The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
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In one sense, the periodic table is actually irrelevant to studying the astrohistory of the elements. Every star consists of virtually nothing but hydrogen and helium, as do gas giant planets. But however important cosmologically, the hydrogen-helium cycle doesn’t exactly fire the imagination. To extract the most interesting details of existence, such as supernova explosions and carboniferous life, we need the periodic table. As philosopher-historian Eric Scerri writes, “All the elements other than hydrogen and helium make up just 0.04 percent of the universe. Seen from this perspective, the periodic system appears to be rather insignificant. But the fact remains that we live on the earth… where the relative abundance of elements is quite different.”
True enough, though the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan said it more poetically. Without the nuclear furnaces described in B2FH to forge elements like carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, and without supernova explosions to seed hospitable places like earth, life could never form. As Sagan affectionately put it, “We are all star stuff.”
Unfortunately, one sad truth of astrohistory is that Sagan’s “star stuff” didn’t grace every part of our planet equally. Despite supernovae exploding elements in all directions, and despite the best efforts of the churning, molten earth, some lands ended up with higher concentrations of rare minerals. Sometimes, as in Ytterby, Sweden, this inspires scientific genius. Too often it inspires greed and rapaciousness—especially when those obscure elements find use in commerce, war, or, worst of all, both at once.
5
Elements in Times of War
Like other staples of modern society—democracy, philosophy, drama—we can trace chemical warfare back to ancient Greece. The city-state of Sparta, laying siege to Athens in the 400s BC, decided to gas its stubborn rival into submission with the most advanced chemical technology of the time—smoke. Tight-lipped Spartans crept up to Athens with noxious bundles of wood, pitch, and stinky sulfur; lit them; and crouched outside the city walls, waiting for coughing Athenians to flee, leaving their homes unguarded. Though as brilliant an innovation as the Trojan horse, the tactic failed. The fumes billowed through Athens, but the city survived the stink bomb and went on to win the war.*
That failure proved a harbinger. Chemical warfare progressed fitfully, if at all, for the next twenty-four hundred years and remained far inferior to, say, pouring boiling oil on attackers. Up until World War I, gas had little strategic value. Not that countries didn’t recognize the threat. All the scientifically advanced nations in the world, save one holdout, signed the Hague Convention of 1899 to ban chemical-based weapons in war. But the holdout, the United States, had a point: banning gases that at the time were hardly more powerful than pepper spray seemed hypocritical if countries were all too happy to mow down eighteen-year-olds with machine guns and sink warships with torpedoes and let sailors drown in the dark sea. The other countries scoffed at U.S. cynicism, ostentatiously signed the Hague pact, and promptly broke their word.
Early, secret work on chemical agents centered on bromine, an energetic grenade of an element. Like other halogens, bromine has seven electrons in its outer energy level but desperately wants eight. Bromine figures that the end justifies the means and shreds the weaker elements in cells, such as carbon, to get its electron fix. Bromine especially irritates the eyes and nose, and by 1910 military chemists had developed bromine-based lacrimators so potent they could incapacitate even a grown man with hot, searing tears.
Having no reason to refrain from using lacrimators on its own citizens (the Hague pact concerned only warfare), the French government collared a ring of Parisian bank robbers with ethyl bromoacetate in 1912. Word of this event quickly spread to France’s neighbors, who were right to worry. When war broke out in August 1914, the French immediately lobbed bromine shells at advancing German troops. But even Sparta two millennia before had done a better job. The shells landed on a windy plain, and the gas had little effect, blowing away before the Germans realized they’d been “attacked.” However, it’s more accurate to say the shells had little immediate effect, since hysterical rumors of the gas tore through newspapers on both sides of the conflict. The Germans fanned the flames—blaming an unlucky case of carbon monoxide poisoning in their barracks on secret French asphyxiants, for instance—to justify their own chemical warfare program.
