EP #11: Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood*, Oliver Sacks, 2001

Entry 11 in the Essays Project with CT; the ‘summer of Sacks’ has turned into the fall of Sacks. It is interesting to be getting such a comprehensive view of a single person’s life and writing. Uncle Tungsten was apparently written in response to the spontaneous surfacing of childhood memories as Sacks approached his 60th year. We’ve read some other essays from that time, mostly from Everything in its Place (essays on South Kensington and Humphry Davies), and found those very good though we hope considerable new ground will be covered. [Later: New ground is being covered — there is not a lot of repetition…]

* Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Oliver Sacks, 2001.

C1: Uncle Tungsten

A chapter on his love of metals. It recounts incidents from when he was very young, and discusses artifacts made of various metals: the copper cauldron in the kitchen; the zinc birdbath in the garden; the cast-iron lawn roller in the garden.

It also has a fascinating description of how a diamond can draw heat from one’s hand and cut right into ice, as demonstrated by his mother, and descriptions of demonstrations of static electricity and crystal radios from his mother and brothers. He was clearly embedded in a very intellectually, scientifically-oriented family, and was blessed to be surrounded by people who answered his questions and encouraged his curiosity.

All these things – the rubbed amber, the magnets, the crystal radio, the clock dials with their tireless coruscations- gave me a sense of invisible rays and forces, a sense that beneath the famil-lar, visible world of colors and appearances there lay a dark, hidden world of mysterious laws and phenomena.
Uncle Tungston, Oliver Sacks, 2001, p 6

Finally he introduces Uncle Dave, aka Uncle Tungsten, who was a sort of a blend of a scientist and entrepreneur who specialized in the use of Tungsten wire in electrical lights. Like other members of the family he fostered Sack’s interests and answered his questions.

C2: “37”

He describes the house he grew up in, with special attention to the library and the rooms in which his parents conducted their medical practices, and the places which were meaningful to him, such as a cupboard he would crawl into when he was small. It is clear that his family was very well off, and that the extended family visited — and often lived — with Sacks, his siblings and his parents.

C3: Exile

When he was six he and his brother Michael were evacuated from London and sent to boarding schools for 4 years. Sacks’ headmaster was abusive, and it turned out to be a horrible experience for Sacks. He acted out when he was home, but his parents apparently did not make a connection between his behavior and the school. This episode resulted in him losing trust in his parents, and vitiated his religious belief. It also lead to him taking refuge in a world of numbers and scientific abstractions; this was encouraged by his Aunt Len, whom he would spend vacations with, and who showed him connections between math and biology (e.g. the fibonacci sequence and golden ratio). At some point Braefield was closed due to the complaints of other children, and he finished his education in exile at St. Lawrence College where he began lying and fantasizing and engaging in increasingly bizarre behaviors:

It seems to me as I look back on this time that I was filled with daydreams and myths, and that I was uncertain, at times, about the boundaries berween fantasy and reality. It seems to me I was trying to invent an identity of an absurd yet glamorous kind. I think my sense of isolation, of being uncared for and unknown, / may have been even greater at St. Lawrence than it was at Brae-field, where even the sadistic attentions of the headmaster could be seen as a sort of concern, even love. I think I was, perhaps, enraged with my parents, who remained blind and deaf, or inattentive, to my distress, and so was tempted to replace them with kindly, parental Russians or wolves.

When my parents visited me at midterm in 1943 (and perhaps heard of my curious fantastications and lies), they finally realized that I was close to the edge, and that they had better bring me back to London before worse befell me,
Uncle Tungston, Oliver Sacks, 2001, p 30-31

C4: An Ideal Metal

Returning home after his evacuation exile, Sacks found that many things had changed: there was both physical damage and alteration due to the war, as well as changes in life in the house (e.g., most servants had left). But he was able to resume his visits to Uncle Tungsten, who taught him basic chemistry, gave him samples of metals to experiment on, and guided him in experiments like calculating density and specific gravity. Uncle T also spoke of his hero Schell, and that in turn influenced Sacks:

There seemed to me an integrity, an essential goodness, about a life in science, a lifelong love affair. I had never given much thought to what I might be when I was “grown up” — growing up was hardly imaginable — but now I knew: I wanted to be a chemist. A chemist like Scheele, an eighteenth-century chemist coming fresh to the field, looking at the whole undiscovered world of natural substances and minerals, analyzing them, plumbing their secrets, finding the wonder of unknown and new metals.
– Uncle Tungston, Oliver Sacks, 2001, p 45

