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April 1, 2015
p148 I made a rapid mental review to be sure that none of those present had as yet heard it, then started to tell the story of the onion in the boiled linseed oil. This, in fact, was a dining room for a company of varnish manufacturers, and it is well known that boiled linseed oil has for many centuries constituted the fundamental raw material of our art. It is an ancient art and therefore noble... But it is also a subtly fraudulent art, like that which aims at concealing the substratum by conferring on it the color and appearance of what it is not: from this point of view it is related to cosmetics and adornment, which are equally ambiguous and almost equally ancient arts (Isaiah 3:16). Given therefore its pluri-millennial origins, it is not so strange that the trade of manufacturing varnishes retains in its crannies... rudiments of customs and procedures abandoned for a long time now.
[Levi tells his story of a prescription (recipe) for boiling linseed oil that included adding two slices of onion at the end of the boiling process. A little research revealed that this dated back to a period before thermometers and the onion slices were there to indicate the proper temperature when they started frying.] Evidently, with the passing of the years, what had been a crude measuring operation had lost its significance and was transformed into a mysterious and magical practice.
p149 Old Cometto told of an analogous episode. Not without nostalgia he recalled his good old times, the times of copal gum: he told how once boiled linseed oil was combined with these legendary resins to make fabulously durable and gleaming varnishes. Their fame and name survived now only in the locution “copal shoes,” [no luck with this. Possibly used on shoes that looked like patent leather?] which alludes precisely to a varnish for leather at one time very widespread that has been out of fashion for at least the last half century. Today the locution itself is almost extinct. Copals were imported by the British from the most distant and savage countries, and bore their names, which in fact distinguished one kind from another: copal of Madagascar or Sierra Leone or Kauri [New Zealand] (whose deposits, let it be said parenthetically, were exhausted along about 1967), and the very well known and noble Congo copal. They are fossil resins of vegetable origin, with a rather high melting point, and in the state in which they are found and sold in commerce are insoluble in oil: to render them soluble and compatible they were subjected to a violent, semi-destructive boiling, in the course of which their acidity diminished (they decarboxylated) and also the melting point lowered. The operation was carried out in a semi-industrial manner by direct fire in modest, mobile kettles of four or six hundred pounds; during the boiling they were weighed at intervals, and when the resin had lost 16 percent of its weight in smoke, water vapor, and carbon dioxide, the solubility in oil was judged to have been reached. Along about 1940, the archaic copals, expensive and difficult to supply during the war, were supplanted by phenolic and maleic resins, [This is an interesting instance of the importance of war in providing an impetus for change and improvement of industrial techniques -- also in culinary techniques as sieges often push people to eat things they've never eaten before] both suitably modified, which, besides costing less, were directly compatible with the oils. Very well: Cometto told us how, in a factory whose name shall not be uttered, until 1953 a phenolic resin, which took the place of the Congo copal in a formula, was treated exactly like copal itself -- that is, by consuming 16 percent of it on the fire, amid pestilential phenolic exhalations -- until it had reached that solubility in oil which the resin already possessed.
p150 Here at this point I remembered that all languages are full of images and metaphors whose origin is being lost, together with the art from which they were drawn: horsemanship having declined to the level of an expensive sport, such expressions as “belly to the ground” and “taking the bit in one’s teeth” are unintelligible and sound odd; since mills with superimposed stones have disappeared, which were also called millstones, and in which for centuries wheat (and varnishes) were ground, such a phrase as “to eat like four millstones” sounds odd and even mysterious today. In the same way, since Nature too is conservative, we carry in our coccyx what remains of a vanished tail.
He’s riding my hobby-horse, here. (And how often do you get a chance to use a phrase that both makes his point and invokes Tristram Shandy?) As I’ve previously written Here, I dream of Smart electronic books that not only include links (as here) to information and images about what is mentioned, but also -- and this is the best part and also the part that relates to Levi’s point -- an explanation of what the author meant by words and phrases. My standard example is the term “Tory” which can mean many different things depending on the year and the point of view of the writer. Wiki can tell me what a “Tory” is but not what the term meant to Ford Madox Ford in Parade’s End -- or better (to use Levi's favorite phrase), what it means to Ford’s character Christopher Tietjens in those novels. (In the end, the character Christopher is probably the best definition of the term in that work, but that doesn’t help you much in the opening chapters of Some Do Not.
