Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001)

by Oliver Sacks

  The museums, especially, allowed me to wander in my own way, at leisure, going from one cabinet to another, one exhibit to another, without being forced to follow any curriculum, to attend to lessons, to take exams or compete. There was something passive, and forced upon one, about sitting in school, whereas in museums one could be active, explore, as in the world. The museums – and the zoo, and the botanical garden at Kew – made me want to go out into the world and explore for myself, be a rock hound, a plant collector, a zoologist or paleontologist. (Fifty years later, it is still natural history museums and botanical gardens I seek out whenever I visit a new city or country.)

  One gained entrance to the Geological Museum, as to a temple, through a great arch of marble flanked by enormous vases of Derbyshire blue-john, a form of fluorspar. The ground floor was devoted to densely filled cabinets and cases of minerals and gems. There were dioramas of volcanoes, bubbling mudholes, lava cooling, minerals crystallizing, the slow processes of oxidation and reduction, rising and sinking, mixing, metamorphosis; so one could get not only a sense of the products of the earth’s activities – its rocks, its minerals – but of the processes, physical and chemical, that continually produced them.

  Up on the top floor was a colossal cluster of stibnite – glossy black, spearlike prisms of antimony sulfide. I had seen antimony sulfide as an unremarkable black powder in Uncle Dave’s lab, but here I saw it in crystals five or six feet high. I worshiped these prisms; they became for me a sort of totem or fetish. These fabulous crystals, the largest of their sort in the world, had come from the Ichinokawa Mine, the legend said, on Shikoku Island, in Japan. When I grew up, I thought, when I was able to travel, I would pay a visit to this island, pay my respects to the god. Stibnite is found in many places, I subsequently learned, but that first sight joined it indissolubly with Japan in my mind, so that Japan, ever afterwards, was for me the Land of Stibnite. Australia, similarly, became the Land of Opal, no less than the Land of the Kangaroo and the Platypus.

  There was a great mass of galena in the museum too – it must have weighed over a ton – which had formed in gleaming dark grey cubes five or six inches across that often had smaller cubes embedded in them. These in turn, I could see by peering through my hand lens, had yet smaller cubes seemingly growing out of them. When I mentioned this to Uncle Dave, he said that galena was cubic through and through, and that if I could look at it magnified a million times, I would still see cubes, and smaller cubes attached to these. The shape of the galena cubes, of all crystals, Uncle said, was an expression of the way their atoms were arranged, the fixed, three-dimensional patterns or lattices they formed. This was because of the bonds between them, he said, bonds that were electrostatic in nature, and the actual arrangement of atoms in a crystal lattice reflected the closest packing that the attractions and repulsions between the atoms would allow. That a crystal was built from the repetition of innumerable identical lattices – that it was, in effect, a single giant self-replicating lattice – seemed marvelous to me. Crystals were like colossal microscopes that allowed one to see the actual configuration of the atoms inside them. I could almost see, in my mind’s eye, the lead atoms and the sulphur atoms composing the galena – I imagined them vibrating slightly with electrical energy, but otherwise firmly held in position, joined to one another now, coordinated in an infinite cubic lattice.

  I had visions (especially after listening to stories of my uncles in their prospecting days) of being a sort of boy geologist myself, armed with chisel and hammer and collecting bags for my trophies, coming upon never-before-described mineral species. I did try a little prospecting in our garden, but found little beyond odd chips of marble and flint. I longed to go out on geological excursions, to see the patterns of the rocks, the richness of the mineral world, for myself. This desire was fanned by my reading, not only accounts of the great naturalists and explorers but also more modest books that came to hand, such as Dana’s little book The Geological Story, with its beautiful illustrations, and my favorite nineteenth-century Playbook of Metahj which was subtitled Personal Narratives of Visits to Coal, Lead, Copper and Tin Mines. I wanted to visit different mines myself, and not just the copper and lead and tin mines in England, but the gold and diamond mines which had drawn my uncles to Africa. But failing this, the museum could provide a microcosm of the world – compact, attractive, a distillation of the experience of innumerable collectors and explorers, their material treasures, their reflections and thoughts.

