The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table

Deception is at the heart of this chapter. For instance, legend says King Midas’s touch turned anything to gold; more likely, Midas’s country of Phrygia in 700 BC obtained zinc and combined it with copper to produce brass, which resembles gold. Greeks colonized Phrygia and loved the brass. Kean tells us, “The tales they sent home could have swelled century by century, until golden-hued brass transmuted into real gold” (224).

Another metal that deceives people is iron pyrite, or fool’s gold, which “shines with a luster more golden than real gold” (225). Tellurium can combine with gold; in the Australian gold rush of 1893 it was discarded as fool’s gold and used as building material; when miners realized their error, they demolished the town in search of the hidden gold.

Counterfeiting began in Asia Minor. In the 500s BC, King Croesus of Lydia minted the first gold and silver coins; a few years later, King Polycrates of Samos “began buying off his enemies in Sparta with lead slugs plated with gold” (228). For the most part, however, “kings considered counterfeiting a high crime—treason. Those convicted of such treason faced hanging” (228).

Then in the 1200s, Kublai Khan introduced paper currency, which was harder to fake than coinage and more convenient to carry. Today, though, paper is easier to counterfeit. As a pushback, European currency is laced with special fluorescent dyes attached to atoms of europium, which, under laser light, glow in various colors, an effect very difficult to fake.

Coins made of precious metals do tend to retain their value: “the metals markets are one of the most stable long-term sources of wealth” (233). The most expensive element available for sale isn’t silver, gold, or platinum; it’s rhodium. During much of the 1800s, though, the most costly was aluminum (aluminium in the UK). Aluminum is common in the earth but hard to separate from oxygen. In 1886, Oberlin student Charles Hall ran a current through aluminum compounds in water and separated the metal. Quickly he formed a company, Alcoa, which soon produced 88,000 pounds of aluminum per day. The price of aluminum dropped from $18 per pound to 25 cents per pound. Nevertheless, Hall became rich. 

Elements not only influence politics and sciences; they also impact the arts. In the early 1800s, most science was carried out by aristocrats, who had the leisure and money to afford such a hobby. Wolfgang von Goethe, perhaps Germany’s greatest literary mind, also dabbled in the sciences. Though his theories today largely are discredited, he has two scientific distinctions: He is called “the last man who knew everything” (240), and he appointed J. W. Döbereiner to the chemistry chair at the University of Jena.

Döbereiner noticed that strontium’s weight lies exactly midway between calcium and barium; he discovered many other such symmetries. He arranged all these elements into a patterned chart based on weight; this work formed the basis for Mendeleev’s periodic table. In 1823, Döbereiner also invented a portable lighter made of platinum, which can “absorb and store massive amounts of burnable hydrogen gas”; this made him “almost as famous worldwide as Goethe” (244).

Even our artistic implements owe their creation to the study of elements. Kean cites the Parker 51 pen, introduced in 1941. It was stylish, came in several colors, used the new plastic Lucite, and delivered ink that dried by being absorbed into paper. The 1944 version’s tip was made of the element ruthenium, stronger and cheaper than previous pen tips, including those made of gold. Over the next three decades, and despite its high cost, the Parker 51 “outsold every pen ever made up to that point” (247).

Mark Twain was another artistic figure influenced by chemistry. He was no scientist but loved scientific discoveries. On the heels of Marie Curie’s announcements of radioactive materials, Twain in 1904 wrote a story about the Devil, who is made of radium and glows hot-green, the heat tempered by a thin layer of polonium.

The poet Robert Lowell, something of a mad genius, became, during the 1950s and 1960s, “the preeminent poet in the United States, winning prizes and selling thousands of books” (251). His “madness” arose from manic depression, now known as bipolar disorder. In 1967, recently hospitalized, Lowell agreed to take lithium as a drug therapy. Those with bipolar disorder have disordered biological clocks, and often they go without sleep until they burn out and become depressed. Lithium resets their inner clocks and helps keep them from overextending themselves. Lowell responded well to lithium, but his poetry became more ragged and less inventive. Kean suggests that “Lowell’s lithium may be a case where it provided health but subdued art, and made a mad genius merely human” (254). 

Scientists have their own kind of madness, called “pathological science” (255). In the 1800s, William Crookes made discoveries about selenium and was elected to Britain’s Royal Society. He also attended séances and wrote a monograph that gave provisional support to evidence of a ghostly afterlife, which shocked the society. Was he driven nutty by selenium?

Selenium, element 34, is a nutrient that, taken in large doses, causes psychological symptoms. Horses and cattle like to eat locoweed, “some varieties of which sponge up selenium from the soil,” which gives the animals a high but also “fevers, sores, and anorexia—a suite of symptoms known as the blind staggers” (258). Crookes, however, did his selenium research decades before his fascination with séances, and he lacked many crucial signs of selenium poisoning.

Crookes also made a youthful study of thallium, a poison, but didn’t exhibit its typical symptoms. His mind, sharp into old age, developed the theory of isotopes, and he made the first detection of helium on earth. Kean explains that “William dove into radioactivity, even discovering (though without realizing it) the element protactinium in 1900” (259). Instead of craziness, it’s likely that Crookes’s “lapse into spiritualism is psychological” (259): the early death of his beloved brother caused Crooke to wish, somehow, to contact him again.