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

  3. In the 1930s in China, a poor province made do with what it had and decided to make money from antimony, about the only local resource. But antimony is soft, easily rubbed away, and slightly toxic, all of which makes for poor coins, and the government soon withdrew them. Though worth just fractions of a cent then, these coins fetch thousands of dollars from collectors today.

  2. Near Twins and Black Sheep

  “really wrote Shakespeare’s plays”: A simpler but less colorful definition of honorificabilitudinitatibus is “with honorableness.” The Bacon anagram for the word is “Hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi,” which translates to “These plays, born of F[rancis] Bacon, are preserved for the world.”

  “anaconda runs 1,185 letters”: There’s some confusion over the longest word to appear in Chemical Abstracts. Many people list the tobacco mosaic virus protein, C785H1220N212O248S2, but a substantial number instead list “tryptophan synthetase a protein,” a relative of the chemical that people (wrongly) suppose makes them sleepy when they eat turkey (that’s an urban legend). The tryptophan protein, C1289H2051N343O375S8, runs 1,913 letters, over 60 percent longer than the mosaic virus protein, and numerous sources—some editions of Guinness World Records, the Urban Dictionary (www.urbandictionary.com), Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words—all list tryptophan as the champ. But after spending hours in the dimly lit stacks of the Library of Congress, I never located the tryptophan molecule in Chemical Abstracts. It just doesn’t seem to have appeared in its full, spelled-out form. To be doubly sure, I hunted down the academic paper that announced the decoding of the tryptophan protein (which was separate from the Chemical Abstracts listing), and there the authors chose to abbreviate the amino acid sequence. So its full name has never appeared in print as far as I can tell, which probably explains why Guinness later rescinded the listing for it as the longest word.

  I did manage to track down listings for the mosaic virus, which is spelled out twice—first on page 967F of a brownish volume called Chemical Abstracts Formula Index, Jan.–June 1964, then on page 6717F of Chemical Abstracts 7th Coll. Formulas, C23H32–Z, 56–65, 1962–1966. Both books are compendiums that collect data for all the scholarly chemistry papers published between the dates on their covers. That means, contra other references to the world’s longest word (especially on the Web), the mosaic virus listing appeared only when those tomes came out in 1964 and 1966 and not in 1972.

  There’s more: the tryptophan paper came out in 1964, and there are other molecules listed in that 1962–1966 Chemical Abstracts compendium with more Cs, Hs, Ns, Os, and Ss than the tobacco mosaic virus. So why aren’t they spelled out? Because those papers appeared after 1965, the year Chemical Abstracts Service, the company in Ohio that collects all this data, overhauled its system for naming new compounds and began discouraging excessively eye-glazing names. But so why did they bother spelling out the tobacco mosaic virus protein in a 1966 compendium? It could have been chopped down but was grandfathered in. And to throw in one more twist, the original 1964 tobacco mosaic virus paper was in German. But Chemical Abstracts is an English-language document, in the fine reference-work tradition of Samuel Johnson and the OED, and it printed the name not to show off but to propagate knowledge, so it sure counts.

  Whew.

  By the way, I owe Eric Shively, Crystal Poole Bradley, and especially Jim Corning at Chemical Abstracts Service a lot for helping me figure all this out. They didn’t have to field my confused questions (“Hi. I’m trying to find the longest word in English, and I’m not sure what it is…”), but they did.

  Incidentally, on top of being the first virus discovered, the tobacco mosaic virus was the first to have its shape and structure analyzed in a rigorous way. Some of the best work in this area was done by Rosalind Franklin, the crystallography expert who generously but naively shared her data with Watson and Crick (see chapter 8). Oh, and the “a” in “tryptophan synthetase α protein” traces back to Linus Pauling’s work on how proteins know how to fold into the proper shape (see chapter 8 again).

  “mercifully known as titin”: A few very patient souls have posted the entire amino acid sequence of titin online. Here are the stats: It occupies forty-seven single-spaced pages of a Microsoft Word document in Times New Roman 12-point font. It contains over 34,000 amino acids, and there are 43,781 occurrences of l; 30,710 of y; 27,120 of yl; and just 9,229 of e.