  I would devour the information provided in the legends for each display. Among the delights of mineralogy were the beautiful and often ancient terms used. Vug, Uncle Dave told me, was a term used by the old tin miners of Cornwall, and came from the Cornish dialect word vooga (or fouga ), meaning an underground chamber; ultimately this came from the Latin fovea, a pit. It intrigued me to think that this funny, ugly word bore testament to the antiquity of mining, to the Romans’ first colonization of England, drawn by the tin mines of Cornwall. The very name for tin ore, cassiterite, came from the Cassiterides, the ‘Tin Isles’ of the Romans.

  The names of minerals especially fascinated me – their sounds, their associations, the sense they gave of people and places. The older names gave one a sense of antiquity and alchemy: corundum and galena, orpiment and realgar. (Orpiment and realgar, two arsenic sulphides, went euphoniously together, and made me think of an operatic couple, like Tristan and Isolde.) There was pyrites, fool’s gold, in brassy, metallic cubes, and chalcedony and ruby and sapphire and spinel. Zircon sounded oriental, calomel Greek – its honeylike sweetness, its ‘mel,’ belied by its poisonness. There was the medieval-sounding sal ammoniac. There was cinnabar, the heavy red sulphide of mercury, and massicot and minium, the twin oxides of lead.

  Then there were minerals named after people. One of the most common minerals, much of the redness of the world, was the hydrated iron oxide called goethite. Was this named in honor of Goethe, or did he discover it? I had read that he had a passion for mineralogy and chemistry. Many minerals were named after chemists – gay-lussite, scheelite, berzelianite, bunsenite, liebigite, crookesite, and the beautiful, prismatic ‘ruby-silver,’ proustite. There was samarskite, named after a mining engineer. Colonel Samarski. There were other names that were evocative in a more topical way: stolzite, a lead tungstate, and scholzite, too. Who were Stolz and Scholz? Their names seemed very Prussian to me, and this, just after the war, evoked an anti-German feeling. I imagined Stolz and Scholz as Nazi officers with barking voices, sword sticks, and monocles.

  Other names appealed to me simply for their sound or for the images they conjured up. I loved classical words and their depiction of simple properties – the crystal forms, colors, shapes, and optics of minerals – like diaspore and anastase and microlite and polycrase. A great favorite was cryolite – ice stone, from Greenland, so low in refractive index that it was transparent, almost ghostly, and, like ice, became invisible in water.«5»

  Many elements had been given names from folklore or mythology, sometimes revealing a little of their history. A kobold was a goblin or evil sprite, a nickel a devil; both were terms used by Saxon miners when cobalt and nickel ores proved treacherous, and did not yield what they should. Tantalum brought up visions of Tantalus tantalized in Hell by water that retreated from him whenever he bent down to drink from it; the element was given its name, I read, because its oxide was unable to ‘drink water,’ that is, to dissolve in acids. Niobium was named after Tantalus’ daughter, Niobe, because the two elements were always found together.

  (My 1860ish books included a third element, pelopium, in this family – Pelops was Tantalus’ son, whom he cooked and served up to the gods – but the existence of this was later disproved.)

  Other elements had astronomical names. There was uranium, discovered in the eighteenth century and named after the planet Uranus; and a few years later, palladium and cerium, named after the recently discovered asteroids Pallas and Ceres. Tellurium had a fine, earthy Greek name, and
it was only natural that when its lighter analog was found, it should be named selenium, after the moon.«6»

  I loved to read of the elements and their discovery – not just the chemical, but the human aspects of this enterprise, and all this, and more, I learned from a delightful book published just before the war by Mary Elvira Weeks, The Discovery of the Elements. Here I got a vivid idea of the lives of many chemists, the great variety, and sometimes vagaries, of character they showed. And here I found quotations from the early chemists’ letters, which portrayed their excitements and despairs as they fumbled and groped their way to their discoveries, losing the track now and again, getting caught in blind alleys, though ultimately reaching the goals they sought.