C5: Light for the Masses

Discusses Uncle T’s company, and the chemistry behind lighting. Also notes that Uncle T did much of his experimentation just for fun — this seems another clear influence on Sacks activities as he grows into adolescence. Sacks also describes making his own electric lighting system, and installing it in the cupboard he liked to inhabit, but also commented that the light illuminated the closet so well that it eliminated its mystery: “Too much light, I decided, was not a good things — there were some places best left with their secrets intact.“

C6: The Land of Stibnite

Sacks recounts being fearful of bullying and being slow to realize that school could be a good place. He was enrolled in Cub Scouts, but did not succeed in mastering the skills he was taught; he was finally expelled when as a sort of prank, he made a hardtack biscuit out of cement, when resulted in his scout master breaking his tooth.

He had better experiences in public institutions, dividing his time between the library and the South Kensington museums. He describes his fascination with rocks and minerals in the museum and his realization that:

a crystal was built from the repetition of innumerable identical lattices — that it was, in effect, a single giant self-replicating lattice — seemed marvelous to me. Crystals were like colossal microscopes that allowed one to see the actual configuration of the atoms inside them. I could almost see, in my mind, eye, the lead atoms and the sulfur atoms composing the galena – I imagined them vibrating slightly with electrical energy, bur otherwise firmly held in position, joined to one another now, coordinated in an infinite cubic lattice.
— Uncle Tungston, Oliver Sacks, 2001, p 66

…reading break…

C7: Chemical Reactions

Sacks describes early experiences with growing cystals and “silica gardens,” but notes that he did not really become interested in chemistry until he saw his the lab his Uncle Dave (Tungsten) had, and the experiments he conducted. Inspired, Sacks set up his own lab, aquiring glassware and an arsenal of chemicals he expanded via monthly visits to the pharmacists (at times surreptitiously funded by his uncles, who approved of his interests). Initially he was guided by a book called “Chemical Recreations,” by J. J. Griffin, which had experiments designed to appeal to children — dyes that changed color, reactions that produced colored flames and explosions, and so on. But this book also introduced basic concepts – like acids and bases – and so was more than just entertainment. Under Uncle Dave’s tutelage, Sacks began to see the reality of atomic weights — i.e. that burning 23 parts of sodium to 35.5 parts of chlorine produced table salt, and that other ratios did not work so well. The led Sacks into paying attention to atomic weights, and thence into collecting samples of all the elements.

Eventually, I had all the known elements, from H 1 to U 92. Every element became indissolubly associated with a number for me, and every number with an element. I loved carrying my little collection of chemical bus tickets with me; it gave me the sense that I had, in the space of a single cubic inch, the whole universe, its building blocks, in my pocket.
–Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten, p. 76

C8: Stinks and Bands

This continues with Sacks’ experiments at home, and notes that he was sometimes joined by his older brothers who suggested experiments. He became fascinated with the colors produced by the salts of different metals and developed the intuition that it was something about the atomic state of the metals that was responsible for their colors. From color he went on to explore reactions that generated heat, and thence to experimenting with acids, though his parents finally put their feet down when he wanted to do experiments with hydrofluoric acid. He writes:

It was really only later, when I thought about it, that became astonished at the nonchalant way in which Grifin (and my other books) proposed the use of intensely poisonous substances. I had not the least difficulty getting potassium cyanide from the chemists, the pharmacy, down the road – it was normally used for collecting insects in a killing bottle – but I could rather easily have killed myself with the stuff. I gathered, over a couple of years, a variety of chemicals that could have poisoned or blown up the entire street, but I was careful – or lucky.
–Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten, p. 85-86

From there he went on to experiment with smells, both pleasant and vile ones; here he was sometimes aided by his Auntie Len, who was interested in botany (and would later? introduce him to the way mathematics was manifested in nature via the golden ratio and the fibonacci sequence). After he accidentally produced a very large quantity of hydrogen sulfide, Sacks’ parents had a fume cupboard installed, and insisted on him using it.

Throughout all of this, I am struck by how much support and encouragement Sacks received from his parents, siblings, and extended family.

C9: Housecalls

In this chapter he discusses his relationship with his father. He describes reading together in the library, and being struck by his father’s intense concentration.