  “almost a proof in itself ”: From a PBS Frontline piece called “Breast Implants on Trial”: “The silicon content of living organisms decreases as the complexity of the organism rises. The ratio of silicon to carbon is 250:1 in the earth’s crust, 15:1 in humus soil [soil with organic matter], 1:1 in plankton, 1:100 in ferns, and 1:5,000 in mammals.”

  “ ‘Bardeen was the brains of this joint organism and Brattain was the hands’ ”: The quote about Bardeen and Brattain being a joint organism comes from the PBS documentary Transistorized!

  “a ‘genius sperm bank’ ”: Shockley’s “genius sperm bank,” based in California, was officially called the Repository for Germinal Choice. He’s the only Nobel Prize winner to admit publicly that he donated, although the sperm bank’s founder, Robert K. Graham, claimed a number of others did, too.

  “Nobel Prize for his integrated circuit”: For information on Kilby and the tyranny of numbers, see the wonderful book The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution by T. R. Reid. Oddly, a club DJ using the handle “Jack Kilby” released a CD in 2006 called Microchip EP, with a picture of a very old Kilby on the cover. It features the songs “Neutronium,” “Byte My Scarf,” “Integrated Circuit,” and “Transistor.”

  3. The Galápagos of the Periodic Table

  “the reality of atoms”: It might seem incredible to us today that Mendeleev refused to believe in atoms, but this was a not uncommon view among chemists at the time. They refused to believe in anything they couldn’t see with their own eyes, and they treated atoms as abstractions—a handy way of doing the accounting, maybe, but surely fictitious.

  “at least in history’s judgment?”: The best description of the six scientists competing to form the first systematic arrangement of elements can be found in Eric Scerri’s The Periodic Table. Three other people are generally given credit for coinventing, or at least contributing to, the periodic system.

  Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois, according to Scerri, discovered “the single most important step” in developing the periodic table—“that the properties of the elements are a periodic function of their atomic weights, a full seven years before Mendeleev arrived at the same conclusion.” De Chancourtois, a geologist, drew his periodic system on a spiral cylinder, like the thread of a screw. The possibility of his getting credit for the table was dashed when a publisher couldn’t figure out how to reproduce the crucial screw diagram showing all the elements. The publisher finally threw his hands up and printed the paper without it. Imagine trying to learn about the periodic table without being able to see it! Nonetheless, de Chancourtois’s cause as founder of the periodic system was taken up by his fellow Frenchman Lecoq de Boisbaudran, perhaps partly to get Mendeleev’s goat.

  William Odling, an accomplished English chemist, seems to have been a victim of bad luck. He got many things right about the periodic table but is virtually forgotten today. Perhaps with his many other chemical and administrative interests, he simply got outworked by Mendeleev, who obsessed over the table. One thing Odling got wrong was the length of the periods of elements (the number of elements that have to appear before similar traits reappear). He assumed all the periods were of length eight, but that’s true only at the top of the table. Because of d-shells, rows three and four require a period of eighteen elements. Because of f-shells, rows five and six require thirty-two.

  Gustavus Hinrichs was the only American on the list of codiscoverers (although he was not native-born) and the only one described as both a crank and a maverick genius ahead of his time. He published
over three thousand scientific articles in four languages and pioneered the study and classification of elements with the light emissions that Bunsen discovered. He also played with numerology and developed a spiral-arm periodic table that placed many really tough elements in the correct groups. As Scerri sums him up, “The work of Hinrichs is so idiosyncratic and labyrinthine that a more complete study will be required before anyone can venture to pronounce on its real value.”

  “Earl Grey ‘eats’ their utensils”: If you’re dying to see the gallium practical joke in action, you can see a spoon of gallium melting into nothing on YouTube. Oliver Sacks also talks about pulling pranks of this sort in Uncle Tungsten, a memoir of his boyhood.

