Notes on "The Disappearing Spoon"

Sam Kean wrote a book a couple years back called "The Disappearing Spoon And Other True Tales Of Madness, Love, And The History Of The World From The Periodic Table Of The Elements." I started it but never finished it. A commenter mentioned the book yesterday on Trooper York, and I suggested that we and another should read and discuss it and so I'm going to give that a shot. I'm going to take this very slowly at first in case you want to buy the book and follow along as well.

I read the Intro and Chapter 1 last night and flagged several passages that struck me as either very well expressed or perhaps worthy of further explanation.

Kean arranges his book into parts and chapters and each concerns a specific element or elements.

My style is to assume that the reader has the book and can proceed along with me on this journey. I'm going to drop quotes where I made markers and then write a few words.  If I don't say anything about a certain passage, it's not because I think it's good or bad or that I disagree. Feel free to ask questions or challenge me in the comments. This first post isn't very chemical at all and is mostly historical in nature. That changes pretty quickly.

Introduction: Mercury

Kean introduces mercury which he's known since childhood (as no doubt have many of a certain age before the stuff was so shunned).  Of course mercury was known to the ancients as well. Page 4, middle of page:

Medieval alchemists, despite their lust for gold, considered mercury the most potent and poetic substance in the universe.

Alchemists considered mercury to be the "spirit" of matter and sulfur to be its "soul." The arcane symbols used for the elements are here. In nature, mercury is commonly found combined with sulfur as the mineral cinnabar. The Romans mined the stuff in Spain and some of the mines are still producing it. I linked to photo of a man floating on a vat of mercury and wrote of some of my own experiences with mercury here and here.

Next we learn how Lewis and Clark left telltale signs along their trek because they carried with and used mercuric chloride as a laxative or emetic. Page 5, about 5 lines up from bottom:

With the weird food and questionable water they encountered in the wild, someone in their party was always queasy, and to this day, mercury deposits dot the soil many places were the gang dug a latrine, perhaps after one of Dr. Rush's "Thunderclappers" had worked a little too well.

This is fascinating. But it's no surprise because mercury persists in the environment. Ingested as insoluble mercuric chloride, it's likely to stay put as mercuric chloride.

Bottom of page 5:

I latched onto those tales, and recently, while reminiscing about mercury over breakfast, I realized that there's a funny, or odd, or chilling tale attached to every element on the periodic table. At the same time, the table is one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind. It's both a scientific accomplishment and a storybook, and I wrote this book to peel back all of the layers one by one, like the transparencies in an anatomy textbook that tell the same story at different depths.

I can relate. I began blogging about the chemical elements after watching 4th of July fireworks 4 years ago: link  I too realized that I had personal experience with many of them and I wanted to pull them together in my own way too. I started a series, using the tag "The Elements Series."  I intend to use some of these posts along the way. Eventually, I intend to extend the series beyond rhodium.
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Next up: Part I   "Orientation: Column By Column, Row by Row"

1. Geography Is Destiny

Chimica Arcana

To grasp the invisible elements, to attract them by their material correspondence, to control, purify and transform them by the living power of the spirit, this is true alchemy. 

~Paracelsus (1493-1541)

Before any sort of chemical bonding was even thought of there were charts of so-called affinities.  I found this interesting chart dating from 1718 on Wiki. It teaches how the then-known "elements" combined with each other. The top row identifies an element and the columns contain those elements with which it combines. Note that sulfur (middle column) was considered the most promiscuous element, consistent with its primacy as the "soul" of matter according to alchemy. Also bear in mind that this simple chart condenses the then known science of chemisty, ca. 1718.  I like the arcane symbols and could see using some them as avatars depending on my mood:

Click to enlarge or see link above

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Here are my translations of the "elements."