I have very early memories of seeing him reading in our library, and his concentration was such that nothing could disturb him, for everything outside the circle of his lamp was completely tuned out of his mind. […]. Seeing his intense absorption in reading, and the expressions that would appear on his face as he read (an involuntary smile, a grimace, a look of perplexity or delight), perhaps drew me to reading very early myself, so that even before the war I would sometimes join him in the library, reading my book alongside him, in a deep but unspoken companionship.

If there were no housecalls to do in the evening, my father would settle down after dinner with a torpedo-shaped cigar. He would palpate it gently, then hold it to his nose to test its aroma and freshness, and if it was satisfactory he would make a V-shaped incision in its tip with his cutter. He would light it carefully with a long match, rotating it so that it lit evenly. The tip would glow red as he drew, and his first exhalation was a sigh of satisfaction He would puff away gently as he read, and the air would tum blue and opalescent with smoke, enfolding us both in a fragrant cloud. I loved the smell of the beautiful Havanas he smoked, and loved to watch the grey cylinder of ash grow longer and longer, wondering how long it would get before it dropped on his book.
–Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten, p. 91-92

And he says he felt closest to his father when they went swimming together — swimming being something that Sacks pursued for nearly his entire life – and that transformed them both from clumsy land animals to graceful porpoise-like beings.

He describes, as well, being taken along on his father’s house calls, and observing first hand how his father’s approach to medicine involved not just being a doctor but having a real social relationship with each family (including eating with them). Next he gives an account of his formidable Aunt Lina, who many in the family disliked, but who stepped in as a surrogate parent when WWII began, and Sacks’ parents were occupied with providing medical support. Finally there is a mention of Uncle Bennie, who was excommunicated when he married a gentile, but whom his father continued to secretly visit…

C10: A Chemical Language

Recaps the history of chemistry through Sacks reading: Boyle, Priestly, Lavoisier. After recounting this, Sacks describes his attempts to repeat some of the classic experiments, demonstrating his increasing sophistication in doing chemistry. There is a nice final passage on the barrage balloons deployed over London during WWII.

C11: Humphrey Davies: A Poet-Chemist

Recaps the story of Humphrey Davies, one of Sacks’ scientist-heroes.

C12: Images

Discusses his interest in photography. One thing Sacks liked about photography is that he viewed it as a way of preserving the past – it was “forced on me by the war, the wholesale way in which seemingly permanent objects were removed or destroyed.“

There had been wrought iron railings, beautiful and solid, around our front garden before the war, but when I returned home in 1943, they were no longer there. I found this very disturbing, and was even driven to doubt my own memory. Had there in fact been such railings before the war, or had I, in a fanciful or poetic way, somehow invented them? Seeing photos of my younger self, posed against the railings, was a great relief, proving that the railings were really there.

[…]

I read 1984 when it came out in 1949, and found its account of the “memory hole” peculiarly evocative and frightening, for it accorded with my own doubts about my memory. I think that reading this led to an increase in my own journal keeping, and photographing, and an increased need to look at testimonies of the past. This took many forms- an interest in antiquarian books and old things of every sort; in genealogy; in archaeology; and most especially in paleontology.
–Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten, p. 135

Sacks also saw photography as a microcosm of science in that it brought together chemistry, optics and perception. His cousin Walter, though 30 years his senior, introduced him to photography — that is, the taking and developing of pictures. This is yet another instance of the young Sacks benefiting from his extended family and their scientific and intellectual interests. Most of the rest of the chapter describes his experimentation with different aspects of photography, such as explorations of color separation and stereoscopy and creating distorted images. The last lead to his seeing a link between photographic distortion and the optical distortions he experienced during his occasional migraines. “Migraines and photography, between them, may have helped tilt me in the direction in which, years later, I would go.”

The chapter ends with a discussion of his love of the stories of H.G. Wells, and his bicycle trips to Wells’ home, where he hoped to catch a glimpse of him.

C13: Mr. Dalton’s Round Bits of Wood

This chapter recaps the history of chemistry during which the ideas of atoms (as distinct elements), and molecules were worked out. It touches on Proust, Dalton, Avogadro and Cannizzaro. Some of the points that are made:

Sometimes ideas are better propounded by those that did not come up with them, for example: Thompson’s descriptions of Dalton’s early work, and Cannizzaro’s paper interpreting Avagadro’s work.
“It was evident that the history of science was anything but a straight and logical series, that it leapt about, split, converged, diverged, took off at tangents, repeated itself, got into jams and corners. “
While some scientists may be better off without knowing history (e.g. Dalton, who was ignorant about the troubled history of the concept of atoms), there were others: “who pondered the history of their subjects continually, and whose own contributions were integrally related to their pondering_-and it is clear chat this was the case with Cannizzaro. Cannizzaro thought intensely about Avogadro; saw the implications of his hypothesis as no one else had; and with them, and his own creativity, revolutionized chemistry.“

It seems clear that many of these ideas — the possibility of ideas being ignored, the knowledge of history, the drawing on and re-presentation of the work of predecessors – really infused Sacks approach to neurology in his adult life.

