"...I Found My Friends, They're In My Head."

Ever since the first day we looked at the periodic table, I've had a question.  "What is it about lithium that inspired a hit Nirvana song?" It's in beautiful irony that in my last blog post about my book, I found the answer.  Robert Lowell is a classic poet.  Everyone at the time agreed he was a bit mad.  He thought he was the Virgin Mary one day and tried to stop traffic on a highway the next. He moved all over and left a fiance to go after his poetic dreams.  He was going through manic highs and lows because of a chemical imbalance in his brain.  Pharmacists came up with lithium carbonate supplements to help people with this problem.  It doesn't cure the high or low, but it prevents the next spell from happening.  It also helps fix people's circadian clock.  Normal people function in a 24 hour day, but bipolar people don't.  They can go forever on a high, when their brains are alight with hyperactivity.  Afterwards, however, they crash into a hard depression.  Lowell immediately benefited from the tablets.  From his new perspective, he realized how he had messed up in his heightened states.  His poetry took a more frank, realistic turn.  Over time, it became dull and almost lifeless.  Other people who took lithium admitted that they felt like they were tranquilized while on it and Lowell's friends noted that he looked changed, in a bad way.  His later work is rarely read because of the lack of life it holds.

Animal Meth

A scientist who was dubbed insane, named Crookes, had taken to the study of selenium.  Selenium gets its name from selene, or the Greek word for moon.  The moon is associated with "lunacy", which is just a pretty word for "crazy." We all (animals) have traces of selenium in our bodies. If we don't have any in our bloodstream, it may signal AIDS.  In large doses, though, selenium is toxic.  There is a plant that grows in the western United States affectionately named locoweed.  It's in the pea family, and some varieties take selenium from the soil.  Cattle seem to really like locoweed.  If ingested, the cattle begin to stagger and stumble around, almost as if they were drunk.  They get fevers and break out in sores.  They also become gaunt and anorexic.  Ranchers call it the blind staggers.  Cows love it though! They get addicted to the locoweed and will eat nothing but it.  It's concluded that the selenium overdose is what causes their symptoms.

The Name Game (Again)

Nowadays, aluminium is used in everything from horseshoes to soda cans.  But a couple hundred years ago, aluminium was far more valuable than gold.  Back when it was first discovered in 1825, it was deemed a precious metal because it was so shiny.  It was more valuable than gold because, even though it was much more common in the Earth's crust, it just about never came in pure forms like gold.  It's always bonded to something, usually oxygen.  It was very hard to get it by itself.  Aluminium was so revered, Napoleon III reserved cutlery made of aluminium for his special guests at banquets while normal guests had ones of gold.  The Washington Monument is capped in aluminium.  Its value was only because it was so hard to purify. When Charles Hall ran an electric current through a liquid with dissolved aluminium compounds in it, the pure metal sank to the bottom, just like the prices of it would soon plummet.  His purification method was very easy to do and would allow for mass production of pure Al.  The price went from $550 per pound to 25 cents per pound.  There's a slight name-game to this element.  Around the world, aluminium is spelled "aluminium."  But in America, it's usually spelled "aluminum," without the extra i.  Hall used the international spelling on his patents, but in one little advertising fluke, he dropped the i.  This was actually good for business; the spelling error put aluminium along the same lines as "platinum".

Gyorgy Hevesy and the Mystery Meat

Gyorgy Hevesy was a bald, jowled, mustached aristocrat from Hungary.  He moved to England to do research in chemistry.  Away from his rich Hungarian foods in his English boarding home, he noticed that the meals the landlady prepared bore striking resemblance to the meals they had the day before.  When he confronted her about the recycling of his leftovers, she denied all charges.  He decided to find the truth behind the mystery meat.  He had discovered radium-D in his lab and hoped to be able to use it to track radioactivity through the bodies and organs of organisms that ingested the radioactive material.  But before that, he decided to use it to investigate his landlady's cooking.  He sprinkled radioactive lead on his dinner one night.  His landlady collected the leftovers as usual.  The next night, he brought a detector to dinner.  When he put it over his food, it went off, signaling the presence of radioactive lead.  He caught her red-handed.