Esprit acides : Acidic (acerbic) spirits

Acide du sel marin: Lit. acid of sea salt, HCl (which was thought to contain oxygen until Davy showed otherwise: link)

Acide nitreux: Nitric and nitrous acids, HNO₃, HNO₂

Acide vitriolique: Sulfuric and sulfurous acids, derived from oleum & vitriol.

Sel alcali fixe: Sodium & potassium hydroxides and carbonates.

Sel alcali volatil: Sal ammoniac, NH₄Cl, which sublimed and was endlessly fascinating.

Terre absorbante: Silicates (sand) and diatomaceous earth.

Substances metalliques: Metallic substances

Mercure: Mercury was considered to be the spirit of matter.

Regule d'Antimoine: Regulus of antimony--metallic antimony. Regulus means "little King"

Or: Gold

Argent: Silver

Cuivre: Copper

Fer: Iron

Plomb: lead

Etain: Tin

Zinc

Pierre Calaminaire: Lit. calamine stone, i.e., calamine ore. Note the French place name.

Soufre mineral: Sulfur or brimstone.  This material held a special place in alchemy, along with mercury and salt.

Principe huileux ou Soufre: The oily essence of organic substances from plants, also called the "sulfur." See the interesting discussion under Spagyric.

Esprit de vinaigre: Vinegar or acetic acid

Eau: water

Sel: Salt held a special place in alchemy along with mercury and sulfur.  

Esprit de vin et Esprit ardents: Any of the flammable alcohols derived from fermentation, e.g., ethanol, methanol, etc.

Bromine Has A Hangover

Most of the world's bromide is dissolved in the sea, but chloride still outnumbers it by about 500 to 1. Originally dubbed "muride" from the Latin word muria meaning brine,* bromide was renamed after bromos which means stench (of male goats) in Greek.

Elemental bromine is a nasty red liquid (bromine and mercury are the only two liquid elements at ambient temperature and pressure). An electron short of an octet and tranquil stability (as bromide), the fuming element can still suck the electron out of many a juicy nucleophile, as I wrote back here. But its power for doing so is less than chlorine's and much less so than fluorine's power. Bromine can still "oxidize" iodide back to iodine, though.

Bromine's usefulness is diminishing. Its greatest ex-use was as ethylene dibromide--an additive for leaded gasoline (it scavenged the lead). Film photography used to rely on silver bromide, but digital photography is killing off that use. Bromide used to be a mild sedative and hangover cure--until it was outlawed for over-the-counter sales around 1995. The main use for the element today is for making fire retardants--as organobromides which are ubiquitous in electronic products.
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*Cf. Muriatic acid, the original name for hydrochloric acid: link

Hermetically Soiled

The Mercury Dime. The winged cap was supposed to be a Phrygian cap, symbolizing free thought: (footnote 1).  The design also featured a fascia on the reverse which was fitting, considering the time period.

I'm getting way ahead of myself in the Periodic Table, but elemental mercury is such cool stuff.  Here is a photo of a man floating on a vat of mercury, originally published in National Geographic Magazine:

Man floats on mercury

The acute toxicity of elemental mercury is overblown. Mercury is mainly a chronic poison, meaning it takes long term exposure to do serious damage. Mercury compounds--especially methyl mercury--are a different story. I have been slowly ridding myself of silver amalgam filings, but the brain damage may be too late. :)

Mercury has a long medicinal history. Alchemists believed that it had healing powers. When I was a kid, my dad would treat us with what we called "sting medicine." Marketed as mercurochrome, merbromin doesn't actually contain any chromium --rather the name "chrome" refers to the bright reddish orange dye attached to the mercuric ion. The last time I saw or used mercurochrome was in Italy in 1979. I "smuggled" some back, thinking it was a controlled substance. It is still freely--though not widely--available here. The Straight Dope wrote a piece on mercurochrome here: link.

Of course I played around with elemental mercury quite a bit as a chemist.  The most mercury I ever saw in one place was in a Toepler pump, a device which uses a mercury piston to collect and measure non condensable gases like methane and carbon monoxide.

