150. Uncle Tungsten - III. Chapters 5-7

Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Uncle Tungsten - II. Scheele

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. 


Jump to Next: Uncle Tungsten - IV. Chapters 8-9

149. Uncle Tungsten - II. Scheele

Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Uncle Tungsten - I. - We begin

Uncle Tungsten

Chapter 4 "An Ideal Metal"

p32 [This first passage is here simply as a shout out to the opening chapter of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow] I returned to London in the summer of 1943, after four years of exile, a ten-year-old boy, withdrawn and disturbed in some ways, but with a passion for metals, for plants, and for numbers. Life was beginning to resume some degree of normality... 

One sign of this, for me, was the fact that my father was given, through a series of intermediaries, an unheard-of thing, a banana from North Africa. None of us had seen a banana since the start of the war, and so my father divided in, sacramentally, into seven equal segments: one each for my mother and himself, one for Auntie Birdie, and one apiece for my brothers and myself. The tiny segment was placed, like a Host, on the tongue, then savored slowly as it was swallowed. Its taste was voluptuous, almost ecstatic, at once a reminder and symbol of times past and an anticipation of times to come, an earnest, a token, perhaps, that I had come home to stay.

[Before the war the Sacks household had employed 6 servants but none returned after the war.]

p41 "Nature offers you copper and silver and gold native, as pure metals," Uncle [Dave or Tungsten] would say, "and in South America and the Urals, she offers the platinum metals, too." ...

But most metals occurred in the form of oxides, or "earths." Earths, he said, were sometimes called calxes, [see oxides] and these ores were known to be insoluable, incombustible, infusible, and to be, as one eighteenth-century chemist wrote, "destitute of metallic splendour." And yet, it was realized, they were very close to metals and could indeed be converted into metals if heated with charcoal; while pure metals became calxes if heated in air. What actually occurred in these processes, however, was not understood. There can be a deep practical knowledge, Uncle said, long before theory: it was appreciated, in practical terms, how one could smelt ores and make metals, even if there was no correct understanding of what actually went on.
...
We know now, he went on, that when one heats the oxides with charcoal, the carbon in the charcoal combines with their oxygen and in this way "reduces" them, leaving the pure metal. [what confuses me about this terminology is that the "reducer" is reduced by an electron, thus becoming "oxidized", while the "oxidizer" gains an electron, and thus is "reduced."] Without the ability to reduce metals from their oxides, he would say, we would never have known any metals other than the handful of native ones. There would never have been a bronze age much less an iron age; there would never have been the fascinating discoveries of the eighteenth-century, when a dozen and a half new metals (including tungsten!) were extracted from their ores.

p42 Uncle Dave showed me some pure tungstic oxide... I took the bottle from him; it contained a dense yellow powder that was surprisingly heavy, almost as heavy as iron. "All we need to do," he said, "is heat it with some carbon in a crucible until it's red hot." He mixed the yellow oxide and the carbon together, and put the crucible in a corner of the huge furnace. A few minutes later, he withdrew it with long tongs, and as it cooled, I was able to see... The carbon was all gone, as was most of the yellow powder, and in their place were grains of dully shinning grey metal...

"There's another way we could make it," Uncle said. "It's more spectacular." He mixed the tungstic oxide with finely powdered aluminum, and then placed some sugar, some potassium perchlorate, and a little sulfuric acid ["The historical name of this acid is oil of vitriol."] on top. The sugar and perchlorate and acid took fire at once, and this in turn ignited the aluminum and tungstic oxide, which burned furiously, sending up a shower of brilliant sparks. When the sparks cleared, I saw a white-hot globule of tungsten in the crucible. "That is one of the most violent reactions there is," said Uncle. "They call this the thermite process; you can see why. It can generate a temperature of three thousand degrees or more -- enough to melt tungsten...

What's notable here is that in the first process energy had to be added in the form of heat. In the second process, the combination of substances provided the energy needed to generate the heat.

