by Sam Kean
Schott—a man described as having “eyes penetrating to the point of hypnosis”—sent in claim jumpers to set up stakes and harass King in court, a major drain on an already floundering mine. The more belligerent claim jumpers threatened the wives and children of miners and destroyed their camps during a winter in which the temperature dropped to twenty below. King hired a limping outlaw named Two-Gun Adams for protection, but the German agents got to King anyway, mugging him with knives and pickaxes on a mountain pass and hurling him off a sheer cliff. Only a well-placed snowbank saved his neck. As the self-described “tomboy bride” of one miner put it in her memoirs, the Germans did “everything short of downright slaughter to hinder the work of his company.” King’s gritty workers took to calling the unpronounceable metal they risked their lives to dig up “Molly be damned.”
King had a dim idea what Molly did in Germany, but he was about the only non-German in Europe or North America who did. Not until the British captured German arms in 1916 and reverse-engineered them by melting them down did the Allies discover the wundermetall, but the shenanigans in the Rockies continued. The United States didn’t enter World War I until 1917, so it had no special reason to monitor Metallgesellschaft’s subsidiary in New York, especially considering its patriotic name, American Metal. It was American Metal that Max Schott’s “company” answered to, and when the government began asking questions around 1918, American Metal claimed that it legally owned the mine, since the harried Otis King had sold it to Schott for a paltry $40,000. It also admitted that, um, it just happened to ship all that molybdenum to Germany. The feds quickly froze Metallgesellschaft’s U.S. stock and took control of Bartlett Mountain. Sadly, those efforts came too late to disable Germany’s Big Berthas. As late as 1918, Germany used moly steel guns to shell Paris from the astonishing distance of seventy-five miles.
The only justice was that Schott’s company went bankrupt after the armistice, in March 1919, when molybdenum prices bottomed out. King returned to mining and became a millionaire by persuading Henry Ford to use moly steel in car engines. But Molly’s days in warfare were over. By the time World War II rolled around, molybdenum had been superseded in steel production by the element below it on the periodic table, tungsten.
Now if molybdenum is one of the harder elements to pronounce on the periodic table, tungsten has one of the most confounding chemical symbols, a big fat unaccountable W. It stands for wolfram, the German name for the metal, and that “wolf” correctly portended the dark role it would play in the war. Nazi Germany coveted tungsten for making machinery and armor-piercing missiles, and its lust for wolfram surpassed even its lust for looted gold, which Nazi officials happily bartered for tungsten. And who were the Nazis’ trading partners? Not Italy and Japan, the other Axis powers. Nor any of the countries German troops overran, such as Poland or Belgium. It was supposedly neutral Portugal whose tungsten fed the wolfish appetite of the German kriegwerks.
Portugal was a hard country to figure at the time. It lent the Allies a vital air base in the Azores, a group of islands in the Atlantic Ocean, and as anyone who’s seen Casablanca knows, refugees longed to escape to Lisbon, from which they could safely fly to Britain or the United States. However, the dictator of Portugal, Antonio Salazar, tolerated Nazi sympathizers in his government and provided a haven for Axis spies. He also rather two-facedly shipped thousands of tons of tungsten to both sides during the war. Proving his worth as a former professor of economics, Salazar leveraged his country’s near monopoly on the metal (90 percent of Europe’s supply) into profits 1,000 percent greater than peacetime levels. This might have been defensible had Portugal had long-standing trade relations with Germany and been worried about falling into wartime poverty. But Salazar began selling tungsten to Germany in appreciable quantities only in 1941, apparently on the theory that his country’s neutral status allowed him to gouge both sides equally.
The tungsten trade worked like this. Learning its lesson with molybdenum and recognizing the strategic importance of tungsten, Germany had tried to stockpile tungsten before it began erasing boundaries between itself and Poland and France. Tungsten is one of the hardest metals known, and adding it to steel made for excellent drill bits and saw heads. Plus, even modest-sized missiles tipped with tungsten—so-called kinetic energy penetrators—could take down tanks. The reason tungsten proved superior to other steel additives can be read right off the periodic table. Tungsten, situated below molybdenum, has similar properties. But with even more electrons, it doesn’t melt until 6,200°F. Plus, as a heavier atom than molybdenum, tungsten provides even better anchors against the iron atoms’ slipping around. Remember that the nimble chlorine worked well in gas attacks. Here, in a metal, tungsten’s solidity and strength proved attractive.
