Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001)

by Oliver Sacks

  I could also, using the Daniell as a source of power, decompose water if it was briny or acidulated. I remember the extraordinary pleasure I got from decomposing a little water in an eggcup, seeing it visibly separate into its elements, oxygen at one electrode, hydrogen at the other. The electricity from a 1-volt cell seemed so mild, and yet it could suffice to tear a chemical compound apart, to decompose water or, more dramatically, salt into its violently active constituents.

  Electrolysis could not have been discovered before Volta’s pile, for the most powerful electrical machines or Leyden jars were wholly impotent to cause chemical decomposition. It would have required, Faraday later calculated, the massed charge of 800,000 Leyden jars, or perhaps the power of a whole lightning stroke, to decompose a single grain of water, something that could be done by a tiny and simple 1-volt cell. (But my 1-volt cell, on the other hand, or even the eighty-cell battery that Marcus showed me in the portable radio, could not make a pithball or an electroscope move.) Static electricity could generate great sparks and high-voltage charges (a Wimshurst machine could generate 100,000 volts), but very little power, at least to electrolyze. And the opposite was so with the massive power, but low voltage, of a chemical cell.

  If the electric battery was my introduction to the inseparable relation of electricity to chemistry, the electric bell was my introduction to the inseparable relation of electricity to magnetism – a relation by no means self-evident or transparent, and one that was discovered only in the 1820s.

  I had seen how a modest electric current could heat a wire, give a shock, or decompose a solution. How was it managing to cause the oscillating movement, the clatter, of our electric bell? Wires from the bell ran to the front door, and a circuit was completed when the outside button was pressed. One evening when my parents were out, I decided to bypass this circuit, and connected the wires so that I could actuate the bell directly. As soon as I let the current pass, the bell hammer jumped, hitting the bell. What made it jump when the current flowed? I saw how the bell hammer, which was made of iron, had copper wire coiled around it. The coil became magnetized when a current flowed through it, and this caused the hammer to be attracted to the iron base of the bell (once it hit the bell, it broke the circuit and fell back into its original place). This seemed extraordinary to me: my lodestones, my horseshoe magnets, were one thing, but here was magnetism that appeared only when a current flowed through the coil, and disappeared the moment it stopped.

  It was the delicacy, the responsiveness, of compass needles which had first given a clue to the connection between electricity and magnetism. It was well known that a compass needle might jerk or even get demagnetized in a thunderstorm, and in 1820 it was observed that if a current was allowed to flow through a wire near a compass, its needle would suddenly move. If the current was strong enough, the needle could be deflected ninety degrees. If one put the compass above the wire rather than below it, the needle turned in the opposite direction. It was as if the magnetic force were forming circles around the wire.«35»

  Such a circular movement of magnetic forces could readily be made visible by using a vertical magnet sticking in a bowl of mercury, with a loosely suspended wire just touching the mercury, and a second bowl in which the magnet could move and the wire was fixed. When a current flowed, the loosely suspended wire would skitter in circles around the magnet, and the loose magnet would rotate in the opposite direction around the fixed wire.

  Faraday, who in 1821 designed this apparatus – in effect, the world’s first electric motor – immediately wondered about its reverse: if electricity could produce magnetism so easily, could a magnetic force produce electricity? Remarkably, it took him several years to answer this question, for the answer was not simple.«36 »Putting a permanent magnet inside a coil of wire did not generate any electricity; one had to move the bar in and out, and only then was a current generated. It seems obvious to us now, because we are familiar with dynamos and how they work. But there was no reason at the time to expect that movement would be necessary; after all, a Leyden jar, a voltaic battery, just sat on the table. It took even a genius like Faraday ten years to make the mental leap, to move out of the assumptions of his time into a new realm, and to realize that movement of the magnet was necessary to generate electricity, that movement was of the essence. (Movement, Faraday thought, generated electricity by cutting the magnetic lines of force.) Faraday’s in-and-out magnet was the world’s first dynamo – an electric motor in reverse.

