153. Uncle Tungsten - VI. Davy & Faraday

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Uncle Tungsten

Chapter 11. Humphry Davy: A Poet-Chemist

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p117 Born in 1778, Davy grew up at the beginning of Lavoisier’s revolution. It was an age of discovery, the coming-of-age of chemistry -- a time, too, when great theoretical clarifications were emerging. Davy, an artisan’s son, was apprenticed to a local apothecary-surgeon in Penzance, but soon aspired to something larger... He read and mastered Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry -- a remarkable achievement for an eighteen-year-old with little formal education...

p118 Lavoisier had left a ghost of phlogiston in his conception of heat or “caloric” as an element, and in his first, seminal experiment, Davy melted ice by friction, thus showing that heat was motion, a form of energy, and not a material substance, as Lavoisier had thought... He set forth the results of his experiments in a long “Essay on Heat and Light,” [1799] a critique of Lavoisier as well as a vision of a new chemistry that he hoped to found, one finally purged of all the remnants of alchemy and metaphysics. 
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p119 In 1800 Davy read Alessandro Volta’s paper describing the first battery, his “pile” -- a sandwich of two different metals with brine-dampened cardboard in between -- which generated a steady electric current... no sustained electrical current was obtainable until now. Volta’s paper, Davy was later to write, acted like an alarm bell among the experimenters of Europe, and, for Davy, suddenly gave form to what he now saw as his life’s work.

He persuaded [Thomas] Beddoes to build a massive electric battery... and started his first experiments with it a few months after Volta’s paper. He suspected almost at once that the electric current was generated by chemical changes in the metal plates and wondered if the reverse was also true -- whether one might induce chemical changes by the passage of an electric current.

So exciting... we’re finally closer to electrons! 


Water could be created (as Cavendish had shown) by sparking hydrogen and oxygen together. Could one now, with the new power of electric current., do the opposite? In his very first electrochemical experiment, passing an electric current through water (he had to add a little acid to render it conducting), Davy showed that it could be decomposed into its constituent elements, hydrogen appearing at one pole or electrode of the battery, and oxygen at the other -- though it was only several years later that he was able to show that they appeared in fixed and exact proportions. 

p120 [footnote - Cavendish sounds like another person on the Asperger's spectrum. Sacks thinks this too.]

With his battery, Davy found, he could not only electrolyze water, but heat metallic wires: a platinum wire, for example, could be heated to incandescence; and if the current was passed into rods of carbon, and these were then separated by a short distance, a dazzling electric “arc” would leap out and bridge the gap... Thus, almost casually, Davy hit upon what were to become two major forms of electrical illumination, incandescence and arc lighting -- though he did not develop these, but went on to other things.

p122 [Lavoisier had suspected that the “alkaline earths” contained undiscovered elements and Davy suspected the same of the alkalis (soda and potash)] ....Davy attacked the alkalis [with electricity], and early in 1807 performed the famous experiments that isolated metallic potassium and sodium by electric current... 

One of my greatest delights was to repeat Davy’s original experiments in my own lab... I diced a little pellet of... [metallic potassium] (it cut like butter, and the surface glistened a brilliant silver-white -- but only for an instant; it tarnished at once). I lowered it gently into a trough full of water and stood back -- hardly fast enough, for the potassium caught fire instantly, melted, and as a frenzied molten blob rushed round and round in the trough, with a violet flame above it, spitting and crackling loudly as it threw off incandescent fragments in all directions. In a few seconds the little globule had burned itself out... But now the water felt warm, and soapy; it had become a solution of caustic potash, and being alkaline, it turned a piece of litmus paper blue.
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p123 Before Humphry Davy’s discovery of sodium and potassium, metals were thought of as hard and dense and infusible, and here were ones as soft as butter, lighter than water, very easily melted, and with a chemical violence, an avidity to combine beyond anything ever seen... 
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p124 After his success in isolating the first alkali metals, Davy turned to the alkaline earths and electrolyzed these, and within a few weeks he had isolated four more metallic elements -- calcium, magnesium, strontium, and barium -- all highly reactive and all able to burn, like alkali metals, with brilliantly colored flames. These clearly formed another natural group.