Also important to note, tungsten was first discovered in the 1780s, before Goethe finished part 1 of Faust. While I don't recall any of our commentators on that work talking about the impact chemical breakthroughs of the time may have had on Goethe, I'm sure he was aware of this and that this is what Mephisto was getting at when he was talking about the wealth concealed in the earth that he was going to help Faust retrieve for the Emperor. 


p44 [Carl Wilhelm] Scheele was one of uncle Dave's great heroes. Not only had  he discovered tungstic acid and molybdic acid (from which the new element molybdenum was made), but hydrofluoric acid, hydrogen sulfide, arsine, and prussic acid, and a dozen organic acids, too. [If you follow those links you will be amazed by the dark side of these early discoveries of science. The last -- Hydrogen cyanide leading to Zyklon B is a prime example.] All this, Uncle Dave said, he did by himself, with no assistants, no funds, no university position or salary, but working alone, trying to make ends meet as an apothecary [like Serenus Zeitblom's father in Doctor Faustus] in a small provincial Swedish town. He had discovered oxygen, not by a fluke, but by making it in several different ways; he had discovered chlorine; and he had pointed the way to the discovery of manganese, of barium, of a dozen other things. 

And Scheele died at only 44. If reducers are eager to lose an electron and oxidizers are eager to gain one, then "acids" are the sluts of chemistry as they are keen to lose an entire proton while "bases" are just waiting to receive that proton to neutralize into a "salt."

Scheele, Uncle Dave would say, was wholly dedicated to his work, caring nothing for fame or money and sharing his knowledge, whatever he had, with anyone and everyone...

Scheele, it was said, never forgot anything if it had to to with chemistry. He never forgot the look, the feel, the smell of a substance, or the way it was transformed in chemical reactions, never forgot anything he read, or was told, about the phenomena of chemistry. He seemed indifferent, or inattentive to most things else, being wholly dedicated to his single passion, chemistry. It was this pure and passionate absorption in phenomena -- noticing everything, forgetting nothing -- that constituted Scheele's special strength.

Scheele epitomized for me the romance of science. There seemed to me an integrity, an essential goodness, about a life in science, a lifelong love affair... I wanted to be a chemist. A chemist like Scheele, an eighteenth-century chemist coming fresh to the field, looking at the whole undiscovered world of natural substances and minerals, analyzing them, plumbing their secrets, finding the wonder of unknown and new metals.

Another way of structuring this book would have been by the great figures, like Scheele, who discovered our scientific world in much the same way a previous generation of explorers had discovered the true map of the earth. In which case this would have followed chapters about Alchemy, perhaps titled "Paracelsus," and Boyle and a few others. 

The alchemists will be mentioned in later chapters as a way of indicating the ignorance of the age. If you don't know what elements are or what makes them different -- and no one did at that point -- you can't understand why elements can't be transmuted into each other. Without a scientific understanding, it is all magic. 

But the reason we start instead with Scheele, I believe, is that it is this passion for chemistry that appeals to the young Oliver Sacks, and that we will later -- in the book, if not so much here -- see him personify. It is this single mindedness and turning away from the non-scientific world that appeals to him at this time.  

Jump to Next: Uncle Tungsten - III. - Chapters 5-7

57. The Periodic Table - chapter 5 - Potassium

Jump to Introduction + Chronology

Jump back to Previous: The Periodic Table - chapter 4

March 25, 2015

p50 In January 1941 the fate of Europe and the world seemed to be sealed. Only the deluded could still think that Germany would not win; the stolid English “had not noticed that they had lost the game,” [I tried to find the source for this quote but kept coming back to Levi] and obstinately resisted under the bombings; but they were alone and suffered bloody losses on all fronts. Only a voluntarily deaf and blind man could have any doubts about the fate reserved for the Jews in a German Europe: we had read Feuchtwanger’s Oppermanns [but see also Here] smuggled secretly in from France, and a British White Book, which arrived from Palestine and described the “Nazi atrocities”; we had only believed half of it, but that was enough. Many refugees from Poland and France had reached Italy, and we talked with them: they did not know the details of the slaughters that were taking place behind a monstrous curtain of silence, but each of them was a messenger, like those who run to Job to tell him, “I alone have escaped to tell you the story.”