Thanks to one man, a bald, mustached chemist who wore a pince-nez, the German gas research units soon outpaced the rest of the world’s. Fritz Haber had one of the great minds in history for chemistry, and he became one of the most famous scientists in the world around 1900 when he figured out how to convert the commonest of chemicals—the nitrogen in air—into an industrial product. Although nitrogen gas can suffocate unsuspecting people, it’s usually benign. In fact, it’s benign almost to the point of uselessness. The one important thing nitrogen does is replenish soil: it’s as crucial to plants as vitamin C is to humans. (When pitcher plants and Venus flytraps trap insects, it’s the bugs’ nitrogen they’re after.) But even though nitrogen makes up 80 percent of air—four of every five molecules we breathe—it’s surprisingly bad at topping off soil because it rarely reacts with anything and never becomes “fixed” in the soil. That combination of plentitude, ineptitude, and importance proved a natural target for ambitious chemists.
There are many steps in the process Haber invented to “capture” nitrogen, and many chemicals appear and disappear. But basically, Haber heated nitrogen to hundreds of degrees, injected some hydrogen gas, turned up the pressure to hundreds of times greater than normal air pressure, added some crucial osmium as a catalyst, and voilà: common air transmuted into ammonia, NH3, the precursor of all fertilizers. With cheap industrial fertilizers now available, farmers no longer were limited to compost piles or dung to nourish their soil. Even by the time World War I broke out, Haber had likely saved millions from Malthusian starvation, and we can still thank him for feeding most of the world’s 6.7 billion people today.*
What’s lost in that summary is that Haber cared little about fertilizers, despite what he sometimes said to the contrary. He actually pursued cheap ammonia to help Germany build nitrogen explosives—the sort of fertilizer-distilled bombs that Timothy McVeigh used to blow a hole in an Oklahoma City courthouse in 1995. It’s a sad truth that men like Haber pop up frequently throughout history—petty Fausts who twist scientific innovations into efficient killing devices. Haber’s story is darker because he was so skilled. After World War I broke out, German military leaders, hoping to break the trench stalemate ruining their economy, recruited Haber for their gas warfare division. Though set to make a fortune from government contracts based on his ammonia patents, Haber couldn’t throw away his other projects fast enough. The division was soon referred to as “the Haber office,” and the military even promoted Haber, a forty-six-year-old Jewish convert to Lutheranism (it helped his career), to captain, which made him childishly proud.
His family was less impressed. Haber’s über alles stance chilled his personal relationships, especially with the one person who might have redeemed him, his wife, Clara Immerwahr. She also exuded genius, becoming the first woman to earn a Ph.D. from the prestigious university in Haber’s hometown, Breslau (now Wrocław). But unlike Marie Curie, a contemporary of hers, Immerwahr never came into her own, because instead of marrying an open-minded man like Pierre Curie, she married Haber. On its face, the marriage was not a poor choice for someone with scientific ambitions, but whatever Haber’s chemical brilliance, he was a flawed human being. Immerwahr, as one historian puts it, “was never out of apron,” and she once rued to a friend about “Fritz’s way of putting himself first in our home and marriage, so that a less ruthlessly assertive personality was simply destroyed.” She supported Haber by translating manuscripts into English and providing technical support on the nitrogen projects, but she refused to help on the bromine gas work.
Haber barely noticed. Dozens of other young chemists had volunteered, since Germany had fallen behind the hated French in chem
ical warfare, and by early 1915 the Germans had an answer to the French lacrimators. Perversely, however, the Germans tested their shells on the British army, which had no gas. Fortunately, as in the first French gas attack, the wind dispersed the gas, and the British targets—bored out of their skulls in a nearby trench—had no idea they’d been attacked.
