The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

by Sam Kean

  Of course, not long after the Parker 51 disappeared, the market for high-end pens began to shrivel. The reason is pretty obvious: while the 51 had thrived on making other pens seem inferior, pens were gradually being forced into obsolescence by technologies like the typewriter. But there’s an ironic story to unbury in that takeover, which starts with Mark Twain and wends its way back to the periodic table.

  After seeing a demonstration of a typewriter in 1874, and despite a worldwide economic depression, Twain ran right out and bought one for the outrageous price of $125 ($2,400 today). Within a week, he was writing letters on it (in all capitals; it had no lowercase) about how he looked forward to giving it away: “IT IS MOST TOO TEARING ON THE MIND,” he lamented. It’s sometimes hard to separate Twain’s real complaints from his curmudgeonly persona, so maybe he was exaggerating. But by 1875, he had given away his typewriter and decided instead to endorse new “fountain” pens for two companies. His adoration of expensive pens never flagged, even when it took “a royal amount of cussing to make the thing[s] go.” Parker 51s they were not.

  Still, Twain did more than anyone to ensure the eventual triumph of typewriters over high-end pens. He submitted the first typewritten manuscript to a publisher, Life on the Mississippi, in 1883. (It was dictated to a secretary, not typed by Twain.) And when the Remington typewriter company asked him to endorse its machines (Twain had reluctantly bought another), he declined with a crusty letter—which Remington turned around and printed anyway.* Even the acknowledgment that Twain, probably the most popular person in America, owned one was endorsement enough.

  These stories of cussing out pens he loved and using typewriters he hated underline a contradiction in Twain. Though perhaps the antithesis of Goethe in a literary sense, the demotic, democratic Twain shared Goethe’s ambivalence about technology. Twain had no pretensions of practicing science, but both he and Goethe were fascinated by scientific discovery. At the same time, they doubted Homo sapiens had enough wisdom to use technology properly. In Goethe, this doubt manifested itself as Faust. And Twain wrote what we might recognize today as science fiction. Really. In contrast to his laddish riverboat novels, he wrote short stories about inventions, technology, dystopias, space and time travel, even, in his bemusing story “Sold to Satan,” the perils of the periodic table.

  The story, two thousand words long, starts shortly after a hypothetical crash of steel shares around 1904. The narrator, sick of scrabbling for money, decides to sell his immortal soul to Mephistopheles. To hammer out a deal, he and Satan meet in a dark, unnamed lair at midnight, drink some hot toddies, and discuss the depressingly modest going price for souls. Pretty soon, though, they’re sidetracked by an unusual feature of Satan’s anatomy—he’s made entirely of radium.

  Six years before Twain’s story, Marie Curie had astounded the scientific world with her tales of radioactive elements. It was genuine news, but Twain must have been pretty plugged into the scientific scene to incorporate all the cheeky details he did into “Sold to Satan.” Radium’s radioactivity charges the air around it electrically, so Satan glows a luminescent green, to the narrator’s delight. Also, like a warm-blooded rock, radium is always hotter than its surroundings, because its radioactivity heats it up. This heat grows exponentially as more radium is concentrated together. As a result, Twain’s six-foot-one, “nine-hundred-odd”-pound Satan is hot enough to light a cigar with his fingertip. (He quickly puts it out, though, to “save it for Voltaire.” Hearing this, the narrator makes Satan take fifty more cigars for, among others, Goethe.)

  Later, the story goes into some detail about refining radioactive metals. It’s far from Twain’s sharpest material. But like the best science fiction, it’s prescient. To avoid incinerating people he comes across, radium-bodied Satan wears a protective coat of polonium, another new element discovered by Curie. Scientifically, this is rubbish: a “transparent” shell of polonium, “thin as a gelatine film,” could never withhold the heat of a critical mass of radium. But we’ll forgive Twain, since the polonium serves a larger dramatic purpose. It gives Satan a reason to threaten, “If I should strip off my skin the world would vanish away in a flash of flame and a puff of smoke, and the remnants of the extinguished moon would sift down through space a mere snow-shower of gray ashes!”