p51 And yet, if we wanted to live, if we wished in some way to take advantage of the youth coursing through our veins, there was indeed no other resource than self-imposed blindness; like the English, “we did not notice,” we pushed all danger into the limbo of things not perceived or immediately forgotten. We could also, in the abstract, throw everything away and escape and be transplanted to some remote, mythical country, chosen from among the few that kept their frontiers open: Madagascar, British Honduras. But to do this one needed a lot of money and a fabulous capacity for initiative -- and I, my family, and our friends had neither one nor the other. Besides, if looked at from close by and in detail, things did not after all seem so disastrous: the Italy around us, or, to put it more accurately (at the time when one traveled little), Piedmont and Turin were not hostile. Piedmont was our true country, the one in which we recognized ourselves; the mountains around Turin, visible on clear days, and within reach of a bicycle, were ours, irreplaceable, and had taught us fatigue, endurance, and a certain wisdom. In short, our roots were in Piedmont and Turin, not enormous but deep, extensive, and fantastically intertwined. 

The important question of the day in Italy was whether or not the Jews were "of" the nation or Internationalists or Zionists. Here we have Levi's answer.

In 1928 frustration arose in the regime over Zionism, in which Mussolini responded to the Italian Zionist Congress by publicly declaring a question to Italy's Jews on their self-identity, "Are you a religion or are you a nation?", Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews responded, the anti-Zionist Jews professed they were religious Jews as part of the Italian nation while Zionist Jews declared that there was no dispute between Zionism and said that all Italian Jews held patriotic respect for Italy.[97] Upon these responses arriving, Mussolini declared that these revealed that a Jewish problem existed in terms of Jewish identity in Italy as a result of conflicting national loyalties amongst Zionist Jews, saying:

My intention was to seek a clarification among Italian Jews and to open the eyes of Christian Italians. [...] This goal has been achieved. The problem exists, and it is no longer confined to that “shadowy sphere” where it had been constituted astutely by the former, ingeniously by the latter.

—Benito Mussolini, 1928.

-Wiki

Neither in us nor, more generally, in our generation, whether “Aryan” or Jew, had the idea yet gained ground that one must and could resist Fascism. Our resistance at the time was passive and was limited to rejection, isolation, and avoiding contamination. The seed of active struggle had not survived down to us, it had been stifled a few years before with the final sweep of the scythe, which had relegated to prison, house arrest, exile, or silence the last Turinese protagonists and witnesses -- Einaudi, Ginzburg, Monti, Vittorio Foa, Carlo Levi. These names said nothing to us, we knew hardly anything about them -- the Fascism around us did not have opponents. We had to begin from scratch, “invent” our anti-Fascism, create it from the germ, from the roots, from our roots. We looked around us and traveled up roads that led not very far away. The Bible, Croce, [probably Here but this other possibility is just too weird (for someone who has just finished Doctor Faustus, see Here, near bottom P14): "Croce (genus), a genus of lacewings in the family Nemopteridae." And about the person Croce this quote from Wiki is probably pertinent, "When Mussolini's government adopted antisemitic policies in 1938, Croce was the only non-Jewish intellectual who refused to complete a government questionnaire designed to collect information on the so-called 'racial background' of Italian intellectuals."] geometry, and physics seemed to us sources of certainty.

p52 ...He who dictated the Law of Moses, and inspired the liberators Ezra and Nehemiah, no longer inspired anyone; the sky above us was silent and empty: he allowed the Polish ghettos to be exterminated, and slowly, confusedly, the idea was making headway in us that we were alone, that we had no allies we could count on, neither on earth nor in heaven, that we would have to find in ourselves the strength to resist. Therefore the impulse that drove us to explore our limits was not completely absurd: to travel hundreds of kilometers on our bikes, to climb with fury and patience up rock walls that we did not know well, to subject ourselves voluntarily to hunger, cold, and fatigue, to train ourselves to endure and to make decisions. A piton goes in or it doesn’t: the rope holds or it doesn’t: these too were sources of certainty.