Here's a modern quandary: incandescent bulbs use more watts of power than the newer mercury-containing CFL bulbs. Burning coal emits tons of mercury into the atmosphere. The EPA and others claim that smokestack emissions are not scrubbed link, even though the technology exists. Link

I think it's ironic that we need to disperse mercury in order to rid ourselves of mercury.

The Language of Chemistry

Original

Beginning students of chemistry encounter chemical symbols which bear little resemblance to their English names. The roots of several common and especially more historical elements caught my fancy, just as other Latin words buried in English did earlier. link

Several names and symbols come from Latin:

• Sb stands for antimony which comes from the Latin Stibium. The Italians still call antimony stibio. We did too until the Middle Ages. link

• Cu for copper comes from Cuprum, which is related to the word Cyprus, an ancient source of copper for the Romans.

• Fe for iron comes from Ferrum. The Italians call their railroads la ferrovia and Spanish calls hardware ferreteria (cf. bilingual signs at Home Depot). English has the vestigial word, farrier.

• Au for gold comes from Aurum.  We've lost that word in English except for some pretentious words like aureate, aurelia, aureole and the like.

• Pb for lead comes from Plumbum. There are lots of English cognates, including plumbago, plumbing, plumb lines and plumb bobs.

• Hg for mercury comes from hydrargyrum. That's confusing because at first glance it could be water-silver. But "hydra" is more generic and means liquid. Mercury used to be called quicksilver which sort of conveys the same notion as hydrargyrum.

• Ag for silver comes from Argentum. The French still call money l'argent.

A couple names look like Latin but are neologisms coined by Sir Humphry Davy:

• K for potassium comes from Kalium which derives from Arabic al-kali.

• Na for sodium comes from Natrium. The Germans still use both words Natrium and Kalium; they never adopted sodium and potassium. I guess they weren't as impressed with Davy as we were.

Also:

• Sn for tin comes from the Latin Stannum. There is some irony here.  The word Stannum is Latin but appears to derive from Irish or Welsh. The Romans got their tin from the British Isles.  Tin is still mined in Cornwall.

• W for Tungsten comes from an older name, Wolfram, which is still used by the Germans. Tungsten derives from Swedish tung heavy + sten stone. 

Mad As A Hatter

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones that are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.~ Jack Kerouac

I once met someone who went mad. He was a professor at a small state university. He was one of those guys who had been been well-schooled back east but, finding no place at the table there, headed west and carved himself a niche at lesser place.

His niche was electrochemistry-the science of what happens at metal electrodes in contact with chemical solutions. He used a special type of electrode called a hanging mercury drop electrode which, as the name suggests, was a hanging droplet of mercury which comprised the electrode. The beauty of the method was that the mercury droplet was the actual working electrode immersed in solution. The droplet, being metallic, was in electrical contact a capillary of mercury in contact with a reservoir of fresh mercury. An applied voltage made cool things happen at the interface: ions line-up in layers, mimicking what happens in things as mundane as milk colloids and in nerve cells. Other electrodes tend to gunk up quickly but the beauty of the hanging drop method was that the electrode could be clipped off and a fresh one rapidly "grown" from the reservoir. This allowed very precise and ingenious time-dependent experiments, faster than a person could analyze. His wife was a computer programmer (she was also a professor, but in the Electrical Engineering department) and her programming skills came in handy. Together they were the first to develop such computer-controlled experiments in 1960's.

His wife passed away in the early 1980's and he was one of those guys who lost interest in life afterwards. They had no kids (that I knew of) and had put all their love and legacies into their students and papers instead. By the time I met him he was erratic, irritable and quite likely mad. We blamed mercury. After he died (he flipped his car on a rural highway, leaving everything to his cat) his lab was cleaned out. There was mercury everywhere, in every crack and crevasse. You couldn't open a drawer without little balls of the stuff rolling and bouncing around inside. So yeah I think the guy was as mad as a hatter.