So attractive that the profligate Nazi regime spent its entire tungsten reserve by 1941, at which point the führer himself got involved. Hitler ordered his ministers to grab as much tungsten as the trains across conquered France could carry. Distressingly, far from there being a black market for this grayish metal, the whole process was entirely transparent, as one historian noted. Tungsten was shipped from Portugal through fascist Spain, another “neutral,” and much of the gold the Nazis had seized from Jews—including the gold wrenched out of the teeth of gassed Jews—was laundered by banks in Lisbon and Switzerland, still another country that took no sides. (Fifty years on, a major Lisbon bank still maintained that officials had had no idea that the forty-four tons of gold they had received were dirty, despite the swastikas stamped on many bars.)
Even stalwart Britain couldn’t be bothered about the tungsten that was helping to cut down its lads. Prime Minister Winston Churchill privately referred to Portugal’s tungsten trade as a “misdemeanor,” and lest that remark be misconstrued, he added that Salazar was “quite right” to trade tungsten with Britain’s avowed enemies. Once again, however, there was a dissenter. All this naked capitalism, which benefited socialist Germany, caused apoplectic fits in the free-market United States. American officials simply couldn’t grasp why Britain didn’t order, or outright bully, Portugal to drop its profitable neutrality. Only after prolonged U.S. pressure did Churchill agree to help strong-arm the strongman Salazar.
Until then, Salazar (if we lay aside morality for a moment) had played the Axis and Allies brilliantly with vague promises, secret pacts, and stalling tactics that kept the tungsten trains chugging. He had increased the price of his country’s one commodity from $1,100 per ton in 1940 to $20,000 in 1941, and he’d banked $170 million in three frenzied years of speculation. Only after running out of excuses did Salazar institute a full tungsten embargo against the Nazis on June 7, 1944—the day after D-Day, by which point the Allied commanders were too preoccupied (and disgusted) to punish him. I believe it was Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind who said that fortunes can be made only during the building up or tearing down of an empire, and Salazar certainly subscribed to that theory. In the so-called wolfram war, the Portuguese dictator had the last lycanthropic laugh.
Tungsten and molybdenum were only the first hints of a veritable metals revolution that would take place later in the twentieth century. Three of every four elements are metals, but beyond iron, aluminium, and a few others, most did nothing but plug holes in the periodic table before World War II. (Indeed, this book could not have been written forty years ago—there wouldn’t have been enough to say.) But since about 1950, every metal has found a niche. Gadolinium is perfect for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Neodymium makes unprecedentedly powerful lasers. Scandium, now used as a tungstenlike additive in aluminium baseball bats and bike frames, helped the Soviet Union make lightweight helicopters in the 1980s and purportedly even topped Soviet ICBM missiles stored underground in the Arctic, to help the nukes punch through sheets of ice.
Alas, for all the technological advances made during the metals revolution, some elements continued to abet wars—and not in the remote past, but in the past decade. Fittingly, two of these elemen
ts were named after two Greek mythological characters known for great suffering. Niobe earned the ire of the gods by bragging about her seven lovely daughters and seven handsome sons—whom the easily offended Olympians soon slaughtered for her impertinence. Tantalus, Niobe’s father, killed his own son and served him at a royal banquet. As punishment, Tantalus had to stand for all eternity up to his neck in a river, with a branch loaded with apples dangling above his nose. Whenever he tried to eat or drink, however, the fruit would be blown away beyond his grasp or the water would recede. Still, while elusiveness and loss tortured Tantalus and Niobe, it is actually a surfeit of their namesake elements that has decimated central Africa.