  “Streets are named for minerals and elements”: For some of the descriptions of the history and geology of Ytterby and for details about the town today, I consulted Jim Marshall, a chemist and historian at the University of North Texas, who was extremely generous with his time and help. He also sent me wonderful pictures. Jim is currently on a quest to revisit the spot where every element was first discovered, which is why he traveled to Ytterby (easy pickings). Good luck, Jim!

  4. Where Atoms Come From

  “proved by 1939”: One man who helped figure out the fusion cycles in stars, Hans Bethe, won a $500 prize for doing so, which he used to bribe Nazi officials and spring his mother and, oddly, her furniture from Germany.

  “ ‘chemically peculiar stars’ ”: A fun factoid: Astronomers have identified a strange class of stars that manufacture promethium through an unknown process. The most famous is called Przybylski’s star. The truly odd thing is that unlike most fusion events deep inside stars, the promethium must be created on the star’s surface. Otherwise, it’s too radioactive and short-lived to survive the million-year crawl from the fusion-rich core of a star to its outer layers.

  “stars govern the fate of mankind”: The two portentous Shakespeare quotes that opened the B2FH paper were as follows:

  It is the stars, / The stars above us, govern our conditions.

  King Lear, act 4, scene 3

  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves.

  Julius Caesar, act 1, scene 2

  “post-ferric fusion”: To be technical, stars don’t form iron directly. They first form nickel, element twenty-eight, by fusing two atoms of silicon, element fourteen, together. This nickel is unstable, however, and the vast majority of it decays to iron within a few months.

  “low-watt, brownish light”: Jupiter could ignite fusion with deuterium—“heavy” hydrogen with one proton and one neutron—if it had thirteen times its current mass. Given the rarity of deuterium (1 out of every 6,500 hydrogen molecules), it would be a pretty weak star, but it would still count. To ignite regular hydrogen fusion, Jupiter would need seventy-five times its current mass.

  “like microscopic cubes”: And not to be outdone by Jupiter’s or Mercury’s strange weather, Mars sometimes experiences hydrogen peroxide “snow.”

  “a siderophile, or iron-loving element”: The siderophiles osmium and rhenium have also helped scientists reconstruct how the moon was formed from a cataclysmic impact between the very early earth and an asteroid or comet. The moon coalesced from the debris that was thrown up.

  “later dubbed Nemesis”: The goddess Nemesis punished hubris. She made sure no earthly creature could ever grow too proud by striking down anyone who threatened to grow more powerful than the gods. The analogy to the sun’s companion star was that if earthly creatures (say, dinosaurs) evolved toward true intelligence, Nemesis would wipe them out before they got traction.

  “like a carousel as it drifts”: Ironically, the overall motion of the sun, if viewed from afar, would resemble the old wheels-within-wheels cycles and epicycles that ancient astronomers bent backward trying to explain in their pre-Copernican, earth-centered cosmos (it’s just that earth cannot be called the center anymore, not by a long shot). Like Miescher and proteins, this is an example of the cyclical nature of all ideas, even in science.

  5. Elements in Times of War

  “went on to win the war”: For more details on the history of chemical warfare, especially the experience of American troops, see “Chemical Warfare in World War I: The American Experience, 1917–1918,” by Major Charles E. Heller, part of the Leavenworth Papers published by the Combat Studies Institute, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/Heller/HELLER.asp.

  “6.7 billion people today”: Among the many other things we can attribute to Fritz Haber’s ammonia: Charles Townes built the first working maser, the precursor of the laser, by using ammonia as the stimulating agent.

  6. Completing the Table… with a Bang

  “a full and correct list”: Urbain wasn’t the only person Moseley embarrassed. Moseley’s apparatus also dismantled Masataka Ogawa’s claim for discovering nipponium, element forty-three (see chapter 8).

  “ ‘most irreparable crimes in history’ ”: For accounts of the bungling orders and battles that led to Moseley’s death, see The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. And actually, you should probably just read the whole thing, since it’s the best account of twentieth-century science history yet written.