  Twain being Twain, he could not let the Devil end the story in a position of power. The trapped radium heat is so intense that Satan soon admits, with unintended irony, “I burn. I suffer within.” But jokes aside, Twain was already trembling about the awesome power of nuclear energy in 1904. Had he lived forty years more, he surely would have shaken his head—dispirited, yet hardly surprised—to see people lusting after nuclear missiles instead of plentiful atomic energy. Unlike Goethe’s forays into hard science, Twain’s stories about science can still be read today with instruction.

  Twain surveyed the lower realm of the periodic table with despair. But of all the tales of artists and elements, none seems sadder or harsher, or more Faustian, than poet Robert Lowell’s adventures with one of the primordial elements, lithium, at the very top of the table.

  When they were all youngsters at a prep school in the early 1930s, friends nicknamed Lowell “Cal” after Caliban, the howling man-beast in The Tempest. Others swear Caligula inspired the epithet. Either way, the name fit the confessional poet, who exemplified the mad artist—someone like van Gogh or Poe, whose genius stems from parts of the psyche most of us cannot access, much less harness for artistic purposes. Unfortunately, Lowell couldn’t rein in his madness outside the margins of his poems, and his lunacy bled all over his real life. He once turned up sputtering on a friend’s doorstep, convinced that he (Lowell) was the Virgin Mary. Another time, in Bloomington, Indiana, he convinced himself he could stop cars on the highway by spreading his arms wide like Jesus. In classes he taught, he wasted hours babbling and rewriting the poems of nonplussed students in the obsolete style of Tennyson or Milton. When nineteen, he abandoned a fiancée and drove from Boston to the country house of a Tennessee poet who Lowell hoped would mentor him. He just assumed that the man would put him up. The poet graciously explained there was no room at the inn, so to speak, and joked that Lowell would have to camp on the lawn if he wanted to stay. Lowell nodded and left—for Sears. He bought a pup tent and returned to rough it on the grass.

  The literary public delighted in these stories, and during the 1950s and 1960s, Lowell was the preeminent poet in the United States, winning prizes and selling thousands of books. Everyone assumed Lowell’s aberrations were the touch of some madly divine muse. Pharmaceutical psychology, a field coming into its own in that era, had a different explanation: Cal had a chemical imbalance, which rendered him manic-depressive. The public saw only the wild man, not his incapacitating black moods—moods that left him broken spiritually and increasingly broke financially. Luckily, the first real mood stabilizer, lithium, came to the United States in 1967. A desperate Lowell—who’d just been incarcerated in a psychiatric ward, where doctors had confiscated his belt and shoelaces—agreed to be medicated.

  Curiously, for all its potency as a drug, lithium has no normal biological role. It’s not an essential mineral like iron or magnesium, or even a trace nutrient like chromium. In fact, pure lithium is a scarily reactive metal. People’s linty pockets have reportedly caught fire when keys or coins short-circuited portable lithium batteries as they jangled down the street. Nor does lithium (which in its drug form is a salt, lithium carbonate) work the way we expect drugs to. We take antibiotics at the height of an infection to knock the microbes out. But taking lithium at the height of mania or in the canyon of depression won’t fix the episode. Lithium only prevents the next episode from starting. And although scientists knew about lithium’s efficacy back in 1886, until recently they had no clue why it worked.

  Lithium tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and its effects are complicated. Most interesting, lithium seems to reset the body’s circadian rhythm, its inner clock. In normal pe
ople, ambient conditions, especially the sun, dictate their humors and determine when they are tuckered out for the day. They’re on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Bipolar people run on cycles independent of the sun. And run and run. When they’re feeling good, their brains flood them with sunshiny neurostimulants, and a lack of sunshine does not turn the spigot off. Some call it “pathological enthusiasm”: such people barely need sleep, and their self-confidence swells to the point that a Bostonian male in the twentieth century can believe that the Holy Spirit has chosen him as the vessel of Jesus Christ. Eventually, those surges deplete the brain, and people crash. Severe manic-depressives, when the “black dogs” have them, sometimes take to bed for weeks.

  Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls—at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving. Lithium helps cleave the proteins from DNA so people can wind down. Notice that sunlight still trumps lithium during the day and resets the proteins; it’s only when the sunlight goes away at night that lithium helps DNA shake free. Far from being sunshine in a pill, then, lithium acts as “anti-sunlight.” Neurologically, it undoes sunlight and thereby compresses the circadian clock back to twenty-four hours—preventing both the mania bubble from forming and the Black Tuesday crash into depression.

  Lowell responded immediately to lithium. His personal life grew steadier (though by no means steady), and at one point he pronounced himself cured. From his new, stable perspective, he could see how his old life—full of fights, drinking binges, and divorces—had laid waste to so many people. For all his frank and moving lines within his poems, nothing Lowell ever wrote was as poignant—and nothing about the fragile chemistry of human beings was as moving—as a simple plaint to his publisher, Robert Giroux, after doctors started him on lithium.

  “It’s terrible, Bob,” he said, “to think that all I’ve suffered, and all the suffering I’ve caused, might have arisen from the lack of a little salt in my brain.”

  Lowell felt that his life improved on lithium, yet the effect of lithium on his art was debatable. As Lowell did, most artists feel that trading a manic-depressive cycle for a muted, prosaic circadian rhythm allows them to work productively without being distracted by mania or sedated by depression. There’s always been debate, though, about whether their work suffers after their “cure,” after they’ve lost access to that part of the psyche most of us never glimpse.

  Many artists report feeling flatlined or tranquilized on lithium. One of Lowell’s friends reported that he looked like something transported around in a zoo. And his poetry undoubtedly changed after 1967, growing rougher and purposely less polished. He also, instead of inventing lines from his wild mind, began poaching lines from private letters, which outraged the people he quoted. Such work won Lowell a Pulitzer Prize in 1974, but it hasn’t weathered well. Especially compared with his vivacious younger work, it’s barely read today. For all that the periodic table inspired Goethe, Twain, and others, Lowell’s lithium may be a case where it provided health but subdued art, and made a mad genius merely human.

  15

  An Element of Madness

  Robert Lowell typified the mad artist, but there’s another psychological deviant in our collective cultural psyche: the mad scientist. The mad scientists of the periodic table tended to have fewer public outbursts than mad artists, and they generally didn’t lead notorious private lives either. Their psychological lapses were subtler, and their mistakes were typical of a peculiar kind of madness known as pathological science.* And what’s fascinating is how that pathology, that madness, could exist side by side in the same mind with brilliance.

  Unlike virtually every other scientist in this book, William Crookes, born to a tailor in London in 1832, never worked at a university. The first of sixteen children, he later fathered ten of his own, and he supported his enormous family by writing a popular book on diamonds and editing a bumptious, gossipy journal of science goings-on, Chemical News. Nevertheless, Crookes—a bespectacled man with a beard and pointy mustache—did enough world-class science on elements such as selenium and thallium to get elected to England’s premier scientific club, the Royal Society, at just thirty-one years of age. A decade later, he was almost kicked out.

  His fall began in 1867, when his brother Philip died at sea.* Despite, or perhaps because of, their abundance of family, William and the other Crookeses nearly went mad with grief. At the time, spiritualism, a movement imported from America, had overrun the houses of aristocrats and shopkeeps alike all over England. Even someone like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who invented the hyperrationalist detective Sherlock Holmes, could find room in his capacious mind to accept spiritualism as genuine. Products of their time, the Crookes clan—mostly tradesmen with neither scientific training nor instinct—began attending séances en masse to comfort themselves and to chat with poor departed Philip.