There’s a good chance you have tantalum or niobium in your pocket right now. Like their periodic table neighbors, both are dense, heat-resistant, noncorrosive metals that hold a charge well—qualities that make them vital for compact cell phones. In the mid-1990s cell phone designers started demanding both metals, especially tantalum, from the world’s largest supplier, the Democratic Republic of Congo, then called Zaire. Congo sits next to Rwanda in central Africa, and most of us probably remember the Rwandan butchery of the 1990s. But none of us likely remembers the day in 1996 when the ousted Rwandan government of ethnic Hutus spilled into Congo seeking refuge. At the time it seemed just to extend the Rwandan conflict a few miles west, but in retrospect it was a brush fire blown right into a decade of accumulated racial kindling. Eventually, nine countries and two hundred ethnic tribes, each with its own ancient alliances and unsettled grudges, were warring in the dense jungles.
Nonetheless, if only major armies had been involved, the Congo conflict likely would have petered out. Larger than Alaska and dense as Brazil, Congo is even less accessible than either by roads, meaning it’s not ideal for waging a protracted war. Plus, poor villagers can’t afford to go off and fight unless there’s money at stake. Enter tantalum, niobium, and cellular technology. Now, I don’t mean to impute direct blame. Clearly, cell phones didn’t cause the war—hatred and grudges did. But just as clearly, the infusion of cash perpetuated the brawl. Congo has 60 percent of the world’s supply of the two metals, which blend together in the ground in a mineral called coltan. Once cell phones caught on—sales rose from virtually zero in 1991 to more than a billion by 2001—the West’s hunger proved as strong as Tantalus’s, and coltan’s price grew tenfold. People purchasing ore for cell phone makers didn’t ask and didn’t care where the coltan came from, and Congolese miners had no idea what the mineral was used for, knowing only that white people paid for it and that they could use the profits to support their favorite militias.
Oddly, tantalum and niobium proved so noxious because coltan was so democratic. Unlike the days when crooked Belgians ran Congo’s diamond and gold mines, no conglomerates controlled coltan, and no backhoes and dump trucks were necessary to mine it. Any commoner with a shovel and a good back could dig up whole pounds of the stuff in creek beds (it looks like thick mud). In just hours, a farmer could earn twenty times what his neighbor did all year, and as profits swelled, men abandoned their farms for prospecting. This upset Congo’s already shaky food supply, and people began hunting gorillas for meat, virtually wiping them out, as if they were so many buffalo. But gorilla deaths were nothing compared to the human atrocities. It’s not a good thing when money pours into a country with no government. A brutal form of capitalism took over in which all things, including lives, were for sale. Huge fenced-in “camps” with enslaved prostitutes sprang up, and innumerable bounties were put out for blood killings. Gruesome stories have circulated about proud victors humiliating their victims’ bodies by draping themselves with entrails and dancing in celebration.
The fires burned hottest in Congo between 1998 and 2001, at which point cell phone makers realized they were funding anarchy. To their credit, they began to buy tantalum and niobium from Australia, even though it cost more, and Congo cooled down a bit. Nevertheless, despite an official truce ending the war in 2003, things never really calmed down in the eastern half of the country, near Rwanda. And lately another element, tin, has begun to fund the fighting. In 2006, the European Union outlawed lead solder in consumer goods, and most manufacturers have replaced it with tin—a metal Congo also happens to have in huge supply. Joseph Conrad once called Congo “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience,” and there’s little reason to revise that notion today.
Overall, more than five million people have died in Congo since the mid-1990s, making it the biggest waste of life since World War II. The fighting there is proof that in addition to all the uplifting moments the periodic table has inspired, it can also play on humankind’s worst, most inhuman instincts.