…reading break…

C14: Lines of Force

His early experiments with electricity…
His Uncle gave him materials but did not provide explanations or hints…
Experiments with static electricity and ‘chemical electricity’
Experiments with electrochemistry — zinc replaces copper, silver, gold,
When Sacks became interested in batteries, used batteries of all shapes and sizes were provided by his extended family…
Curiosity about how their doorbell worked led him to explore the relationship between electricity and magnetism, since it was the electrical production of a magnetic field that caused the clapper to clap. This led, eventually, to Maxwell’s unification of electricity and magnetism, and the vision of a propagating field of electricity producing a propagating field of magnetism, and so on, moving at nearly the speed of light. Sacks writes: “After hearing this, I began to think of light differently — as electric and magnetic fields leapfrogging over each other with lightning speed, braiding themselves together to form a ray of light.” This, in turn, lead to Hertz’s discovery of longer ‘radio waves.’
Comment that while batteries were taken up right upon their discovery, dynamos — the opposite, in a sense, took decades to catch on

C15: Home Life

Sacks family supported the Zionist community in London, although, with a few exceptions, they appear to have been luke warm rather than ardent Zionists.
Chief among the ardent Zionists was Aunt Annie Landau, who — according to Sacks — bullied and blackmailed others into contributing to the Zionist cause. She also chided Sacks, when he was a small child, for riding a tricycle on the sabbath, and led him to dislike the punitive and vindictive god that Annie depicted.
“It was evident that god had an acute nose.” (p. 174). In reference to Talmudic prescriptions for preparing incense.
Describes how he enjoyed the ritual of many Jewish festivals; but at the same time many of the more serious festivals and fast left him feeling oppressed and frightened.
Describes how the congregations — and other aspects of his family life (presence of relatives and servants in their house) – was shattered by WWII and its aftermath.
A short memoir of Aunt Birdie, a loving but mentally disabled Aunt.
A short reminiscence on music in his family…his father, brother, and his piano teacher who unexpectedly died in childbirth.
And account of his relationship with, and gradual estrangement from, his brother Michael as his schizophrenia became manifest, and Sacks withdrew into his lab and his explorations of chemistry, photography and electricity:

I became terrified of him, for him, of the nightmare which was becoming reality for him, the more so as I could recognize similar thoughts and feelings in myself, even though they were hidden, locked up in my own depths. What would happen to Michael, and would something similar happen to me, too? It was at this time that I set up my own lab in the house, and closed the doors, closed my ears, against Michael’s madness. It was at this time that I sought for (and sometimes achieved) an intense concentration, a complete absorption in the worlds of mineralogy and chemistry and physics, in science focusing on them, holding myself together in the chaos. It was not that I was indifferent to Michael; I felt a passionate sympathy for him, I half-knew what he was going through, but I had to keep a distance also, create my own world from the neutrality and beauty of nature, so that I would not be swept into the chaos, the madness, the seduc-tion, of his.
– Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten, p. 186

C16: Mendeleev’s Garden

After the war the science museum in South Kensington reopened, and Sacks became entranced with a cabinet which contained the elements of the periodic table. This was clearly a life altering experience for Sacks from the moment he saw it. His descriptions of his initial excitement, and the ways in which he explored it, as well as reading Mendeleeve’s Principles, is impressive and fascinating.

I kept dreaming of the periodic table in the excited half-sleep of that night – I dreamed of it as a flashing, revolving pinwheel or Catherine wheel, and then as a great nebula, going from the first element to the last, and whirling beyond uranium, out to infinity. The next day I could hardly wait for the museum to open, and dashed up to the top floor, where the table was, as soon as the doors were opened.