  My history and geography as a boy, the history and geography that moved me, was based more on chemistry than on wars or world events. I followed the fortunes of the early chemists more closely than the fortunes of the contending forces in the war (perhaps, indeed, they helped insulate me from the frightening realities around me). I longed to go to ‘ultima Thule,’ the far-northern home of the element thulium, and to visit the little village of Ytterby in Sweden, which had given its name to no fewer than four elements (ytterbium, terbium, erbium, yttrium). I longed to go to Greenland, where, I imagined, there were whole mountain ranges, transparent, scarcely visible, of ghostly cryolite. I longed to go to Strontian, in Scotland, to see the little village that had given strontium its name. The whole of Britain, for me, could be seen in terms of its many lead minerals – there was matlockite, named for Matlock in Derbyshire; leadhillite, named after the Leadhills in Lanarkshire; lanarkite, also from Lanarkshire; and the beautiful lead sulphate, anglesite, from Anglesey in Wales. (There was also the town of Lead in South Dakota – a town, I liked to imagine, actually built of metallic lead.) The geographic names of elements and minerals stood out for me like lights over the map of the world.

  Seeing the minerals in the museum incited me to get little bags of ‘mixed minerals’ from a local shop for a few pennies; these would contain little pieces of pyrites, galena, fluorite, cuprite, hematite, gypsum, siderite, malachite, and different forms of quartz, to which Uncle Dave might contribute rarer things, like tiny fragments of scheelite which had broken off his larger piece. Most of my mineral specimens were rather battered, often tiny ones that a real collector would sniff at, but they gave me a feeling of having a sample of nature for myself.

  It was from looking at minerals in the Geological Museum and studying their chemical formulas that I learned about their composition. Some were simple and invariable in composition – this was true of cinnabar, a mercury sulphide that always contained the same proportion of mercury and sulphur, no matter where a particular specimen was found. But it was different with many other minerals, including Uncle Dave’s favorite scheelite. While scheelite was ideally pure calcium tungstate, some specimens contained a certain amount of calcium molybdate as well. Pure calcium molybdate, conversely, occurred naturally as the mineral powellite, but some specimens of powellite also contained small amounts of calcium tungstate. One might, in fact, have any intermediate between the two, from a mineral that was 99 percent tungstate and 1 percent molybdate to one that was 99 percent molybdate and 1 percent tungstate. This was because tungsten and molybdenum had atoms, ions, of similar size, so that an ion of one element could replace the other within the mineral’s crystal lattice. But above all, it was because tungsten and molybdenum belonged to the same chemical group or family, and nature treated them, with their similar chemical and physical properties, very much alike. Thus both tungsten and molybdenum tended to form similar compounds with other elements, and both tended to occur naturally as acidic salts that crystallized from solution under similar conditions.

  These two elements formed a natural pair, were chemical brothers. This fraternal relationship was even closer with the elements niobium and tantalum, which usually occurred together in the same minerals. And the fraternity approached identical twinship in the elements zirconium and hafnium, which not only invariably occurred together in the same minerals, but were so similar chemically that it took a century to distinguish them – Nature herself could hardly do so.

  Wandering through the Geological Museum, I also got a sense of the enormous range, the thousands of different minerals in the earth’s crust, and of the relative abundances of the elements that made them up. Oxygen and silicon were overwhelmingly common – there were more silicate minerals than any others, to say nothing of all the world’s sands. And with the standard rocks of the world – the chalks and feldspars, granites and dolomites – one could see that magnesium, aluminium, calcium, sodium, and potassium must make up nine-tenths or more of the earth’s crust. Iron, too, was common; there seemed to be whole areas of Australia as iron-red as Mars. And I could add little fragments of all these elements, in the form of minerals, to my own collection.

  The eighteenth century, Uncle told me, had been a grand time for the discovery and isolation of new metals (not only tungsten, but a dozen others, too), and the greatest challenge to eighteenth-century chemists was how to separate these new metals from their ores. This is how chemistry, real chemistry, got on its feet, investigating countless different minerals, analyzing them, breaking them down, to see what they contained. Real chemical analysis – seeing what minerals would react with, or how they behaved when heated or dissolved – of course required a laboratory, but there were elementary observations one could do almost anywhere. One could weigh a mineral in one’s hand, estimate its density, observe its luster, the color of its streak on a porcelain plate. Hardness varied hugely, and one could easily get a rough approximation – talc and gypsum one could scratch with a fingernail; calcite with a coin; fluorite and apatite with a steel knife; and orthoclase with a steel file. Quartz would scratch glass, and corundum would scratch anything but diamond.