A more notable discovery of Hevesy's was the finding of element 72, dubbed hafnium, in his first try.  The research got him nominated in 1924 for the Nobel Prize in chemistry, but political bickering made it so that no one took the gold.  Speaking of gold, Hevesy had quite the interesting time with gold in Nazi Germany.  At this time, it was illegal to ship gold out of Germany and Nazis went around collecting it.  Two Jewish scientists sent their gold Nobel Prizes to Niels Bohr's lab (which was where Hevesy worked) for safekeeping.  The  time came where Nazis knocked on Bohr's door, looking for gold.  Hevesy wanted to bury the medals, but Bohr said that would be far too obvious.  Instead, Hevesy took a caustic mix of nitric and hydrochloric acid called aqua regina to dissolve them.  When the Nazis ransacked the lab looking for valuables, they left the orange beaker alone.  Hevesy had to flee the institute, but when he came back years later, he found the beaker on a shelf, untouched.  He precipitated the gold from the solution and had the medals re-cast.

The Name Game

The race to find all the elements started as a fun pass-time for scientists who had the appropriate funds.  Soon, during the Cold War, a rivalry came about between American and Soviet scientists to leave their marks upon the periodic table.  The University of California at Berkley named elements 97 and 98 (which they had found in their labs) berkelium and californium.  The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section joked around that the university would, no doubt, find plenty of other elements after these and lost the chance to be immortalized on the table with a sequence like universitium (97), ofium (98), californium (99), berkelium (100).  Berkley scientists joked back, saying how awful it would've been if some Yankee scientist discovered elements 99 and 100 before them and decided to name them "newium" and "yorkium".

One scientist from Berkley, Glenn Seaborg, stepped in when his colleague, Edwin McMillan, was whisked away from his studies by the U.S. government to work on radar and other advances during World War II.  Seaborg took on McMillan's work and made element 94.  It's charge is +7, higher than any other element out there.  It was believed that this was the last element that could be made.  Because of this, Seaborg named it plutonium.  He worked in finding elements 95 and 96, which he named americium and curium, the latter after Marie Curie.  He also found elements 99 and 100 (einsteinium and fermium) in radioactive coral after a hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific atolls in 1952.  They continued on to find elements 101, 102, and 103 as well.

During this time, Soviet science was at a standstill.  Their scientists were sent to Siberia to mine for nickel and other minerals that were abundant in the -80 degree mines.  Hearing word of America's successes, a few went back to their labs to contest with the American chemists.  They managed to steal some of America's splendor by finding element 104.  Things got so tense, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) had to intervene in the naming of the next elements from 104 too 109: rutherfordium (104), dubnium (105), seaborgium (106), bohrium (107),  hassium (108), and meitnerium (109).  Element 106 caused some fuss, since Americans downright refused to have it named anything other than seaborgium, the only element to be named after a living person.   They practically forced the IUPAC to allow it to be named that since they were backed by one of the major scientific-journal publishing companies.  That was a small victory, though, because Russia still has the glory for finding all the elements after that.

The Dish on Dirty Bombs

The normal atomic bomb is insidious enough.  They're easier to build than dirty bombs.  They wipe out entire cities and everything nearby.  Spontaneous tornadoes come up afterwards and if people don't die from the initial bomb, they will shortly afterwards.  Dirty bombs are a whole other story.  Normal nuclear bombs use the heat of the explosion to toast everything in its range. They emit a bit of radiation, but not as much as dirty bombs.  Dirty bombs use gamma rays.  Gamma rays have extremely high wavelengths.  Think of them as X-rays that tear you apart when you are exposed to large amounts of them.  They burn people to a crisp, but they also cause damage more subtle to people who aren't right underneath them.  They bore into bone marrow and mix up white blood cells' chromosomes.  They either die, become cancerous, or grow continuously.  They then end up deformed and cannot fight infections.  They are from hell.

