Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc

371 Pages·2011·3.53 MB·English

by  Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Periodic Tales
A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc
Hugh Aldersey-Williams
To my parents
Mary Redfield Aldersey-Williams
(23 June 1930–16 May 2004)
Arthur Grosvenor Aldersey-Williams
(6 June 1929–23 December 2008)
with love and gratitude
Contents
List of Illustrations
Prologue
Part One: Power
El Dorado
Going Platinum
Noble Metals, Ignobly Announced
The Ochreous Stain
The Element Traders
Among the Carbonari
Plutonium Charades
Mendeleev’s Suitcases
The Liquid Mirror
Part Two: Fire
The Circumnavigation of the Sulphur
Pee is for Phosphorus
‘As under a green sea’
‘Humanitarian nonsense’
Slow Fire
Our Lady of Radium
Nightglow of Dystopia
Cocktails at the Pale Horse
The Light of the Sun
Part Three: Craft
To the Cassiterides
Dull Lead’s Grey Truth
Our Perfect Reflection
The Worldwide Web
Au Zinc
Banalization
‘Turn’d to barnacles’
The Guild of Aerospace Welders
The March of the Elements
Part Four: Beauty
Chromatic Revolution
‘Lonely-chrome America’
Abbé Suger’s Sheet Sapphire
Inheritance Powder
Rainbows in the Blood
Crushing Emeralds
The Crimson Light of Neon
Jezebel’s Eyes
Part Five: Earth
Swedish Rock
Europium Union
Auerlicht
Gadolin and Samarsky, Everymen of the Elements
Ytterby Gruva
Epilogue
Notes
References and Select Bibliography
Text Credits
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other Books by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
List of Illustrations
Detail from Simon Patterson, Untitled, 1996. (Copyright © Simon Patterson.
Courtesy Haunch of Venison Gallery, London.)
Marc Quinn, Siren, 2008 (solid gold). (Copyright © Marc Quinn. Courtesy
White Cube.)
Cripple Creek.
Film poster for Platinum Blonde. (Copyright © 1931, renewed 1958, Columbia
Pictures Industries, Inc. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.)
Scratch card advertisement. (Will Hammond.)
Wollaston’s anonymous palladium announcement. (Reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library from McDonald and
Hunt, A History of Platinum, p. 105.)
Max Whitby’s element specimens.
Charcoal-making. (The Dorset Charcoal Co.)
Carbonari initiation ceremony. (John Murray, 1821.)
AERE bus. (Mike Bennett.)
Homoeopathic Plutonium.
Mendeleev’s first printed periodic table. (Reproduced by kind permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library from Gordin, A Well-Ordered Thing, p.
29.)
Mercury mirror in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée. (14(c) 1946 SNC (Groupe M6) /
Comité Cocteau. Special Thanks to Pierre Bergé, President of the Comité
Cocteau.)
Alexander Calder, Mercury Fountain. (Copyright © 2010 Calder Foundation,
New York / DACS London.)
Thomas Aquinas. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library from Roberts, The Mirror of Alchemy, p. 34.)
Mercury–sulphur experiment. (Nicolas Thomas, INRAP–Université Paris 1
Panthéon-Sorbonne.)
HMS Sulphur. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library from Belcher, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World,
frontispiece and title page.)
Joseph Wright, The Alchymist, 1771. (Copyright © 2010 Derby Museum and Art
Gallery.)
Trying to isolate phosphorus.
The fire-bombing of Hamburg. (Imperial War Museum IWM C 3677.)
John Singer Sargent, Gassed, 1919. (Imperial War Museum IWM ART 1460.)
The Bromo-Seltzer Tower. (Visit Baltimore.)
The Radium Palace Hotel. (Lé ebné lázn Jáchymov a.s.)
Radium leather dye.
Sodium street light townscape. (Copyright © David Jones.)
Humphry Davy’s voltaic piles. (Courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great
Britain.)
A View of the Fireworks and Illuminations at his grace the Duke of Richmond’s
at Whitehall and on the River Thames, on Monday 15th May 1749, coloured
engraving by the English School (eighteenth century). (Private Collection / The
Bridge-man Art Library.)
Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa’s atom diagrams. (Reproduced by kind permission
of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library from Besant and Leadbeater,
Occult Chemistry, plate IV.)
Ernst Haeckel’s marine organisms. (Reproduced by kind permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library from Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur,
plate 41.)
A Cornish tin mine.
Zoe Laughlin’s tuning forks. (Zoe Laughlin.)
Bleigiessen.
Crane Park shot tower.
Anselm Kiefer, Jason. (Copyright © Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.)