Undeterred, the German military wanted to devote even more resources to chemical warfare. But there was a problem—that pesky Hague pact, which political leaders didn’t want to break (again) publicly. The solution was to interpret the pact in an ultraconscientious yet ultimately bogus way. In signing it, Germany had agreed to “abstain from the use of projectiles, the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.” So to the Germans’ sophisticated, legalistic reading, the pact had no jurisdiction over shells that delivered shrapnel and gas. It took some cunning engineering—the sloshing liquid bromine, which evaporated into gas on impact, wreaked havoc with the shells’ trajectory—but Germany’s military-industrial-scientific complex prevailed, and a 15 cm shell filled with xylyl bromide, a caustic tearjerker, was ready by late 1915. The Germans called it weisskreuz, or “white cross.” Again leaving the French alone, Germany swung its mobile gas units east, to shell the Russian army with eighteen thousand weisskreuze. If anything, this attempt was more of a debacle than the first. The temperature in Russia was so cold the xylyl bromide froze solid.
Surveying the poor field results, Haber ditched bromine and redirected his efforts to its chemical cousin, chlorine. Chlorine sits above bromine on the periodic table and is even nastier to breathe. It’s more aggressive in attacking other elements for one more electron, and because chlorine is smaller—each atom weighs less than half of a bromine atom—chlorine can attack the body’s cells much more nimbly. Chlorine turns victims’ skin yellow, green, and black, and glasses over their eyes with cataracts. They actually die of drowning, from the fluid buildup in their lungs. If bromine gas is a phalanx of foot soldiers clashing with the mucous membranes, chlorine is a blitzkrieg tank rushing by the body’s defenses to tear apart the sinuses and lungs.
Because of Haber, the buffoonery of bromine warfare gave way to the ruthless chlorine phase history books memorialize today. Enemy soldiers soon had to fear the chlorine-based grunkreuz, or “green cross”; the blaukreuz, or “blue cross”; and the nightmarish blister agent gelbkreuz, or “yellow cross,” otherwise known as mustard gas. Not content with scientific contributions, Haber directed with enthusiasm the first successful gas attack in history, which left five thousand bewildered Frenchmen burned and scarred in a muddy trench near Ypres. In his spare time, Haber also coined a grotesque biological law, Haber’s Rule, to quantify the relationship between gas concentration, exposure time, and death rate—which must have required a depressing amount of data to produce.
Horrified by the gas projects, Clara confronted Fritz early on and demanded he cease. As usual, Fritz listened to her not at all. In fact, although he wept, quite unironically, when colleagues died during an accident in the research branch of the Haber office, after he returned from Ypres he threw a dinner party to celebrate his new weapons. Worse, Clara found out he’d come home just for the night, a stopover on his way to direct more attacks on the eastern front. Husband and wife quarreled violently, and later that night Clara walked into the family garden with Fritz’s army pistol and shot herself in the chest. Though no doubt upset, Fritz did not let this inconvenience him. Without staying to make funeral arrangements, he left as planned the next morning.
Despite having the incomparable advantage of Haber, Germany ultimately lost the war to end all wars and was universally denounced as a scoundrel nation. The international reaction to Haber himself was more complicated. In 1919, before the dust (or gas) of World War I had settled, Haber won the vacant 1918 Nobel Prize in chemistry (the Nobels were suspended during the war) for his process to produce ammonia from nitrogen, even though his fertilizers hadn’t protected thousands of Germans from famine during the war. A year later, he was charged with being an international war criminal for prosecuting a campaign of chemical warfare that had maimed hundreds of thousands of people and terrorized millions more—a contradictory, almost self-canceling legacy.
Things got worse. Humiliated at the huge reparations Germany had to pay to the Allies, Haber spent six futile years trying to extract dissolved gold from the oceans, so that he could pay the reparations himself. Other projects sputtered along just as uselessly, and the only thing Haber gained attention for during those years (besides trying to sell himself as a gas warfare adviser to the Soviet Union) was an insecticide. Haber had invented Zyklon A before the war, and a German chemical company tinkered with his formula after the war to produce an efficient second generation of the gas. Eventually, a new regime with a short memory took over Germany, and the Nazis soon exiled Haber for his Jewish roots. He died in 1934 while traveling to England to seek refuge. Meanwhile, work on the insecticide continued. And within years the Nazis were gassing millions of Jews, including relatives of Haber, with that second-generation gas—Zyklon B.