  A classical way of determining the relative density or specific gravity of a specimen was to weigh a fragment of mineral twice, in air and in water, to give the ratio of its density to that of water. Another, simpler way, and one which gave me a peculiar pleasure, was to examine the buoyancy of different minerals in liquids of different specific gravity – ’heavy’ liquids had to be used here, for all minerals, except ice, were denser than water. I got a series of heavy liquids: first bromoform, which was almost three times as dense as water, then methylene iodide, which was even denser, and then a saturated solution of two thallium salts called Clerici solution. This had a specific gravity of well over four, and even though it looked like ordinary water, many minerals and even some metals would easily float in it. I loved taking my little bottle of Clerici solution to school, asking people to hold it, and seeing their look of surprise as they experienced its weight, almost five times what they might have expected.

  I was on the shy side at school (one school report called me ‘diffident’) and Braefield had added a special timidity, but when I had a natural wonder – whether it was shrapnel from a bomb; or a piece of bismuth with its terraces of prisms resembling a miniature Aztec village; or my little bottle of arm-droppingly dense, sensorily stunning, Clerici solution; or gallium, which melted in the hand (I later got a mold, and made a teaspoon of gallium, which would shrink and melt as one stirred the tea with it) – I lost all my diffidence, and freely approached others, all my fear forgotten.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Chemical Recreations

  My parents and my brothers had introduced me, even before the war, to some kitchen chemistry: pouring vinegar on a piece of chalk in a tumbler and watching it fizz, then pouring the heavy gas this produced, like an invisible cataract, over a candle flame, putting it out straightaway. Or taking red cabbage, pickled with vinegar, and adding household ammonia to neutralize it. This would lead to an amazing transformation, the juice going through all sorts of colors, from red to various shades of purple, to turquoise and blue, and finally to green.

  After the war, with my new interest in minerals and colors, my brother David,
who had grown some crystals when he did chemistry at school, showed me how to do this myself. He showed me how to make a supersaturated solution by dissolving a salt like alum or copper sulphate in very hot water and then letting it cool. One needed to hang something – a thread or a bit of metal – in the solution to start the process off. I did this first with a thread of wool in a copper sulphate solution, and in a few hours this produced a beautiful chain of bright blue crystals climbing along the thread.

  But if I used an alum solution and a good seed crystal to start it off, I discovered, the crystal would grow evenly, on every face, giving me a single large, perfectly octahedral crystal of alum.

  I later commandeered the kitchen table to make a ‘chemical garden,’ sowing a syrupy solution of sodium silicate, or water-glass, with differently colored salts of iron and copper and chromium and manganese. This produced not crystals but twisted, plantlike growths in the water-glass, distending, budding, bursting, continually reshaping themselves before my eyes.«7» This sort of growth, David told me, was due to osmosis, the gelatinous silica of the water-glass acting as a ‘semipermeable membrane,’ allowing water to be drawn in to the concentrated mineral solution inside it. Such processes, he said, were crucial in living organisms, though they occurred in the earth’s crust as well, and this reminded me of the gigantic nodular, kidneylike masses of hematite I had seen in the museum – the label said this was ‘kidney ore’ (though Marcus had once told me they were the fossilized kidneys of dinosaurs).

  I enjoyed these experiments, and tried to envisage the processes that were going on, but I did not feel a real chemical passion – a desire to compound, to isolate, to decompose, to see substances changing, familiar ones disappearing and new ones in their stead – until I saw Uncle Dave’s lab and his passion for experiments of all kinds. Now I longed to have a lab of my own – not Uncle Dave’s bench, not the family kitchen, but a place where I could do chemical experiments undisturbed, by myself. As a start, I wanted to lay hands on cobaltite and niccolite, and compounds or minerals of manganese and molybdenum, of uranium and chromium – all those wonderful elements which were discovered in the eighteenth century. I wanted to pulverize them, treat them with acid, roast them, reduce them – whatever was necessary – so I could extract their metals myself. I knew, from looking through a chemical catalog at the factory, that one could buy these metals already purified, but it would be far more fun, far more exciting, I reckoned, to make them myself. This way, I would enter chemistry, start to discover it for myself, in much the same way as its first practitioners did – I would live the history of chemistry in myself.