Silver Ring Thing promotional material. (Copyright © The Silver Ring Thing.)
David Clarke silverware. (David Clarke.)
Cornelia Parker, Stolen Thunder, 1997–9: tarnish from James Bowie’s (inventor
of the Bowie knife) soup spoon. (One of a set of ten, each 63 × 63 cm. Courtesy
of Cornelia Parker and Frith Street Gallery, London.)
Christopher Wren’s original sketch of an alternative detail for the top of the
Monument. (Courtesy Codrington Library, All Souls College, Oxford.)
Moritz Seelig zinc statue. (Carol Grissom.)
Zinc cladding, Jewish Museum, Berlin. (Bitter Bredt Fotographie.)
Maurice Lambert, head of Edith Sitwell. (Courtesy Mrs Alexandra Hayward,
Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire.)
Picquot Ware tea-set.
Hopscotch grid in chalk.
Orvieto cathedral. (Moira Morrissey.)
Michelangelo, tomb of Pope Julius II. (Image copyright © Jean-Christophe
Benoist.)
Barbara Hepworth’s studio with marble sculptures. (Copyright © Bowness
Hepworth Estate, BHM, St Ives, 1976.)
David Poston’s studio.
Ann Marie Shillito’s jewellery. (Ann Marie Shillito.)
My father’s paints.
Cornelissen’s artists’ material shop.
Longwood House. (Ripetungi.)
William Morris wallpaper. (Andrew Meharg.)
Sea tunicates. (Copyright © Gary Bell / OceanwideImages.com.)
William Ramsay’s gas discharge tubes.
Fiona Banner Studio, Bones, 2007: question mark. (One of ten neon parts bent
by the artist, paper templates, clamps, wire and transformers, each 70 × 100 cm.
Studio installation shot.)
‘Neon boneyard’, Las Vegas. (Courtesy of the Neon Museum, Las Vegas, NV.)
Antimony star. (Isaac Newton, ‘Newton’s Most Complete Laboratory
Notebook’, in William R. Newman, ed., The Chymistry of Isaac Newton,
http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/newton.)
Statue of Carl Scheele, Stockholm.
A chemist’s blow-pipe.
Giovanni Mataloni, Incandescenza a Gas. (Courtesy of Italgas Historical
Archive.)
Berzelius’s labelled chemical bottles. (Lennart Nilsson. Courtesy Centre for
History of Science, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.)
Ytterby mine.
All uncredited photographs are by the author.
Prologue
Like the alphabet or the zodiac, the periodic table of the elements is one of those
graphic images that seem to root themselves for ever in our memories. The one I
remember is from school, hung on the wall behind the teacher’s desk like an
altar screen, its glossy yellowing paper testament to years of chemical attack. It’s
an image I haven’t been able to shake off, despite scarcely venturing into a
laboratory for years. Now I have it on my own wall.
Or at least a version of it. The familiar stepped skyline is there, and the neatly
stacked boxes, one for each element. Each box contains the symbol and atomic
number appropriate to the element in that position. However, all is not quite as it
should be in this table. For where the name of each element should appear, there
is another name entirely, one that is nothing to do with the world of science. The
symbol O represents not the element oxygen but the god Orpheus; Br is not
bromine but the artist Bronzino. Many of the other spaces are taken, for some
reason, by figures from 1950s cinema.
This periodic table is a lithograph by the British artist Simon Patterson.
Patterson is fascinated by the diagrams that are the means by which we organize
our world. His way of working is to recognize the importance of the thing as an
emblem of order but then to play havoc with its contents. His best-known work
is a London Underground map with the stations along each line renamed after
saints and explorers and football players. Strange things happen at the
intersections.
It is no surprise that he should wish to play the same game with the periodic
table. He has grim memories of how it was taught by rote at his school. ‘It was
convenient to teach it that way, but I could never remember it,’ Simon tells me.
Yet he remembered the idea of it. Ten years after leaving school, he produced a
series of variations on the table in which the symbol for each element kicks off a
false association. Cr is not chromium but Julie Christie, Cu not copper but Tony
Curtis; and then even this cryptic system is sabotaged: Ag, the symbol for silver,
is not Jenny Agutter, say, or Agatha Christie, but of course Phil Silvers. There
are teasing moments of apparent logic in this new tabulation: the sequential
elements beryllium and boron (symbols Be and B) are the Bergmans, Ingrid and
Ingmar respectively. The acting brothers Rex and Rhodes Reason appear
adjacent to one another, co-opting the symbols for rhenium (Re) and osmium
(Os). Kim Novak (Na; sodium) and Grace Kelly (K; potassium) share the same