Cobalt is the main villain when it comes to dirty bombs.   The warhead (main thing inside the bomb) is surrounded by a jacket of cobalt-59.  In the warhead, plutonium undergoes fission with hydrogen.  The cobalt takes neutrons from these reactions, changing it from stable cobalt-59 to loose-cannon cobalt-60, which would float down onto the victims as ash, coating the area it's detonated in.  A 10th of an ounce of cobalt-60 covering every surface of the Earth would be enough to completely exterminate the human race . . . or every race, for that matter.  Even cockroaches.  Normal atomic bombs can be waited out in underground shelters for a few days.  Dirty cobalt bombs, however, cannot be waited out.  It would take an entire lifetime for the land hit by one to become survivable again.  The cobalt ash on the ground keeps it radiated, gamma rays continuing to flow out for decades.

Fritz Haber: All is Fair in Love and War

Fritz Haber's more tame discovery was that of nitrogen-based fertilizer.  His invention has saved millions of lives from starvation and is key in feeding the current global population, but only through extension.  His real pursuit was developing a fertilizer-distilled bomb for use by the Germans in World War I.  German military leaders recruited him to make the bombs to flush the Allies out of the trenches.  His first attempt didn't work, and the unsuspecting Brits didn't even know they had been attacked when the shells were lobbed into the trenches.  Their second attempt failed because of stupidity.  They took the new shells to Russia to be tested, and the liquid inside them froze rather than explode.  Haber decided to switch to chlorine gas.  Chlorine was much better for this use because it was so much smaller than the previously  used gas, bromine.  Chlorine can dart into the body much faster, due to its smaller size.  Victims drown from a liquid buildup in their lungs.

His wife did not approve of his experiments.  She was a very smart woman, having been the first to get a Ph. D in her college.  Her husband never let her work with him, though.  He always kept her busy doing domestic work and only let her translate his works.  When she learned of his gas experiments, she downright refused to help him.  They argued regularly about it, and she pleaded with him not to continue them.  He paid her no mind.  One night, after a particularly violent argument, she took his army pistol, ran out into the garden, and shot herself in the chest.  He left for work the next morning as if nothing had happened.

Haber won the 1918 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his fertilizers.  The next year, he was deemed an international war criminal.  For the next six years, he tried to extract dissolved gold from the ocean so he could help pay Germany's reparations to the Allies.  He had invented Zyklon A as an insecticide.  With some tinkering, a German company made Zyklon B.  Eventually, Haber was exiled from Germany for being Jewish and the Nazis, who were coming to power, began to use Zyklon B to gas Jews in their ever-so-famous concentration camps.  Haber's chemical was used against his own people.

The Real Story Behind Robert Bunsen

We all know who Robert Bunsen is; he's the guy that made the Bunsen burner, right? Wrong.  Robert Bunsen didn't invent "his" burner.  He just improved the existing model and made it popular in his labs.  His real love was for arsenic.  He was quite interested in arsenic since it has had a lot of popularity as a poison. He worked dedicatedly with the dangerous element, to the point where he had hallucinations and delirium from the disgustingly noxious fumes arsenic gives off.  To help treat himself, he developed iron oxide hydrate, which is still the best antidote for arsenic poisoning today.  You'd think the awful smell and poisoning would stop him from experimenting with arsenic, but you'd be wrong (...again). It took the explosion of a beaker full of arsenic. The shards of glass and the chemicals caused blindness in his right eye for the rest of his life, and such, he retired this strain of research.  If only he was wearing his goggles . . .

After that explosion, Bunsen began studying natural explosions, such as geysers and volcanoes.  He hand-collected the stuff that spewed from both.  He was quite the dare-devil.  He was the one that invented the spectroscope.  As we learned in the last lab we did, spectroscopes show the spectral lines for the elements that give off light.  Each element has its own, specific spectral lines.  In building the spectroscope, him and a student put a prism in a cigar box.  They then attached two lenses from telescopes to look inside.  The only thing that made it hard to see the spectral lines was finding a flame hot enough to heat the metals.  This is where he makes "his" Bunsen burner.  The only thing he changed from a normal burner was add an oxygen valve.  His invention of the spectroscope helped the development of the periodic table, which will be discussed in my next post. Stay tuned!