A confession here, when I first re-read this I completely missed Levi’s point about “taking the bit in one’s teeth.” I was thinking, “But horses still do that, it’s even happened to me.” But his point, of course, is that horse related language is today almost as obscure to the average person as automobile related language would be to Jane Austen’s characters. If you told someone, “Don’t put your ears back” they might get it because cats do the same thing. But if you mentioned to the Bennet sisters that Lydia was the first of them to “drive stick” they wouldn’t have a clue. And this is possibly also an excellent example of Levi’s concern as well, given the stories I keep reading about carjackers and car thieves being thwarted by manual transmissions. Driving “stick,” and even more “driving stick” will be a mystery to most people within a generation.
...Bruni worked from 1955 to 1965 in a large factory on the shores of a lake, the same one in which I had learned the rudiments of the varnish-making trade during the years 1946-47. So he told us that, when he was down there in charge of the Synthetic Varnishes Department, there fell into his hands a formula of a chromate-based anti-rust paint that contained an absurd component: nothing less than ammonium chloride, the old, alchemical sal ammoniac of the temple of Ammon, much more apt to corrode iron than preserve it from rust. He had asked his superiors and the veterans in the department about it: surprised and a bit shocked, they had replied that in that formulation, which corresponded to at least twenty or thirty tons of the product a month and had been in force for at least ten years, that salt “had always been in it,” and that he had his nerve, so young in years and new on the job, criticizing the factory’s experience, and looking for trouble by asking silly hows and whys. If ammonium chloride was in the formula, it was evident that it had some sort of use. What use it had nobody any longer knew, but one should be very careful about taking it out because “one never knows.” ... unless there have been further developments, ammonium chloride is still being put in; and yet today it is completely useless, as I can state from firsthand experience because it was I who introduced it into the formula.
p151 ...I had returned from captivity three months before and was living badly. The things I had seen and suffered were burning inside me; I felt closer to the dead than the living, and felt guilty at being a man, because men had built Auschwitz, and Auschwitz had gulped down millions of human beings, and many of my friends, and a woman who was dear to my heart. It seemed to me that I would be purified if I told its story, and I felt like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who waylays on the street the wedding guests going to the feast, inflicts on them the story of his misfortune. I was writing concise and bloody poems telling the story at breakneck speed, either by talking to people or by writing it down, so much so that gradually a book was later born: by writing I found peace for a while and felt myself become a man again, a person like everyone else, neither a martyr nor debased nor a saint: one of those people who form a family and look to the future rather than the past.
Since one can’t live on poetry and stories, I looked feverishly for work and found it in the big lakeshore factory, still damaged from the war...
...
[Levi is given the task of salvaging thousands of “cans” of “livered” paint (the contents of the cans had turned gelatinous, “the consistence of slaughtered tripes,” and the cans had been cut open and the contents dumped in a pile.]
That paint, he told me, had been produced during the war and immediately after; it contained a basic chromate and alkyd resin. Perhaps the chromate was too basic or the resin too acidic: these were exactly the conditions under which a “livering” can take place. All right, he made me the gift of that pile of old sins; I should think about it, make tests and examinations, and try to say with precision why the trouble had occurred, what should be done so that it was not repeated, and if it were possible to reclaim the damaged goods.