* * *
In addition to Haber’s being a Jew, Germany excommunicated him because he had become passé. In parallel with its gas warfare investment, the German military had begun to exploit a different pocket of the periodic table during World War I, and it eventually decided that bludgeoning enemy combatants with two metals, molybdenum and tungsten, made more sense than scalding them with chlorine and bromine gas. Once again, then, warfare turned on simple, basic periodic table chemistry. Tungsten would go on to become the “it” metal of the Second World War, but in some ways molybdenum’s story is more interesting. Almost no one knows it, but the most remote battle of World War I took place not in Siberia or against Lawrence of Arabia on the Sahara sands, but at a molybdenum mine in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
After its gas, Germany’s most feared weapons during the war were its Big Berthas, a suite of superheavy siege guns that battered soldiers’ psyches as brutally as they did the trenches of France and Belgium. The first Berthas, at forty-three tons, had to be transported in pieces by tractors to a launchpad and took two hundred men six hours to assemble. The payoff was the ability to hurl a 16-inch, 2,200-pound shell nine miles in just seconds. Still, a big flaw hobbled the Berthas. Lofting a one-ton mass took whole kegs of gunpowder, which produced massive amounts of heat, which in turn scorched and warped the twenty-foot steel barrels. After a few days of hellish shooting, even if the Germans limited themselves to a few shots per hour, the gun itself was shot to hell.
Never at a loss when providing weaponry for the fatherland, the famous Krupp armament company found a recipe for strengthening steel: spiking it with molybdenum. Molybdenum (pronounced “mo-lib-di-num”) could withstand the excessive heat because it melts at 4,750°F, thousands of degrees hotter than iron, the main metal in steel. Molybdenum’s atoms are larger than iron’s, so they get excited more slowly, and they have 60 percent more electrons, so they absorb more heat and bind together more tightly. Plus, atoms in solids spontaneously and often disastrously rearrange themselves when temperatures change (more on this in chapter 16), which often results in brittle metals that crack and fail. Doping steel with molybdenum gums up the iron atoms, preventing them from sliding around. (The Germans were not the first ones to figure this out. A master sword maker in fourteenth-century Japan sprinkled molybdenum into his steel and produced the island’s most coveted samurai swords, whose blades never dulled or cracked. But since this Japanese Vulcan died with his secret, it was lost for five hundred years—proof that superior technology does not always spread and often goes extinct.)
Back in the trenches, the Germans were soon blazing away at the French and British with a second generation of “moly steel” guns. But Germany soon faced another huge Bertha setback—it had no supply of molybdenum and risked running out. In fact, the only known supplier was a bankrupt, nearly abandoned mine on Bartlett Mountain in Colorado.
Before World War I, a local had laid claim to Bartlett upon discovering veins of ore that looked like lead or tin. Those metals would have been worth at least a few cents per pound, but the useless molybdenum he found cost more to mine than it fetched, so he sold his mining rights to one Otis King, a feisty five-foot-five banker from Nebraska. Always enterprising, King adopted a new extraction technique that no one had bothered to invent before and quickly liberated fifty-eight hundred pounds of pure molybdenum—which more or less ruined him. Those nearly three tons exceeded the yearly world demand for molybdenum by 50 percent, which meant King hadn’t just flooded the market, he’d drowned it. Noting at least the novelty of King’s attempt, the U.S. government mentioned it in a mineralogical bulletin in 1915.
Few noticed the bulletin except for a behemoth international mining company based in Frankfurt, Germany, with a U.S. branch in New York. According to one contemporary account, Metallgesellschaft had smelters, mines, refineries, and other “tentacles” all over the world. As soon as the company directors, who had close ties to Fritz Haber, read about King’s molybdenum, they mobilized and ordered their top man in Colorado, Max Schott, to seize Bartlett Mountain.