Atoms Have Soulmates Too!

The first real chapter of the book discusses the far-right column of the periodic table: the noble gases.  Everyone knows they're called "noble gases" because their valence shells are full and don't need to interact with other atoms to get or give electrons.  Sam explains this in a very interesting way by using Plato's The Symposium. Plato said that everything wants to find its compliment.  The most common example is people.  We want to find someone who completes us, with the goal that once we are together, our flaws will be filled in with the other's strengths.  Plato also came up with the concept of "forms". A form is the perfect possible form of something. For example, the perfect example of a dog exists somewhere. It has no flaws, and the subconscious goal of every other dog is to become like that one.  There are forms of everything, animate and inanimate.  This concept is supported by the tee-shirt experiment we learned about in biology class. Women chose the most attractive man by what his tee shirt smelled like after he wore it for a day with no deodorant or cologne.  The women chose the men whose immune system differed the most from their own.  If they were to reproduce, the child would have a stronger immune system because the flaws of the parents would be filled in by the other's strengths.  Sam says this is true of atoms. Atoms are looking for their compliment, another atom that will fill their need for more or less electrons.  When they find that compliment, both atoms will be much more stable and strong.  I thought it was an extremely creative way to explain all that, and how the noble gases don't need someone to complete them. They are lonely, but content to be on their own.  I find myself sympathizing with them . . . even though they're just atoms. Maybe if passionate theories were used to explain science more often, people will become more passionate about the subject.  That's just a theory.

Introduction

The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of Elements by Sam Kean is just as exciting as it sounds. Who would've thought a chemistry book could be a page-turner? I find myself actually interested in this history-chemistry crossover . . . which is coming from a high-school student where history and chemistry had probably been the two most challenging subjects in her school career.  Mr. Kean does an extraordinary job of compiling interesting tidbits about the elements and combining them with educational facts. It's enough to keep any reader interested in the subject. Well, that's enough of me giving my review. Let's continue on to the actual book.

The first chapter has many different aspects in it. A lot of it is chemistry 101: what the rows and columns on the periodic table mean, what the symbols and numbers on it mean, the properties of protons, electrons, and neutrons, among other chemistry basics. But there are also personal stories from Sam's childhood run-in with chemistry.  His favorite element is mercury. When he was little, he broke many a mercury thermometer. He sat, fascinated, as he watched his mother collect the perfect beads of mercury from the floor with a toothpick, corralling them together and rolling the quivering puddle of silver-colored mercury onto an envelope, then into an old pill bottle. Over time, the bottle would collect more mercury as Sam dropped more thermometers.  Sometimes his mother would let him look at the mercury whisk around, always merging flawlessly into another shimmering, metallic puddle. This is how our author's interest in chemistry was born.

Sam was so fascinated with mercury, he'd keep an ear out for whenever it was mentioned in hopes to learn more about it. In school, he learned that on Lewis and Clark's exploration across the Great Plains, they carried with them 600 laxatives made of mercury. Each pill was four times the size of an aspirin. They were dubbed Dr. Rush's Bilious Pills, after the "doctor" who made them. Benjamin Rush, who is perhaps better known as a signer of the Declaration of Independence, lived in Philadelphia during the nasty yellow fever breakout there in 1793. He developed a mercury-chloride treatment that, theoretically, used a poison to battle a poison. Patients' hair and teeth fell out, and many died. More died from this treatment rather than the fever. He gave Lewis and Clark these pills for their journey to help combat the constipation caused by an explorer's unpredictable diet. Mercury deposits show the paths that the exploration party took, where someone had excreted the treatment along with whatever else was in their systems.  Sam also learned that mercury was used to separate fur from pelts used to make hats, which is why hatters (much like the Mad Hatter in Alice and Wonderland) went mad. The fumes from mercury practically fray the wiring in the brain, causing symptoms similar to that of Alzheimer's.  I wonder if that's why the phrase "mad as a hatter" came about.  I love learning tidbits and facts like that.  Little explanations for things that no one bothered to question.  I think I'm really going to enjoy this book.