Chemistry, for me, had stopped being such a source. It led to the heart of Matter, and Matter was our ally precisely because the Spirit, dear to Fascism, was our enemy; but, having reached the fourth year of Pure Chemistry, I could no longer ignore the fact that chemistry itself, or at least that which we were being administered, did not answer my questions... After having been force fed in liceo the truths revealed by Fascist Doctrine, all revealed, unproven truths either bored me stiff or aroused my suspicion... The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans or magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West -- Archimedes and Euclid. I would become a physicist, ruat coelum: ["Fiat justitia ruat caelum is a Latin legal phrase, meaning 'Let justice be done though the heavens fall.'"] perhaps without a degree, since Hitler and Mussolini forbade it.

...

...I asked him [the young physics assistant who had been teaching the chemistry students] whether it would be possible to be accepted for experimental work in his school. The assistant looked at me with surprise; and instead of going into the long explanation I expected, he replied with two words from the Gospel: “Follow me.”

p54 ...Some molecules are carriers of an electrical dipole; they behave in short in an electrical field like minuscule compass needles: they orient themselves, some more sluggishly, others less so... they obey certain laws with greater or less respect... he was busy with other matters... and besides he had no experience with certain manipulations which were considered necessary to purify the products that had to be measured; for this a chemist was necessary, and I was the welcomed chemist. He willingly handed over the field to me and the instruments. The field was two square meters of a table and desk; the instruments, a small family, but the most important were the Westphal balance and the heterodyne. The first I already knew; with the second I soon established a friendship. In substance it was a radio-receiving apparatus, built to reveal the slightest differences in frequency; and in fact, it went howlingly out of tune and barked like a watchdog simply if the operator shifted in his chair or moved a hand, or if someone just came into the room. Besides, at certain hours of the day, it revealed a whole intricate universe of mysterious messages, Morse tickings, modulated hisses, and deformed, mangled human voices, which pronounced sentences in incomprehensible languages, or others in Italian, but they were senseless sentences, in code. It was the radiophonic Babel of the war, messages of death transmitted by ships or planes from God knows who to God knows whom, beyond the mountains and the sea.

In Thomas Pynchon's hands those last few sentences would have grown to a chapter, possibly a whole book.

...

p56 His relationship to physics perplexed me. He did not hesitate to harpoon my last hippogriff, confirming quite explicitly that message about “marginal futility” which we had read in his eyes in the lab. Not only those humble exercises of ours but physics as a whole was marginal, by its nature, by vocation, insofar as it set itself the task of regulating the universe of appearances, whereas the truth, the reality, the intimate essence of things and man exist elsewhere, hidden behind a veil, or seven veils (I don't remember exactly). He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road he was traveling with effort, wonderment, and profound joy. Physics was prose: elegant gymnastics for the mind, mirror of Creation, the key to man’s dominion over the planet; but what is the stature of Creation, of man and the planet? His road was long and he had barely started up it, but I was his disciple: Did I want to follow him?

It was a terrifying request. To be the assistant’s disciple was for me an enjoyment of every minute, a never before experienced bond, without shadows, rendered more intense by the certainty that the relationship was mutual: I, a Jew, excluded and made skeptical by recent upheavals, the enemy of violence but not yet caught up in the necessity of an opposed violence, I should be for him the ideal interlocutor, a white sheet on which any message could be inscribed.

p57 I did not mount the new gigantic hippogriff which the assistant offered me. During those months the Germans destroyed Belgrade, broke the Greek resistance, invaded Crete from the air: that was the Truth, that was the Reality. [It would have been nice if he had said a little more about how these German victories were presented in Italy, since they were -- for the Germans -- an unplanned and un-wished for diversion resulting from the failure of Italian arms in the Balkans.] There were no escape routes, or not for me. Better to remain on the Earth, playing with the dipoles for lack of anything better, purify benzene and prepare for an unknown but imminent and certainly tragic future... [The rest of this chapter describes Levi’s substituting potassium (which he had) for sodium (which he couldn’t find) in the purifying process for some benzene. When cleaning up after his first distilling session he fails to notice a tiny particle of potassium in an “empty” flask.]