p153 Thus set forth, half chemistry and half police work, the problem attracted me: I was reconsidering it that evening... as one of the sooty, freezing freight trains of that period lugged me to Turin. Now it happened that the next day destiny reserved for me a different and unique gift: the encounter with a woman, young and made of flesh and blood, warm against my side through our overcoats, gay in the humid mist of the avenues, patient, wise and sure as we were walking down streets still bordered with ruins. In a few hours we knew that we belonged to each other, not for one meeting but for life, as in fact has been the case. In a few hours I felt reborn and replete with new powers, washed clean and cured of a long sickness, finally ready to enter life with joy and vigor; equally cured was suddenly the world around me, and exorcised the name and face of the woman who had gone down into the lower depths with me and had not returned. My very writing became a different adventure, no longer the dolorous itinerary of a convalescent, no longer a begging for compassion and friendly faces, but a lucid building, which was no longer solitary: the work of a chemist who weighs and divides, measures and judges on the basis of assured proofs, and strives to answer questions. Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells his story, I now felt in the writing complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differential calculus. It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is, commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter. Paradoxically, my baggage of atrocious memories became a wealth, a seed; it seemed to me that, by writing, I was growing like a plant.
p154 In the freight train of the following Monday... I felt full of joy and alert as never before or after. I was ready to challenge everything and everyone, in the same way that I had challenged and defeated Auschwitz and loneliness: dispose, especially, to engage in joyous battle with the clumsy pyramid of orange livers that awaited me on the lakeshore.
p154 It is the spirit that dominates matter, is that not so? Was it not this that they had hammered into my head in the Fascist and Gentile liceo? I threw myself into the work with the same intensity that, at not so distant a period, we had attacked a rock wall; and the adversary was still the same, the not-I, the Button Molder, [Footnote: a character in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt "Peer escapes and is confronted with the Button-molder, who maintains that Peer's soul must be melted down with other faulty goods unless he can explain when and where in life he has been 'himself'." -Wiki] the hyle: stupid matter, slothfully hostile as human stupidity is hostile, and like it strong because of its obtuse passivity. Our trade is to conduct and win this interminable battle: a livered paint is much more rebellious, more refractory to your will than a lion in its mad pounce; but, let’s admit it, it’s also less dangerous.
...
[He eliminates the resin as culprit and moves on to the chromate] ...right before my eyes I had the interminable list of tests from January 1942 until today (one of the least exciting forms of reading imaginable), and all the values satisfied the specifications, indeed were equal among themselves: 29.5 percent, not one percent more, not one less. I felt my inner being as a chemist writhe, confronted by that abomination; in fact, one should know that the natural oscillations in the method of preparation of such a chromate, added to the inevitable analytical errors, make it extremely improbable that that many values found in different batches and on different days could coincide so exactly. How come nobody had gotten suspicious? But in fact at that time I did not yet know the frightening anesthetic power of company papers, their capacity to hobble, douse, and dull every leap of intuition and every spark of talent. It is well known to the scholarly that all secretions can be harmful or toxic: now under pathological conditions it is not rare that the paper, a company secretion, is reabsorbed to an excessive degree, and puts to sleep, paralyzes, or actually kills the organism from which it has been exuded.
...
[He discovers that on January 4, 1944 a new chromatic file card had been created with the direction to add, not the correct “2 or 3” drops of reagent, but “23” drops of reagent.]
p157 ...The diagnosis was confirmed, the pathogenesis discovered: it was now a matter of defining the therapy.
This was found pretty soon, drawing on good inorganic chemistry, that distant Cartesian island, a lost paradise, for us organic chemist, bunglers, “students of gunks”: it was necessary to neutralize in some way, within the sick body of that varnish, the excess of basicity due to free lead oxide. The acid were shown to be noxious from other aspects: I thought of ammonium chloride, capable of combining stably with lead oxide, producing an insoluble and inert chloride and freeing the ammonia...
p158 The following Monday the mill had regained its voice: it was in fact crunching away gaily with a full, continuous tone... I stopped it and cautiously loosened the bolts on the manhole; there spurted out with a hiss an ammoniacal puff, as it should. Then I took off the cover. Angels and ministers of grace! -- the paint was fluid and smooth, completely normal, born again from its ashes like the Phoenix...
Since the storeroom contained several shipments of perilously basic chromate, which must also be utilized because they had been accepted by the inspection and could not be returned to the supplier, the chloride was officially introduced as an anti-livering preventive in the formula of that varnish. Then I quit my job: ten years went by, the postwar years were over, the deleterious, too basic chromates disappeared from the market, and my report went the way of all flesh: but the formulas are as holy as prayers, decree-laws, and dead languages, and not an iota in them can be changed. And so my ammonium chloride, the twin of a happy love and a liberating book, by now completely useless and probably a bit harmful, is religiously ground into the chromate anti-rust paint on the shore of that lake, and nobody knows why anymore.