  “as ‘not good for much’ ”: The Time magazine article that mentioned the discovery of element sixty-one also included this tidbit about the question of what to name the element: “One convention wag suggested [naming it] grovesium, after loud-mouthed Major General Leslie R. Groves, military chief of the atom bomb project. Chemical symbol: Grr.”

  “Pac-Man style”: Besides the electron-gobbling Pac-Man model of the nucleus, scientists at the time also developed the “plum pudding” model, in which electrons were embedded like raisins in a “pudding” of positive charge (Rutherford disproved this by proving that a compact nucleus existed). After the discovery of fission, scientists discovered the liquid drop model, in which large nuclei split like a drop of water on a surface splitting cleanly into two drops. Lise Meitner’s work was crucial in developing the liquid drop model.

  “ ‘would go thermonuclear’ ”: The quotes from George Dyson can be found in his book Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship.

  “ ‘methodological map’ ”: The quote about the Monte Carlo method being a “netherland at once nowhere and everywhere on the usual methodological map” appears in Peter Louis Galison’s Image and Logic.

  7. Extending the Table, Expanding the Cold War

  “ ‘Talk of the Town’ section”: The New Yorker item appeared in the April 8, 1950, issue and was written by E. J. Kahn Jr.

  “the alarm one last time”: For more details about the experiments that led to elements 94 through 110, and for personal information about the man himself, see Glenn Seaborg’s autobiographies, especially Adventures in the Atomic Age (cowritten with his son Eric). The book is intrinsically interesting because Seaborg was at the center of so much important science and played such a large role in politics for decades. Honestly, though, Seaborg’s cautious writing style makes the book a bit bland at points.

  “poisonous nickel smelters”: The information about the lack of trees around Norilsk comes from Time.com, which in 2007 named Norilsk one of the ten most polluted cities in the world. See http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1661031_1661028_1661022,00.html.

  “June 2009, copernicium (Cn)”: It covers a bit of the same material as here, but a story I wrote for Slate.com in June 2009 (“Periodic Discussions,” http://www.slate.com/id/2220300/) examines in detail why it took thirteen full years to promote copernicium from provisional element to full member of the periodic table.

  8. From Physics to Biology

  “they won forty-two”: Besides Segrè, Shockley, and Pauling, the other twelve scientists on the cover of Time were George Beadle, Charles Draper, John Enders, Donald Glaser, Joshua Lederberg, Willard Libby, Edward Purcell, Isidor Rabi, Edward Teller, Charles Townes, James Van Allen, a
nd Robert Woodward.

  The Time “Men of the Year” article contained the following words by Shockley on race. He meant them as complimentary, obviously, but his view on Bunche had to have sounded weird even at the time, and in retrospect it’s creepy. “William Shockley, 50, is that rare breed of scientist, a theorist who makes no apology for a consuming interest in the practical applications of his work. ‘Asking how much of a research job is pure and how much applied,’ says Shockley, ‘is like asking how much Negro and white blood Ralph Bunche might have. What’s important is that Ralph Bunche is a great man.’ ”

  The article also shows that the legend about Shockley as the main inventor of the transistor was already firmly established:

  Hired by Bell Telephone Laboratories right after he graduated from M.I.T. in 1936, theoretical physicist Shockley was one of a team that found a use for what had previously been a scientific parlor stunt: the use of silicon and germanium as a photoelectric device. Along with his partners, Shockley won a Nobel Prize for turning hunks of germanium into the first transistors, the educated little crystals that are fast replacing vacuum tubes in the country’s booming electronics industry.

  “of all the damned luck, Ida Noddack”: Overall, Ida Noddack had a spotty run as a chemist. She helped find element seventy-five, but her group’s work with element forty-three was riddled with mistakes. She predicted nuclear fission years before anyone else, but about that same time, she began arguing that the periodic table was a useless relic, because the multiplication of new isotopes was rendering it unwieldy. It’s not clear why Noddack believed that each isotope was its own element, but she did, and she tried to convince others that they should scrap the periodic system.