p58 Potassium... is sodium’s twin, but it reacts with air and water with even greater energy: it is known to everyone (and was known also to me) that in contact with water it not only develops hydrogen but also ignites...

p59 I took the now empty flask, put it under the faucet, and turned on the water. I heard a rapid thump and from the neck of the flask came a flash of flame directed at the window... and the curtains around it caught fire...

When it was all over, when the incandescent tatters were extinguished, I remained standing there for a few minutes, weak and stunned, my knees turned to water, contemplating the vestiges of the disaster without seeing them. As soon as I got my breath back, I went to the floor below and told the assistant what had happened. If it is true that there is no greater sorrow than to remember a happy time in a state of misery, it is just as true that calling up a moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one’s desk, is a source of profound satisfaction.

...

p60 ...adhering to the glass of the flask there must have remained a minuscule particle of potassium, all that was needed to react with the water I had poured in and set fire to the benzene vapors.

The assistant looked at me with an amused, vaguely ironic expression: better not to do than to do, better to meditate than to act, better his astrophysics, the threshold of the Unknowable, than my chemistry, a mess compounded of stenches, explosions, and small futile mysteries. I thought of another moral, more down to earth and concrete, and I believe that every militant chemist can confirm it: that one must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost the same as potassium, but with sodium nothing would have happened), the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates, and all patchwork. The differences can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad’s switch points; the chemist’s trade consists in good part in being aware of those differences, knowing them close up, and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist’s trade.

Potassium (K 19)

“Because potassium and sodium are chemically very similar, their salts were not at first differentiated. The existence of multiple elements in their salts was suspected in 1702,[4] and this was proven in 1807 when potassium and sodium were individually isolated from different salts by electrolysis. Potassium in nature occurs only in ionic salts. As such, it is found dissolved in seawater (which is 0.04% potassium by weight[5][6]), and is part of many minerals.

Most industrial chemical applications of potassium employ the relatively high solubility in water of potassium compounds, such as potassium soaps. Potassium metal has only a few special applications, being replaced in most chemical reactions with sodium metal.

Potassium ions are necessary for the function of all living cells. Potassium ion diffusion is a key mechanism in nerve transmission, and potassium depletion in animals, including humans, results in various cardiac dysfunctions. Potassium accumulates in plant cells, and thus fresh fruits and vegetables are a good dietary source of it. This resulted in potassium first being isolated from potash, the ashes of plants, giving the element its name.” -Wiki

Sodium

“In animals, sodium ions are used against potassium ions to build up charges on cell membranes, allowing transmission of nerve impulses when the charge is dissipated. The consequent need of animals for sodium causes it to be classified as a dietary inorganic macro-mineral nutrient.” -Wiki

Salts

“In chemistry, salts are ionic compounds that result from the neutralization reaction of an acid and a base. They are composed of related numbers of cations (positively charged ions) and anions (negative ions) so that the product is electrically neutral (without a net charge)...

Molten salts and solutions containing dissolved salts (e.g., sodium chloride in water) are called electrolytes, as they are able to conduct electricity...

Different salts can elicit all five basic tastes, e.g., salty (sodium chloride), sweet (lead diacetate, which will cause lead poisoning if ingested), sour (potassium bitartrate), bitter (magnesium sulfate), and umami or savory (monosodium glutamate). ” -Wiki

All this because it interests me that the importance of potassium (in particular) in the body is ionic. Our nervous systems operate like an electronic device and potassium ions make it work at an electrical level. We are like a semiconductor doped with potassium and sodium ions.

Also, I image there has been at least one wedding ceremony where the chemist bride and groom have been described as cations and anions joining to form a salt.

Jump to Next: The Periodic Table - chapter 6