On this second visit I found myself looking at the table in almost geographic terms, as a realm, a kingdom, with different territories and boundaries. Seeing the table as a geographic realm allowed me to rise above the individual elements, and see certain general gradients and trends. Metals had long been recognized as a special category of elements, and now one could see, in a single synoptic glance, how they occupied three-quarters of the realm — all of the west side, most ot the south — leaving only a smallish area, mostly in the northeast, for the nonmetals. A jagged line, like Hadrian’s Wall, separated the metals from the rest, with a few “semimetals,” metalloids — arsenic, selenium — straddling the wall. One could see the gradients of acid and base, how the oxides of the “western” elements reacted with water to form alkalis, the oxides of the “eastern” elements, mostly non-metals, to form acids. One could see, again at a glance, how the elements on either border of the realm — the alkali metals and halogens, like sodium and chlorine, for example — showed the greatest avidity for each other and combined with explosive force, forming crystalline salts with high melting points which dissolved to form electrolytes; while those in the middle formed ra very different sort of compound — volatile liquids or gases which resisted electric currents. One could see, remembering how Volta and Davy and Berzelius ranked the elements into an electrical series, how the most strongly electropositive elements were all to the left, the most strongly electronegative to the right. Thus it was not just the placement of the individual elements, but trends of every sort that hit the eye when one looked at the table.

Seeing the table, “getting” it, altered my life. I took to visiting it as often as I could. I copied it into my exercise book and carried it everywhere; I got to know it so well — visually and conceptually — that I could mentally trace its paths in every direction, going up a group, then turning right on a period, stopping, going down one, yet always knowing where I was. It was like a garden, the garden of numbers I had loved as a child — but unlike this, it was real, a key to the universe. I spent hours now, enchanted, totally absorbed, wandering, making discoveries, in the enchanted garden of Mendeleev.
– Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten, p. 191; 194

After reading a dismissal of the periodic table as “superficial” and “illusory” by an eminent chemist of the period, Sack began to examine it for other regularities. He discovered the CRC Handbook of Physics and Chemistry, and made us of that for his examination:

I learned the densities, melting points, boiling points, refractive indices, solubilities, and crystalline forms of all the elements and hundreds of their compounds. I became consumed with graphing these, plotting atomic weights against every physical property I could think of. I became more and more excited, exu-berant, the more I explored, for almost everything I looked at showed periodicity: not only density, melting point, boiling point, but conductivity for heat and electricity, crystalline form, hardness, volume changes with fusion, expansion by heat, electrode potentials, etc., etc. It was not just valency, then, it was physical properties, too. The power, the universality of the periodic table was increased for me by this confirmation.
– Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten, p. 1204

This is remarkable, and, it must be said, obsessive behavior. Especially for a 12 year old. I wonder what his family made of this…

…reading break…

C17: A Pocket Spectroscope

Early on Sacks was intrigued with the colors of fireworks and the colors various compounds made when they were put in flames by his mother.
When he was 10 he received a book from his Aunt Lennie that included an imaginary account of a journey into the heart of the sun, and his Uncle Abe decided that Oliver should learn about spectroscopy, and gave him a book and leant him a small spectroscope. Uncle Abe also took him to his small observatory (on the top of his house, of course), and let him see that the spectra of earthly elements were present in the stars.
Sacks gives an account of Bunsen and Kirchoff’s use of spectroscopy to discover a variety of new elements (about 20 in all), and further discoveries in spectroscopy.

C18: Cold Fire

Continues on with his ‘apprenticeship’ with Uncle Abe, and his introduction to phosphorescence, luminescence, and Uncle Abe’s other interests.
He remarks that he lived in a “medical household,” and that both his parents were fond of telling stories about what they encounter. These stories might start out as a description of something particular, but would often broaden out in an entire biography of the patient

Though many of the fears of ” Braefield had vanished like a bad dream, they had lefta residue of fear and superstition, a sense that some special awfulness might be reserved for me, and that this might descend at any moment. The special dangers of chemistry were sought out, to some degree, I suspect, as a means of playing with such fears, persuading myself that by care and vigilance, prudence, forethought, one could learn to control, or find a way through, this hazardous world.
[…]
But with regard to life and health generally, no such protection could be counted on. Different forms of anxiety, of fearfulness, now struck me: I became afraid of horses (still used by the milkman to drive his float), afraid they might bite me with their large teeth; afraid of crossing the road, especially after our dog, Greta, was killed by a motorbike; afraid of other children, who (if nothing else) would laugh at me; afraid of stepping on the cracks between paving stones; and afraid, above all, of disease, of death.
– Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten, p. 235-236

His mother, like Oliver, was intensely shy and could hardly bear social occasions, but could become exuberant and flamboyant in front of an audience.
His parents, he says, were very sensitive to the sufferings of others, “more so, I sometimes thought, than to the sufferings of their own children.”
His mother particularly loved gardens, and it was here where her interest in structure, her appreciation of beauty, and her tenderness all found a focus. She was particularly fond of ferns, as Oliver was…
His mother, eager for Oliver to learn anatomy, brought home several malformed human fetuses for him to dissect, at the age of 11. He found this very disturbing, but says she didn’t notice and assumed he was as enthusiastic as he was.

