but through these important and abundant natural materials it is the element we most associate with the absence of colour. Apart from snow, our similes for whiteness are calcareous–white as marble, alabaster, chalk; white as ivory, bone or teeth; white as pearl. Calcium’s whiteness is iconic: I hesitate to use such an overworked adjective but the instance of the White House alone seems to sanction it. The White Cliffs of Dover, too, were a potent enough image that the American lyricist of Vera Lynn’s wartime song felt able to complete his work having no more seen them with his own eyes than he’d seen the ‘bluebirds over’. The white horses and other figures created by carving out turf from England’s chalk hillsides in Neolithic times–with occasional additions still being made today–also retain a timeless graphic power.

  Walking the hills and downs of southern England today one can still feel how a collective identity can spring from autochthonous rock. Simply drawn on paper, figures such as the Cerne Abbas Giant or the White Horse at Uffington would appear as nothing more than graffiti, vulgarly priapic and Picasso-ish respectively. But inscribed in chalk, they become English despite themselves. On the Isle of Wight where horizontal geology is tipped up on edge like a slice of layer cake, I head to the western tip and the standing chalk rocks known as the Needles–once four, now three plus their vital lighthouse, and never quite as craggy in fact as in the old prints etched by artists whose heads spun with ideas of the sublime. Chalk cliffs drop a hundred metres and more to the sea on my left, while on my right is Alum Bay, its sands once mined for alum, now lying undisturbed in multi-coloured ridges. I am conscious that this southern coast is Britain’s only margin that lies at all close to other nations. These white cliffs are pristine battlements, and scanning the sea for ships, I cannot avoid the feeling of being on sentry duty, a sense reinforced by the eruption into the downy landscape every few miles of the ruined defences of five centuries–against the Spanish, the French, the Germans.

  In 1868, Thomas Huxley lectured ‘On a Piece of Chalk’ to the citizens of Norwich. Beginning with the chalk in his hand, he worked back through ‘that long line of white cliffs to which England owes her name of Albion’ to find his Darwinian theme. His disputatious claim was that

  the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderful universe, and of man’s relation to it, than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant of those of Nature.

  He described the microscopic skeletons of the uncountable billions of calcium carbonate algae that lived and died during the cretaceous epoch, and eventually built up from the pale silt of their decay the thick layers of England’s protective chalk cliffs ‘vastly older than Adam’. Huxle
y’s geological prospect set nearby Cromer and the Garden of Eden on equal footings of chalk and clay, surely sending a frisson of pleasure through his audience. For some, though, the pleasure may have been short-lived, for all this was no more than Huxley warming to his customary theme, wielding the scientific evidence of the rocks in order to demolish the biblical version of creation.

  Shakespeare seems to have sensed this cycle in which the same white mineral endlessly lives and dies. In The Tempest, Trinculo invites Caliban to ‘put some lime upon your fingers’ in preparation for their raid on Prospero’s cave. But Caliban ‘will have none on’t. We shall lose our time, / And all be turn’d to barnacles’. It is still odd to think that lime thrown into the grave was itself once life in the form of millions of tiny marine organisms, and that our bones in their turn may become the foodstuff of future generations of shelly creatures. We may appreciate nature’s cycles of water, oxygen and nitrogen but we ignore the grinding stony cycle of life-giving calcium that shifts constantly under our feet.

  In his rush to scorn otherwise educated persons who unhappily remain ignorant of science, Huxley neglected to consider that quality of chalk most likely to detain the ‘learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity’–its whiteness. We tend to assume that the formal marks of human civilization are black on white, made with charcoal or graphite or the powdered carbon known as lamp black used in printer’s ink. But our traces have often been the primal negative of this, urgent but judicious delineations scored on the ground in white–the finish line at the Circus Maximus, the Caucasian chalk circle that is the means of dispensing Solomonic justice in Bertolt Brecht’s play of that name, the outline of a murder victim. White is there at the end, when final judgement is pronounced. In Italian, calcio is the word both for calcium and for the game of soccer, both meanings derived from the Latin calx, which is not only literal lime but also a metaphor for a goal, an achievement marked perhaps by a chalk line crossed.