Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks

Author:Oliver Sacks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2000-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Mendeleev’s Garden

In 1945 the Science Museum in South Kensington reopened (it had been closed for much of the war), and I first saw the giant periodic table displayed there. The table itself, covering a whole wall at the head of the stairs, was a cabinet made of dark wood with ninety-odd cubicles, each inscribed with the name, the atomic weight, and the chemical symbol of its element. And in each cubicle was a sample of the element itself (all of those elements, at least, which had been obtained in pure form, and which could be exhibited safely). It was labeled ‘The Periodic Classification of the Elements – after Mendeleeff.’

My first vision was of metals, dozens of them in every possible form: rods, lumps, cubes, wire, foil, discs, crystals. Most were grey or silver, some had hints of blue or rose. A few had burnished surfaces that shone a faint yellow, and then there were the rich colors of copper and gold.

In the upper right corner were the nonmetals – sulphur in spectacular yellow crystals and translucent red crystals of selenium; phosphorus, like pale beeswax, kept under water; and carbon, as tiny diamonds and shiny black graphite. There was boron, a brownish powder, and ridged crystalline silicon, with a rich black sheen like graphite or galena.

On the left were the alkali and alkaline earth metals – the Humphry Davy metals – all (except magnesium) in protective baths of naphtha. I was struck by the lithium in the upper corner, for this, with its levity, was floating on the naphtha, and also by the cesium, lower down, which formed a glittering puddle beneath the naphtha. Cesium, I knew, had a very low melting point and it was a hot summer day. But I had not fully realized, from the tiny, partly oxidized lumps I had seen, that pure cesium was pale gold – it gave at first just a glint, a flash of gold, seeming to iridesce with a golden luster; then, from a lower angle, it was purely gold, and looked like a gilded sea, or golden mercury.

There were other elements which up to this point had only been names to me (or, almost equally abstract, names attached to some physical properties and atomic weights), and now for the first time I saw the range of their diversity and actuality. In this first, sensuous glance I saw the table as a gorgeous banquet, a huge table set with eighty-odd different dishes.

I had, by this time, become familiar with the properties of many elements and I knew they formed a number of natural families, such as the alkali metals, the alkaline earth metals, and the halogens. These families (Mendeleev called them ‘groups’) formed the verticals of the table, the alkali and alkaline earth metals to the left, the halogens and inert gases to the right, and everything else in four intermediate groups in between. The ‘groupishness’ of these intermediate groups was somewhat less clear – thus in Group VI, I saw sulphur, selenium, and tellurium.

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