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Table talk: stories of the stuff that makes up the world
Natural History, March, 2003 by Hans Christian von Baeyer
The ingredients: A Guided Tour of the Elements By Philip Ball Oxford University Press, 2003; $22.00
When I was in college nearly half a century ago, we students were entranced by the inimitable campus bard, Tom Lehrer, singing "The Elements." At a breathtaking pace he rattled them off:
There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,/And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium/And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,/ And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,/Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium/And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium/And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium [inhale]/And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.
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The song went on to list a total of 102 elements, but Lehrer, then a math instructor at Harvard, was well enough informed to end on a cautious note: "These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,/And there may be many others but they haven't been discovered." His caveat turned out to be well advised. The most recent element to be discovered, number 118, was promptly undiscovered again.
What a world of drama and mystery is evoked by those wonderful names! The occasional familiar one--life-giving oxygen, much-coveted gold--saves the list from academic obscurity and imbues it with an aura of relevance. At the same time, the strange names cry out for more information. What does that one look like? Is it normally a gas, or a solid, or perhaps even a liquid like mercury? Who discovered it? When? Where? How? What does the name mean? What's it good for? The lore and lure of the elements--the stuff that we and the rest of the universe are made of--cast their spell far beyond the circle of professional chemists.
For answers to the questions conjured up by Lehrer's ditty back in the `50s, I used to turn to my "rubber bible." We all called it that, rather than The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, because it was published by The Chemical Rubber Publishing Company and printed on thin India paper, like a bible. Now in its eighty-third edition (my tattered copy is the thirty-eighth), this fat book has been an indispensable reference for four generations of scientists. Before computers, that's where you looked up stuff like the value of the tangent of 79.7 degrees, the density of sulfur, and all the other grains of information that give physical science its gritty texture.
In the middle of the good book, between a list of electronic configurations and the periodic table, there was an essay titled "The Elements"--like the song. It was an alphabetical list of thumbnail sketches, each no longer than a paragraph, of the properties and histories of the elements, from actinium to zirconium. In 3,000 pages, one brief chapter was the only repository in the great reference for anecdotes about people and stories about places of origin, discoveries, applications, and etymologies. This brief section of my bible relieved the tedium of the surrounding pile of dry data, and provided a reassuring reminder that the entire enterprise is of human origin.
Although an alphabetical listing of the elements is more practical than Lehrer's purely poetic arrangement, it is not much more scientific. The number of ways to shuffle a hundred names is almost unlimited. A historian of science might compile a list by year of discovery--starting with Aristotle's element of water, which Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier unmasked as a compound in 1783, and ending with the nameless superheavies that seem to be forever embroiled in controversy. An economist might classify the elements by price, an industrialist by usefulness, a geologist by abundance on Earth, an astronomer by their place in the scheme of nucleosynthesis, a physician by necessity for health. By far the most significant list for scientists is Dmitri Mendeleyev's periodic table of 1869 one of the great triumphs of the human intellect.
But what if you want to conduct a guided tour for the public? How would you choose your itinerary? Which of the possible enumerations of nature's building blocks would most suit your stroll? The answer, of course, is "none of the above." The Italian writer Primo Levi's semi-autobiographical book The Periodic Table comprises only twenty-one elemental chapter names. "Brilliant Light," the English-American neurologist Oliver Sacks's reminiscences of his chemical boyhood (published in The New Yorker and later expanded in his book Uncle Tungsten), pushes the envelope of inclusiveness with mentions of forty-five elements. Sacks recalls how he once drove his parents to distraction with an enraptured chemical monologue until they were forced to exclaim: "Enough about thallium!" List mania, even in the scientific realm, is not a universal passion.
Philip Ball, an English science writer and contributing editor for Nature, is far too experienced to become boxed in by the lure of comprehensiveness. He explains his approach in the preface: "No piano tutor would start by instructing a young pupil to play every note on the keyboard. Far better to show how just a few keys suffice for constructing a host of simple tunes." Accordingly, his little book is divided into just seven chapters, with the history and explanation of the periodic table taking pride of place in the middle. Leading up to it is a short history of the elements, from Aristotle to the seventeenth-century chemist Robert Boyle, followed by two intimate portraits of individual elements.
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