If this hadn’t been in the news today I wouldn’t necessarily connect the following with the preceding, but I was reading an account of a tragic fire in Brooklyn in which seven Orthodox Jewish children died. Speculation is that the fire was caused by a hot plate that was left on because Orthodox Jews are not supposed to push buttons on the Sabbath, so they just leave turned on hot plates they think they will need. If the ritual of not doing work (pushing buttons) was ever necessary, its implications today are far beyond the imaginations of the people who first composed these magical formulas... and yet people can't imagine changing them.
Chromium (Cr 24)
“Chromium oxide was used by the Chinese in the Qin dynasty over 2,000 years ago to coat metal weapons found with the Terracotta Army... nearly all chromium is commercially extracted from the single commercially viable ore chromite, which is iron chromium oxide (FeCr2O4). Chromite is also now the chief source of chromium for chromium pigments.”
...
“Chromium metal left standing in air is passivated by oxygen, forming a thin protective oxide surface layer. This layer is a spinel structure only a few atoms thick. It is very dense, and prevents the diffusion of oxygen into the underlying material. This barrier is in contrast to iron or plain carbon steels, where the oxygen migrates into the underlying material and causes rusting.[6]”
...
“Although rare, deposits of native chromium exist.[13][14] The Udachnaya Pipe in Russia produces samples of the native metal. This mine is a kimberlite pipe, rich in diamonds, and the reducing environment helped produce both elemental chromium and diamond.[15]”
...
“Chromium(III) ions tend to form octahedral complexes. The colors of these complexes is determined by the ligands attached to the Cr center. The commercially available chromium(III) chloride hydrate is the dark green complex [CrCl2(H2O)4]Cl. Closely related compounds have different colors: pale green [CrCl(H2O)5]Cl2 and the violet [Cr(H2O)6]Cl3. If water-free green chromium(III) chloride is dissolved in water then the green solution turns violet after some time, due to the substitution of water by chloride in the inner coordination sphere. This kind of reaction is also observed with solutions of chrome alum and other water-soluble chromium(III) salts.”
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History
“Chromium minerals as pigments came to the attention of the west in the 18th century. On 26 July 1761, Johann Gottlob Lehmann found an orange-red mineral in the Beryozovskoye minesin the Ural Mountains which he named Siberian red lead. Though misidentified as a lead compound with selenium and iron components, the mineral was in fact crocoite (lead chromate) with a formula of PbCrO4.[26]
In 1770, Peter Simon Pallas visited the same site as Lehmann and found a red lead mineral that had useful properties as a pigment in paints. The use of Siberian red lead as a paint pigment then developed rapidly. A bright yellow pigment made from crocoite also became fashionable.[26]
The red color of rubies is from a small amount of chromium.
In 1797, Louis Nicolas Vauquelin received samples of crocoite ore. He produced chromium trioxide(CrO3) by mixing crocoite with hydrochloric acid. In 1798, Vauquelin discovered that he could isolate metallic chromium by heating the oxide in a charcoal oven, making him the discoverer of the element.[27] Vauquelin was also able to detect traces of chromium in precious gemstones, such as ruby or emerald.[26][28]”
...
Dye and pigment
School bus painted in chrome yellow[37]
“The mineral crocoite (lead chromate PbCrO4) was used as a yellow pigment shortly after its discovery. After a synthesis method became available starting from the more abundant chromite, chrome yellow was, together with cadmium yellow, one of the most used yellow pigments. The pigment does not photodegrade, but it tends to darken due to the formation of chromium(III) oxide. It has a strong color, and was used for school buses in the US and for Postal Service (for example Deutsche Post) in Europe. The use of chrome yellow declined due to environmental and safety concerns and was replaced by organic pigments or alternatives free from lead and chromium.”
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