  It was curious that Faraday’s two inventions, the electric motor and the dynamo, discovered around the same time, had very different impacts. Electric motors were taken up and developed almost at once, so that there were battery-powered electric riverboats by 1839, while dynamos were much slower to develop and became widespread only in the 1880s, when the introduction of electric lights and electric trains created a demand for huge amounts of electricity and a distribution system to keep them going. Nothing like these vast, humming dynamos, weaving a mysterious and invisible new power out of thin air, had ever been seen, and the early powerhouses, with their great dynamos, inspired a sense of awe. (This is evoked in H.G. Wells’s early story ‘The Lord of the Dynamos,’ in which a primitive man begins to see the massive dynamo he looks after as a god who demands a human sacrifice.)

  Like Faraday, I started to see ‘lines of force’ everywhere. I already had battery-powered front and rear lamps on my bike, and now I got dynamo-powered lights as well. As the little dynamo whirred on the back wheel, I would think sometimes of the magnetic lines of force being cut as it whirred, and of the mysterious, crucial role of motion.

  Magnetism and electricity had seemed at first completely separate; now they seemed to be linked, somehow, by motion. It was at this point that I turned to my ‘physics’ uncle, Uncle Abe, who explained that the relationship between electricity and magnetism (and the relationship of both to light) had indeed been made clear by the great Scottish physicist Clerk Maxwell.«37» A moving electrical field would induce a magnetic field near it, and this in turn would induce a second electrical field, and this another magnetic field, and so on. With these almost instantaneous mutual inductions, Maxwell envisaged, there would be, in effect, a combined electromagnetic field in extremely rapid oscillation, and this would expand in all directions, propagating itself as a wave motion through space. In 1865, Maxwell was able to calculate that such fields would propagate at 300,000 kilometers per second, a velocity extremely close to that of light. This was very startling – no one had suspected any relationship between magnetism and light; indeed, no one had any idea what light might be, although it was well understood that it was propagated as a wave. Now Maxwell suggested that light and magnetism were ‘affections of the same substance, and that light is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the field according to electromagnetic laws.’ After hearing this, I began to think of light differently – as electric and magnetic fields leapfrogging over each other with lightning speed, braiding themselves together to form a ray of light.

  It followed, as a corollary, that any varying electric or magnetic field could give rise to an electromagnetic wave propagating in all directions. It was this, Abe said, that inspired Heinrich Hertz to look for other electromagnetic waves – waves, perhaps, with a much longer wavelength than visible light. He was able to do this, in 1886, by using a simple induction coil as a ‘transmitter’ and small coils of wire with tiny (a hundredth of a millimeter) spark gaps as ‘receivers.’

  When the induction coil was set to sparking, he could observe, in the darkness of his lab, tiny secondary sparks in the small coils. ‘You switch on the wireless,’ said Abe, ‘and you never think of the wonder of what’s actually happening. Think how it must have seemed on that day in 1886 when Hertz saw these sparks in the darkness and realized that Maxwell was right, and that something like light, an electromagnetic wave, was raying out from his induction coil in every direction.’

  Hertz died as a very young man, and nev
er knew that his discovery was to revolutionize the world. Uncle Abe himself was only eighteen when Marconi first transmitted radio signals across the English Channel, and he remembered the excitement of this, even greater than the excitement over the discovery of X-rays two years earlier. Radio signals could be picked up by certain crystals, especially crystals of galena; one would have to find the right spot on their surface by exploring them with a tungsten wire, a ‘cat’s whisker.’ One of Uncle Abe’s own early inventions was to make a synthetic crystal that worked even better than galena. Everyone still spoke of radio waves as ‘Hertzian waves’ at this point, and Abe had called his crystal Hertzite.