6
Completing the Table… with a Bang
A supernova sowed our solar system with every natural element, and the churning of young molten planets made sure those elements were well blended in the rocky soil. But those processes alone cannot tell us everything about the distribution of elements on earth. Since the supernova, whole species of elements have gone extinct because their nuclei, their cores, were too fragile to survive in nature. This instability shocked scientists and left unaccountable holes in the periodic table—holes that, unlike in Mendeleev’s time, scientists just couldn’t fill, no matter how hard they searched. They eventually did fill in the table, but only after developing new fields that let them create elements on their own, and only after realizing that the fragility of some elements conceals a bright, shiny danger. The making of atoms and the breaking of atoms proved more intimately bound than anyone dared expect.
The roots of this story go back to the University of Manchester in England just before World War I. Manchester had assembled some brilliant scientists, including lab director Ernest Rutherford. Perhaps the most promising student was Henry Moseley. The son of a naturalist admired by Charles Darwin, Moseley was drawn instead to the physical sciences. He treated his lab work like a deathbed vigil, staying for fifteen-hour stretches, as if he’d never have time to finish all he wanted to do, and he subsisted on mere fruit salad and cheese. Like many gifted people, Moseley was also a pill, stiff and stuffy, and he expressed open disgust at the “scented dirtiness” of foreigners at Manchester.
But young Moseley’s talent excused a lot. Although Rutherford objected to the work as a waste of time, Moseley grew enthusiastic about studying elements by blasting them with electron beams. He enlisted Darwin’s grandson, a physicist, as a partner and in 1913 began to systematically probe every discovered element up to gold. As we know today, when a beam of electrons strikes an atom, the beam punches out the atom’s own electrons, leaving a hole. Electrons are attracted to an atom’s nucleus because electrons and protons have opposite charges, and tearing electrons away from the nucleus is a violent deed. Since nature abhors a vacuum, other electrons rush in to fill the gap, and the crashing about causes them to release high-energy X-rays. Excitingly, Moseley found a mathematical relation between the wavelength of the X-rays, the number of protons an element has in its nucleus, and the element’s atomic number (its spot on the periodic table).
Since Mendeleev had published his famous table in 1869, it had undergone a number of changes. Mendeleev had set his first table sideways, until someone showed him the sense in rotating it ninety degrees. Chemists continued to tinker with the table, adding columns and reshuffling elements, over the next forty years. Meanwhile, anomalies had begun to peck at people’s confidence that they really understood the table. Most of the elements line up on the table in a cattle call of increasing weight. According to that criterion, nickel should precede cobalt. Yet to make the elements fit properly—so cobalt sat above cobalt-like elements and nickel above nickel-like elements—chemists had to switch their spots. No one knew why this was necessary, and it was just one of several annoying cases. To get around this problem, scientists invented the atomic number as a placeholder, which just underscored that no one knew what the atomic number actually me
ant.
Moseley, just twenty-five, solved the riddle by translating the question from chemistry to physics. The crucial thing to realize is that few scientists believed in the atomic nucleus at the time. Rutherford had put forward the idea of a compact, highly positive nucleus just two years earlier, and it remained unproven in 1913, too tentative for scientists to accept. Moseley’s work provided the first confirmation. As Niels Bohr, another Rutherford protégé, recalled, “We cannot understand it today, but [the Rutherford work] was not taken seriously…. The great change came from Moseley.” That’s because Moseley linked an element’s place on the table to a physical characteristic, equating the positive nuclear charge with the atomic number. And he did so with an experiment that anyone could repeat. This proved the ordering of elements was not arbitrary but arose from a proper understanding of atomic anatomy. Screwy cases such as cobalt and nickel suddenly made sense, since the lighter nickel had more protons and therefore a higher positive charge and therefore had to come after cobalt. If Mendeleev and others discovered the Rubik’s Cube of the elements, Moseley solved it, and after Moseley there was no more need to fudge explanations.
Furthermore, like the spectroscope, Moseley’s electron gun helped tidy up the table by sorting through a confusing array of radioactive species and disproving spurious claims for new elements. Moseley also fingered just four remaining holes in the table—elements forty-three, sixty-one, seventy-two, and seventy-five. (The elements heavier than gold were too dear to obtain proper samples to experiment on in 1913. Had Moseley been able to, he would have found gaps at eighty-five, eighty-seven, and ninety-one, too.)