150. Uncle Tungsten - III. Chapters 5-7

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Uncle Tungsten

Thinking about what I posted yesterday, I've come to the conclusion I need to say more about salts. I know! It's like I read your mind, right? 

The thing is, I have a pretty good grasp of the electronic aspect of chemistry -- with an analogy I'm very happy with that will come into play in the final chapters -- but I'm still pretty in the dark about this proton donating business. (After bouncing around Wiki reading about this, I'm still confused but I did finally notice that "protonation" is the term used for a cation donating a proton. Progress.)

So, upon still further consideration, I think this discussion belongs at the end with the electronic info. Maybe.

Chapter 5 - Light For the Masses

p46 Uncle Tungsten... loved chemistry, but he was not a "pure" chemist... Uncle Dave was an entrepreneur, a businessman, as well. He was a manufacturer who made a moderately good living -- there was always a ready sale for his bulbs and vacuum tubes, and this was enough. He knew everyone who worked for him in friendly personal detail. He had no desire to expand, to become huge, as he could easily have done... He did not really need the compact but finely equipped laboratories in his factories, but he was curious and addicted to experiment, some of it with immediate application to his manufacturing, though much of it, as far as I could judge, for the pure pleasure of it, for fun...

p51 ...It was evident, at this point, [1913] that the days of the tantalum [filament] bulb were numbered, and that tungsten -- tougher, cheaper, more efficient -- would soon replace it (although this could not happen until after the war, when argon became available in commercial quantities). It was at this point that many manufacturers turned to making tungsten bulbs, and that Uncle Dave, with several of his brothers (and three of his wife's brothers, the Wechslers, also chemists), pooled their resources and founded their firm, Tungstalite.

p52 Uncle Daves' bulbs were larger than Osram, or GE, or other electric bulbs on the market -- larger, heavier, and almost absurdly robust, and they seemed to last forever... Uncle Tungsten made lightbulbs of all sorts and sizes, from dinky 1 1/2 -volt bulbs designed for little penlights to immense bulbs used for football fields or searchlights. There were also bulbs of special shapes, designed for instrument dials, ophthalmoscopes, and other medical instruments; and (despite Uncle's attachment to tungsten) bulbs with filaments of tantalum for use in cinema projectors and on trains. Such filaments were less efficient, less capable of higher temperatures than tungsten, but more resistant to vibration...


Chapter 6 - The Land of Stibnite

p58 ...Uncle Dave ... 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 [in the Geological Museum], 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, [particularly helpful animation there in Wiki. In an electrostatic bond a "spare" valence electron from one atom migrates to another atom that has a gap in its valence shell. This gives both atoms stable valence shells but also ionizes them (the donor being an anion and the receiving atom being a cation) so that they now attract each other and stick together "electrostatically." With covalent bonds, two atoms share a pair of atoms forming one stable valence pair of electrons for two atoms. This bonds them together directly. The term covalent only dates from 1939, and ionic (or electrostatic) and covalent (and other kinds of) bonds were only understood at this time due to the Nobel Prize wining work of Linus Pauling. We may return to this much later when we get to quantum theory.] and the actual arrangement of atoms in a crystal lattice reflected the closest packing that the attractions and repulsions between the atoms would allow... 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 sulfur 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. 

He's way ahead of himself here which is perhaps why he hasn't included any helpful images to go with this. 


p60 ...Was... [goethite] named in honor of Goethe, [yes ] or did he discover it? I had read that he had a passion for mineralogy and chemistry...
...
p64 The eighteenth century, Uncle told me, had been a grand time for the discovery and isolation of new metals (not only tungsten, but dozens of 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... 

I'm going to throw in this Wiki passage about Boyle which really seems to belong here. 

Robert Boyle (1627–1691) pioneered the scientific method in chemical investigations. He assumed nothing in his experiments and compiled every piece of relevant data. Boyle would note the place in which the experiment was carried out, the wind characteristics, the position of the Sun and Moon, and the barometer reading, all just in case they proved to be relevant.^[73]This approach eventually led to the founding of modern chemistry in the 18th and 19th centuries, based on revolutionary discoveries of Lavoisier and John Dalton. -Source Wiki


Chapter 7 - Chemical Recreations

p67 ...
After the war, with my new interest in minerals and colors, my brother David... showed me how to make a supersaturated solution by dissolving a salt like alum or copper sulfate in very hot water and then letting it cool... 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.


p68 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... twisted, plantlike growths in the water-glass, distending, budding, bursting, continually reshaping themselves before my eyes. [He almost beat me to the Doctor Faustus reference here. Quoting Adrian's father describing this process -- which I skipped then and will again here.] 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...

p69 ... 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... 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.