  It’s not clear why William tagged along one night. Perhaps solidarity. Perhaps because another brother was stage manager for the medium. Perhaps to dissuade everyone from going back—privately, in his diary, he had dismissed such spiritual “contact” as fraudulent pageantry. Yet watching the medium play the accordion with no hands and write “automatic messages,” Ouija board–style, with a stylus and plank impressed the skeptic despite himself. His defenses were lowered, and when the medium began relaying babbled messages from Philip in the great beyond, William began bawling. He went to more sessions, and even invented a scientific device to monitor the susurrus of wandering spirits in the candlelit rooms. It’s not clear if his new radiometer—an evacuated glass bulb with a very sensitive weather vane inside—actually detected Philip. (We can hazard a guess.) But William couldn’t dismiss what he felt holding hands with family members at the meetings. His attendance became regular.

  Such sympathies put Crookes in the minority among his fellow rationalists in the Royal Society—probably a minority of one. Mindful of this, Crookes concealed his biases in 1870 when he announced that he had drawn up a scientific study of spiritualism, and most fellows of the Royal Society were delighted, assuming he would demolish the whole scene in his rowdy journal. Things did not turn out so neatly. After three years of chanting and summoning, Crookes published “Notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena Called Spiritual” in 1874 in a journal he owned called the Quarterly Journal of Science. He compared himself to a traveler in exotic lands, a Marco Polo of the paranormal. But instead of attacking all the spiritualist mischief—“levitation,” “phantoms,” “percussive sounds,” “luminous appearances,” “the rising of tables and chairs off the ground”—he concluded that neither charlatanism nor mass hypnosis could explain (or at least not wholly explain) all he’d seen. It wasn’t an uncritical endorsement, but Crookes did claim to find a “residual” of legitimate supernatural forces.*

  Coming from Crookes, even such tepid support shocked everyone in England, including spiritualists. Recovering quickly, they began shouting hosannas about Crookes from the mountaintops. Even today, a few ghost hunters haul out his creaky paper as “proof” that smart people will come around to spiritualism if they approach it with an open mind. Crookes’s fellows in the Royal Society were equally surprised but rather more aghast. They argued that Crookes had been blinded by parlor tricks, swept up in crowd dynamics, and charmed by charismatic gurus. They also tore into the dubious scientific veneer he’d given his report. Crookes had recorded irrelevant “data” about the temperature and barometric pressure inside the medium’s lair, for instance, as if immaterial beings wouldn’t poke their h
eads out in inclement weather. More uncomfortably, former friends attacked Crookes’s character, calling him a rube, a shill. If spiritualists sometimes cite Crookes today, a few scientists still cannot forgive him for enabling 135 years of New Age-y BS. They even cite his work on the elements as proof he went crazy.

  When young, you see, Crookes had pioneered the study of selenium. Though an essential trace nutrient in all animals (in humans, the depletion of selenium in the bloodstream of AIDS patients is a fatally accurate harbinger of death), selenium is toxic in large doses. Ranchers know this well. If not watched carefully, their cattle will root out a prairie plant of the pea family known as locoweed, some varieties of which sponge up selenium from the soil. Cattle that munch on locoweed begin to stagger and stumble and develop fevers, sores, and anorexia—a suite of symptoms known as the blind staggers. Yet they enjoy the high. In the surest sign that selenium actually makes them go mad, cattle grow addicted to locoweed despite its awful side effects and eat it to the exclusion of anything else. It’s animal meth. Some imaginative historians even pin Custer’s loss at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on his horses’ taking hits of loco before the battle. Overall, it’s fitting that “selenium” comes from selene, Greek for “moon,” which has links—through luna, Latin for “moon”—to “lunatic” and “lunacy.”

  Given that toxicity, it might make sense to retroactively blame Crookes’s delusions on selenium. Some inconvenient facts undermine that diagnosis, though. Selenium often attacks within a week; Crookes got goofy in early middle age, long after he’d stopped working with selenium. Plus, after decades of ranchers’ cursing out element thirty-four every time a cow stumbled, many biochemists now think that other chemicals in locoweed contribute just as much to the craziness and intoxication. Finally, in a clinching clue, Crookes’s beard never fell out, a classic symptom of selenosis.