I believe this is, because of his dependence on that room sized battery, the first instance in history of “big science.” (Yes, I know I'm using this term incorrectly. It is supposed to be science that requires teams rather than individuals; but I have in mind the need for expensive apparatus. Just as the Large Hadron Collider was required to make certain recent discoveries, the biggest battery ever created was necessary to discover these elements.) Goethe must have been both excited, as a scientist, and apprehensive at this sudden churning out of new, violent elements. 


Pure alkali metals do not exist in nature; nor do the elemental alkaline earth metals -- they are too reactive and instantly combine with other elements. What one finds instead are simple or complex salts of these elements. While salts tend to be nonconducting when crystalline, they can conduct an electric current well if dissolved in water or melted; and will indeed be decomposed by an electric current, yielding the metallic component of the salt (e.g., sodium) at one pole, and the nonmetallic element (e.g., chlorine) at the other. This implied to Davy that the elements were contained in the salt as charged particles -- why else should they be attracted to the electrodes? Why did sodium always go to one electrode and chlorine to the other? His pupil, Michael Faraday, was later to call these charged particles of an element “ions,” and further distinguished the positive and negative ones as “cations” and “anions.” [Finally!] Sodium, in its charged state, was a strong cation, and chlorine, in its charged state, one of the strongest anions.

p125 For Davy, electrolysis was a revelation that matter itself was not something inert, held together by “gravity,” as Newton had thought, but was charged and held together by electrical forces. Chemical affinity and electrical force, he now speculated, were one and the same. For Newton and Boyle there had been only one force, universal gravity, holding not only the stars and planets together, but the very atoms of which they were composed. Now, for Davy, there was a second cosmic force, a force no less potent than gravity, but operating at the tiny distances between atoms, in the invisible, almost unimaginable, world of chemical atoms. Gravity, he felt, might be the secret of mass, but electricity was the secret of matter.

Doesn’t this sound like Quantum Mechanics in the following century? Substitute Einstein for Newton, and the Strong Force for gravity.

Just as Lavoisier’s new terminology gave scientists a way to categorize and understand substances, Davy and Faraday gave scientists an inkling of what was actually happening. Going back to Faust again, tossing aside the veil of alchemical language and the fog of metaphysical confusion about what was involved in chemical reactions, must have been as confusing and disconcerting for a fully initiated alchemist like Faust as it was enlightening. And seeing the raw -- demonic -- power of some of these reactions, like the one above with potassium, must have been frightening. 


(Footnote: Mary Shelley, as a child, was enthralled by Davy’s inaugural lecture at the Royal Institution, and years later, in Frankenstein, she was to model Professor Waldman’s lecture on chemistry rather closely on some of Davy’s words when, speaking of galvanic electricity, he said, “A new influence has been discovered, which has enabled man to produce from combinations of dead matter effects which were formerly occasioned only by animal organs.”)
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p126 There was an extraordinary appetite for science, especially chemistry, in these early, palmy days of the Industrial Revolution; it seemed a new and powerful (and not irreverent) way not only of understanding the world but of moving it to a better state. Davy himself seemed to embody this new optimism, to be at the crest of a vast wave of scientific and technological power, a power that promised, or threatened, to transform the world... 

Sounds Faustian, in Goethe’s sense, to me. And, with Frankenstein and that demonstration with potassium and water in mind, it's worth remembering the essential role potassium plays in our bodies. 
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p130 In a further discovery, Davy found that if a platinum wire was put in an explosive mixture, it would become red-hot and glow. He had discovered the miracle of catalysis: how certain substances, such as the platinum metals, might induce a continuing chemical reaction on their surfaces, without being themselves consumed... But... it was Davy’s personality that appealed to me... filled with the exuberance and enthusiasm of a boy, with a wonderful adventurousness and sometimes dangerous impulsiveness -- he was always at the point of going too far -- and it was this which captured my imagination above all. 

That ending about Davy is very faustian. 


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57. The Periodic Table - chapter 5 - Potassium

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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.

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...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.

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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.

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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.

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