Swimming Across by Andrew S. Grove

Author:Andrew S. Grove [GROVE, ANDREW S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO013000
ISBN: 9780446553285
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2008-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Throughout my years at gymnasium, I got more and more involved with chemistry. It all started during my last year at the Dob Street School. I had come across a book of simple chemistry experiments for kids. The experiments themselves were fun, but I had additional motivation for getting interested in science: After the fiasco of my potential journalism career, I was eager to cultivate an interest in a new profession that was less prone to subjectivity.

The chemistry experiments were innocent at first, involving ingredients I could find at home. I dissolved sugar in water, suspended a string in the solution, then let the water evaporate and watched the sugar crystals precipitate around the string. I heated some sugar over a little alcohol burner and watched it melt, change color, and give off a caramel-like odor. Sugar was a delicacy, particularly in cube form, but I always managed to appropriate a bit for my scientific purposes.

After the first simple experiments, my book led me to more complicated ones. But for these I needed more specialized materials.

The book was published before the war, a more prosperous time when chemical supplies were easy to find. After describing an ingredient, the author would blithely end the section with, “This compound should be available from most good drugstores.” I got increasingly annoyed with this phrase because in the world I lived in, even ordinary soap was available only intermittently.

Even the places that specialized in chemical compounds generally didn't have them in stock. In an economy that operated by central planning, shortages of just about everything were commonplace.

I had already experienced the frustrations of central planning when I tried to buy photographic paper. My aunt Manci had taught me some photography, and I also tinkered with developing my own film and enlarging photos at home. During the summer, my pictures had strong blacks and whites, and I needed low-contrast paper to print them properly. On the other hand, in the winter, when everything was in shades of gray, my pictures required high-contrast paper. Needless to say, low-contrast paper was always short in the summer and high-contrast paper was unavailable in the winter. I ended up buying my supply of paper during the prior season and then hoping I had stocked enough for my needs.

Buying chemicals for my experiments was also a hit-or-miss affair. There were no stores that sold chemistry supplies, so I went from drugstores to paint stores to chemical warehouses at the outskirts of Budapest, where I would plead with the clerks to give me small amounts of whatever I needed. People generally tried to help me out, but since no single store had everything, I had to go to a lot of stores before I could build up what I needed for the next group of experiments.

At first, I was satisfied just to mix two liquids together and watch them turn blue or purple or result in the precipitation of a white powder. I only vaguely understood what was actually happening, so the experiments had an air of magic.

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