I suspect both Mann and Sacks are impressed by this because it is almost alchemy or sorcery. Violating the earth to get these ores and then processing them to isolate various elements, literally taking them apart but seemingly transforming them, is the essence of the Mephistophic order. So we get both the bourgeois and the Mephistophic together in the Sacks family. 


p71 [I'm not giving you the passage on bleaching, but here is a link to some info on bleach and chemical bleaching.]

p72 ...
There was a great popular interest in chemistry in the Victorian era, and many households had their own labs, as they had their ferneries and stereoscopes. Griffin's Chemical Recreations had originally been published around 1830 and was so popular that it was continually revised and brought out in new editions; I had the tenth, published in 1860. (Note: Griffin was not only an educator at many levels -- he wrote The Radical Theory in Chemistry and A System of Crystallography, both more technical than his Recreations -- but also a manufacturer and purveyor of chemical apparatus: his "chemical and philosophical apparatus" was used throughout Europe. His firm, later to become Griffin & Tatlock, was still a major supplier a century later, when I was a boy.)

p73 A companion volume to Griffin's, published at much the same time and in the same green and gilt binding, was The Science of Home Life, by A.J. Bernays, which focused on coal, coal gas, candles, soap, glass, china, earthenware, disinfectants -- everything that might be contained in a Victorian home (and much of which was still contained in houses a century later).

And it's necessary to constantly remind ourselves that this was in the early days of petrochemicals. Most "plastics" were still coal based, like Bakelite.

Nylon was the first commercially successful synthetic thermoplastic polymer...

Wallace Carothers at DuPont patented^[9] nylon 66, but overlooked the possibility to use lactams. That synthetic route was developed by Paul Schlack at IG Farben, leading to nylon 6...   -Wiki

Carothers -- and others like him at IG Farben and the other major dye and chemical manufacturers -- were doing the same kind of pioneering chemistry, at the time Sacks is writing about, that the "fathers" of chemistry he writes about were doing in the 18th century. 


...
A much earlier book... was The Chemical Pocket-Book or Memoranda Chemica, written in 1803. The author was James Parkinson... I got a strong sense, from his book, of how chemistry was expanding almost explosively, at the beginning of the nineteenth century; thus Parkinson spoke of ten new metals -- uranium, tellurium, chromium, columbium, (niobium), tantalum, cerium, palladium, rhodium, osmium, iridium -- all having been discovered in the preceding few years.

p74 It was from Griffin that I first gained a clear idea of what was meant by "acids" and "alkalis" and how they combined to produce "salts." Uncle Dave demonstrated the opposition of acid and bases by measuring out precise quantities of hydrochloric acid and caustic soda, which he mixed in a beaker. The mixture became extremely hot, but when it cooled, he said, "Now try it, drink it."... I tasted only salt. "You see," he explained, "an acid and a base come together, and they neutralize each other; they combine and make a salt."

Could this miracle happen in reverse, I asked? Could salty water be made to produce the acid and the base all over again? "No," Uncle said, "that would require too much energy. You see how it got hot when the acid and base reacted -- the same amount of heat would be needed to reverse the reaction. And salt," he added, "is very stable. The sodium and chloride hold each other tightly, and no ordinary chemical process will break them apart. To break them apart you have to use an electric current."

He showed me this more dramatically one day be putting a piece of sodium in a jar full of chlorine. There was a violent conflagration, the sodium caught fire and burned, weirdly, in the yellowish green chlorine -- but when it was over, the result was nothing more than common salt. I had a heightened respect for salt, I think, after having seen the violent opposites that came together in its [salt] making and the strength of the energies, the elemental forces, that were now locked in a compound. 

Rats! This discussion of acids and alkalis and salts would be where he would get into the physics and he didn't. This is where you want to know where the energy to create that heat came from, and why reversing the process requires so much energy, but he doesn't explain. 


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