The Disappearing Spoon shines a light on many female scientists who have made significant contributions in scientific history. What role do you think their gender played in their work? Or do you think that these scientists’ gender was irrelevant?
Why did it take scientists so long to discover what a chemical element really was? Why were scientists so surprised when they discovered they could make chemical compounds from noble gases?
How did reading The Disappearing Spoon change your ideas about the day-to-day life of scientists and the work they do?
Did you discover any new heroes while reading this book? Was there anyone you thought came across as a villain? Was there anyone whose motivations surprised you?
Sam Kean makes connections to many areas of science, nature, and life that normally aren’t discussed in association of the periodic table. What connections most surprised you?
Were you surprised at how dangerous some of the elements on the periodic table are, considering that they exist within nature?
Now that you have read The Disappearing Spoon, what is your favorite element? Why?
If you could name an element, what would you name it? (Remember, it has to end in “-ium” and you can’t name it after a living person, including yourself!)
If you could redesign the periodic table, what would yours look like?
Sam Kean’s top-five favorite elements
1. Mercury
Element 80 got me started with the periodic table. I explain how in my response to the first question on page 2.
2. Molybdenum
I admit I didn’t know much about element 42 before I started writing the book. I might not have recognized it as an element, and I sure didn’t know how to pronounce it! But I found that it had such a great back story—it played a crucial role in World War I for the Germans, and they sent people halfway across the world, to the Rocky Mountains in the United States, to secure a ready supply. And as far as wars and battles over elements go, this one at least had a comic side: no death or large-scale destruction, and the defeated side actually came back and made millions off the element in the end.
3. Aluminium
The story behind element 13 is sort of the opposite of the story behind molybdenum. It’s an element you thought you knew so well, but it has a secret life. Aluminium is common in the earth’s crust but very hard to separate from other elements. So when scientists started to obtain pure samples of it in the 1800s, they were considered miracles, a shiny, attractive, and strong metal that ounce for ounce was worth far more than gold. Kings and emperors coveted it for sixty years. Suddenly, a few chemists came along and crashed the market by making aluminium cheap, and it became the metal we use today in pop cans and baseball bats. I really think it depends on your temperament whether you think it was better off as the worst most precious or most passé metal.
4. Ununseptium
Element 117 is the newest addition to the table as of this writing, joining the table in 2010; and even though the name’s a temporary placeholder, I love its Latin roots (for 1-1-7). And I’ll still be fond of this element long after we’ve created more new elements and it gets an official name. Ununseptium filled in a gap in the seventh and lowest row of the periodic table, and it completed that row. Given the haphazard discoveries of all the rest of the elements, we’ve never had a periodic table where every single row was filled in before. So beyond just its row, ununseptium completed the entire table, squared it off handsomely. And given how fragile new elements beyond 117 will likely be, scientists probably will never be able to fill in an eighth full row, either. So this element gave us, right now, probably the only “complete” periodic table humankind will ever get to see.
5. Bismuth
Element 83 sits in the middle of what I call poisoners’ corridor, a number of ugly mug shots of dangerous elements. To the left of and above bismuth sit the conventional retching-and-deep-pain poisons of mystery novels; to its right and below it sit scarily radioactive poisons. But somehow bismuth itself is totally benign, even medicinal: it’s the “bis” in hot pink Pepto-Bismol. I also enjoy the fact that, of all the elements that will decay by the end of the time, bismuth will hold on longer than any of them, twenty billion billion years, over a billion times longer than the current age of the universe.
Sam Kean’s suggestions for further reading
Patrick Coffey. Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries That Made Modern Chemistry. Oxford University Press, 2008.
John Emsley. Nature’s Building Blocks: An A–Z Guide to the Elements. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Theodore Gray. The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe. Black Dog & Leventhal, 2009.
Theodore Gray. Theo Gray’s Mad Science: Experiments You Can Do at Home—But Probably Shouldn’t. Black Dog & Leventhal, 2009.
Arthur Greenberg. A Chemical History Tour: Picturing Chemistry from Alchemy to Modern Molecular Science. Wiley-Interscience, 2000.
J. D. Macdougall. Nature’s Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything. University of California Press, 2009.
Richard Rhodes. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Eric Scerri. The Periodic Table. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Glenn Seaborg and Eric Seaborg. Adventures in the Atomic Age: From Watts to Washington. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.
Tom Zoellner. Uranium. Viking, 2009.
NOTES AND ERRATA
Introduction
“literature, poison forensics, and psychology:” Another topic I learned about via mercury was meteorology. The final peal of the death knell of alchemy sounded on the day after Christmas in 1759, when two Russian scientists, trying to see how cold they could get a mixture of snow and acid, accidentally froze the quicksilver in their thermometer. This was the first recorded case of solid Hg, and with that evidence, the alchemists’ immortal fluid was banished to the realm of normal matter.
Lately mercury has been politicized as well, as activists in the United States have campaigned vigorously against the (totally unfounded) dangers of mercury in vaccines.
1. Geography Is Destiny
“anything but a pure element”: Two scientists observed the first evidence for helium (an unknown spectral line, in the yellow range) during an eclipse in 1868—hence the element’s name, from helios, Greek for “sun.” The element was not isolated on earth until 1895, through the careful isolation of helium from rocks. (For more on this, see chapter 17.) For eight years, helium was thought to exist on earth in minute quantities only, until miners found a huge underground cache in Kansas in 1903. They had tried to light the gas shooting out of a vent in the ground on fire, but it wouldn’t catch.
“only the electrons matter”: To reiterate the point about atoms being mostly empty space, Allan Blackman, a chemist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, wrote in the January 28, 2008, Otago Daily Times: “Consider the most dense known element, iridium; a sample of this the size of a tennis ball would weigh just over 3 kilograms [6.6 pounds]…. Let’s assume that we could somehow pack the iridium nuclei together as tight as we possibly could, thereby eliminating most of that empty space…. A tennis ball–sized sample of this compacted material would now weigh an astonishing seven trillion tonnes [7.7 trillion U.S. tons].”
As a footnote to this footnote, no one really knows whether iridium is the densest element. Its density is so close to osmium’s that scientists cannot distinguish between them, and in the past few decades they’ve traded places as king of the mountain. Osmium is on top at the moment.
“every quibbling error”: For more detailed portraits of Lewis and Nernst (and many other characters, such as Linus Pauling and Fritz Haber), I highly recommend Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries That Made Modern Chemistry by Patrick Coffey. It’s a personality-driven account of the most important era in modern chemistry, between about 1890 and 1930.
“most colorful history on the periodic table”: Other facts
about antimony:
1. Much of our knowledge of alchemy and antimony comes from a 1604 book, The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony, written by Johann Thölde. To give his book a publicity boost, Thölde claimed he’d merely translated it from a 1450 text written by a monk, Basilius Valentinus. Fearing persecution for his beliefs, Valentinus had supposedly hidden the text in a pillar in his monastery. It remained hidden until a “miraculous thunderbolt” split the pillar in Thölde’s time and allowed him to discover the manuscript.
2. Although many did call antimony a hermaphrodite, others insisted it was the essence of femininity—so much so that a version of the alchemical symbol for antimony, , became associated with the general symbol for “female.”
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 α 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 “α” 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!
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