  But the supreme achievement of Maxwell was to draw all electromagnetic theory together, to formalize it, to compress it, into just four equations. In this half-page of symbols, Abe said, showing the equations to me in one of his books, was condensed the whole of Maxwell’s theory – for those who could understand them. Maxwell’s equations revealed, for Hertz, the lineaments of ‘a new physics…like an enchanted fairyland’ – not only the possibility of generating radio waves, but a sense that the whole universe was crisscrossed by electromagnetic fields of every sort, reaching to the ends of the universe.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Home Life

  Zionism played a considerable part on both sides of my family. My father’s sister Alida worked during the Great War as an assistant to Nahum Sokolov and Chaim Weitzmann, the leaders of Zionism in England at the time, and, with her gift for languages, was entrusted with the translation of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 into French and Russian, and her son Aubrey, even as a boy, was a learned and eloquent Zionist (and later, as Abba Eban, the first Israeli ambassador to the United Nations). My parents, as doctors with a large house, were expected to provide a venue, a hospitable place, for Zionist meetings, and such meetings often took over the house in my childhood. I would hear them from my bedroom upstairs – raised voices, endless argument, passionate poundings of the table – and every so often a Zionist, flushed with anger or enthusiasm, would barge into my room, looking for the loo.

  These meetings seemed to take a lot out of my parents – they would look pale and exhausted after each one – but they felt a duty to host them. I never heard them talk between themselves about Palestine or Zionism, and I suspected they had no strong convictions on the subject, at least until after the war, when the horror of the Holocaust made them feel there should be a ‘National Home.’ I felt they were bullied by the organizers of these meetings, and by the gangsterlike evangelists who would pound at the front door and demand large sums for yeshivas or ‘schools in Israel.’ My parents, clearheaded and independent in most other ways, seemed to become soft and helpless in the face of these demands, perhaps driven by a sense of obligation or anxiety. My own feelings (which I never discussed with them) were passionately negative: I came to hate Zionism and evangelism and politicking of every sort, which I regarded as noisy and intrusive and bullying. I longed for the quiet discourse, the rationality, of science.

  My parents were moderately orthodox in practice (though there was little discussion that I remember as to what anyone actually believed), but some of the family were extremely orthodox. It was said that my mother’s father would wake up at night if his yarmulke fell off, and that my father’s father would not even swim without his. Some of my aunts wore sheitls – wigs – and these gave an oddly youthful, sometimes mannequinlike appearance to them: Ida had a bright yellow one, Gisela a raven black one, and these remained unchanged even when my own hair, many years later, had started to turn grey.

  My mother’s eldest sister, Annie, had gone to Palestine in the 1890s and founded a school in Jerusalem, a school for ‘English gentlewomen of the Mosaic persuasion.’ Annie was a woman of commanding presence. She was excessively orthodox, and (I suspect) believed herself to be on close personal terms with the Deity (as she was with the Chief Rabbi, the Mandate, and the Mufti, in Jerusalem).«38» She would arrive periodically in England with steamer trunks so enormous they needed six porters to lift them, and on her visits she would introduce an atmosphere of terrifying religious strictness in the house – my parents, less orthodox, were somewhat scared of her gimlet eye.

  On one occasion – it was an oppressive Saturday in the tense summer of 1939 – I decided to ride my tricycle up and down Exeter Road near the house, but there was a sudden downpour and I got completely soaked. Annie wagged a finger at me, and shook her heavy head: ‘Riding on shabbas! You can’t get away with it,’ she said. ‘He sees everything, He is watching all the time!’ I disliked Saturdays from this time on, disliked God, too (at least the vindictive, punitive God that Annie’s warning had evoked), and developed an uncomfortable, anxious, watched feeling about Saturdays (which persists, a little, to this day).

  In general – that Saturday was an exception – I would go with the family to shul, the commodious Walm Lane Synagogue which, at that time, had a congregation of over two thousand. We would all be scrubbed and excessively clean, and dressed in our ‘Sunday’ best, and walk down Exeter Road following our parents, like so many ducklings. My mother, along with various aunts, would climb to the women’s gallery.

  When I was very young, three or less, I would go with her, but as a ‘grown-up’ boy of six, I was expected to be downstairs with the men (though I was always stealing glances at the women upstairs, and sometimes tried to wave, though I was sternly forbidden to do so).

  My father was well known in the congregation – half of whom were his patients, or my mother’s – and had the reputation of being a staunch supporter of the community and a scholar, though his scholarship was nothing, he told me, to that of Wilensky across the aisle, who knew every word of the Talmud so thoroughly by heart that if a pin were stuck into any of the volumes, he could tell you what sentence it would pierce on every page. Wilensky did not follow the service, but some internal program or litany of his own, always rocking back and forth, davening, in his own way. He had long ringlets, and payes down his face – I looked at him with awe, as something superhuman.

  It was a very long service on Saturday mornings, which even with high-speed praying took a minimum of three hours – and the praying was, at times, incredibly fast. One silent prayer, the Amidah, had to be said standing, facing toward Jerusalem. It was, I supposed, about ten thousand words long, but the front-runners in the shul could do it in three minutes flat. I would read as much as I could (with frequent glances at the translation on the opposite page to see what it all meant), but I had scarcely read more than a paragraph or two before the time was up, and the service rushed ahead onto something else. For the most part I did not try to keep up, but wandered through the prayer book in my own way. It was here that I learned about myrrh and frankincense, and the weights and measures used in the land of Israel three thousand years ago. There were many passages which attracted me with their rich language, or their beauty, their sense of poetry and myth, detailing the odors and spices that went with some sacrifices. It was evident that God had an acute nose.

  I liked the singing, the choir – where cousin Dennis sang, and Uncle Moss presided – the virtuosic chazzan, and some of the savage, rabbinical speeches, and occasionally the sense that all of us actually formed a single community. But by and large, the synagogue oppressed me; religion seemed more real, and infinitely more pleasant, at home. I loved Passover, with its preliminaries (removing all the leavened bread, the chometz, from the house, burning it, sometimes communally with our neighbors), the special, beautiful cutlery and plates and tablecloths we used for its eight days, and the rooting up of the horseradish that had been growing in the garden, its grinding which led to copious tears.

  We would sit down fifteen, sometimes twenty, to the table on seder nights: my parents; the maiden aunts – Birdie, Len, and before the war, Dora, sometimes Annie; cousins of varying degree, visiting from France or Switzerland; and always a stranger or two who would come. There was a beautiful, embroidered tablecloth which Annie had
brought us from Jerusalem, gleaming white and gold on the table. My mother, knowing that sooner or later there would be accidents, always had a preemptive ‘spill’ herself – she would manage, somehow, very early in the evening, to tip a bottle of red wine onto the tablecloth, and thereafter no guest would be embarrassed if they knocked over a glass. Though I knew she did this deliberately, I could never predict how or when the ‘accident’ would occur; it always looked absolutely spontaneous and authentic. (She would immediately spread salt on the wine stain, and it became much paler, almost disappearing; I wondered why salt had this power.)

  Unlike the shul service, which was gabbled as fast as possible, and largely unintelligible to me, the seder service took its time, with long discussions and disquisitions, and questions about the symbolism of the different dishes – the egg, the salt water, the bitter herb, the haroseth. The Four Boys mentioned in the service – the Wise One, the Wicked One, the Simple One, and the One Who Was Too Young to Ask Any Questions – were always identified by me with the four of us, though this was especially unfair to David, who was neither more nor less wicked than any other fifteen-year-old boy. I loved the ritual washing of the hands, the four cups of wine, the recitation of the ten plagues (here, as one recited them, one would dip an index finger into the wine at each plague; then, after the tenth plague, the slaying of the first-born, one would throw the wine on one’s fingertips over one’s shoulder). I, as the youngest, would recite the Four Questions in a quavering treble; and later, try to see where my father hid the middle matzoh, the afikomen (but I could no more catch him doing this than I could catch my mother maneuvering the wine spill).