C19: Ma

This chapter surveys his relationship with his mother, though it omits her rejection of him for being gay, and begins, oddly, with a story of his pet octopus.

A brief account of the octopus he kept as a pet; it was discovered and attacked by the maid, who apparently killed it. “…I found it dead, sprawled out in its own ink. I dissected it, sorrowfully, when I got back to London, to learn what I could, and kept its scattered remains in formalin in my bedroom for many years.“
He remarks that he lived in a “medical household,” and that both his parents were fond of telling stories about what they encounter. These stories might start out as a description of something particular, but would often broaden out in an entire biography of the patient

Though many of the fears of ” Braefield had vanished like a bad dream, they had lefta residue of fear and superstition, a sense that some special awfulness might be reserved for me, and that this might descend at any moment. The special dangers of chemistry were sought out, to some degree, I suspect, as a means of playing with such fears, persuading myself that by care and vigilance, prudence, forethought, one could learn to control, or find a way through, this hazardous world.
[…]
But with regard to life and health generally, no such protection could be counted on. Different forms of anxiety, of fearfulness, now struck me: I became afraid of horses (still used by the milkman to drive his float), afraid they might bite me with their large teeth; afraid of crossing the road, especially after our dog, Greta, was killed by a motorbike; afraid of other children, who (if nothing else) would laugh at me; afraid of stepping on the cracks between paving stones; and afraid, above all, of disease, of death.
–Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten, p. 235-236

His mother, like Oliver, was intensely shy and could hardly bear social occasions, but could become exuberant and flamboyant in front of an audience.
His parents, he says, were very sensitive to the sufferings of others, “more so, I sometimes thought, than to the sufferings of their own children.”
His mother particularly loved gardens, and it was here where her interest in structure, her appreciation of beauty, and her tenderness all found a focus. She was particularly fond of ferns, as Oliver was…
His mother, eager for Oliver to learn anatomy, brought home several malformed human fetuses for him to dissect, at the age of 11. He found this very disturbing, but says she didn’t notice and assumed he was as enthusiastic as he was. “these precocious experiences turned me against medicine, made me want to escape and turn to plants, which had no feelings, to crystals and minerals and elements, above all, for they existed in a deathless realm of their own, where sickness and suffering, pathology, held no sway.“
At 14 his mother arranged for him to dissect a human body. He was given the body of a 14 year old girl, and after a brief introduction was left to dissect it on his own. “But this delight in understanding and appreciating anatomy was lost, for the most part, in the horror of the dissection, and the feeling of the dissecting room spread to life outside. I did not know if I would ever be able to love the warm, quick bodies of the living after facing, smelling, cutting the formalin-reeking corpse of a girl my own age.“

C20: Penetrating Rays

Back at Uncle Abe’s. Abe introduces Oliver to cathode rays. This leads into a discussion of x-rays, a short precis of Roentgen’s discovery, and the way x-rays were rapidly applied to real-world problems, with everything from medical uses to uses in shoe stores.
Oliver also has an Uncle Yitzchak, a doctor who had an x-ray machine, and gets demonstrations and instruction from that Uncle. He learns about using metals as contrast agents, and gets to observe an attempt to diagnose a stomach ulcer in one of his father’s patients.
X-rays lead to Berquerl and his discover that Uranium compounds could cause film to darken even in the complete absence of light and other energy. It is quite the mystery: uranium salts, even after being left in the dark for months, could still affect film. Where was the energy to do this coming from? (Uncle Abe encouraged Oliver to repeat Berquerl’s experiments, and gave him a chunk of pitchblende to use in his experiments.)
Sacks notes that the radiation produced by Uranium could have been discovered earlier — in fact, there is a case where it darkened film, but the scientist assumed the film was bad, rather than that there was some mysterious phenomenon to be investigated. Anyway, Sacks lays out ways in which Uranium’s radiation could have been discovered earlier, but also suggests that had it been, it would likely have been ignored because there was not enough context and related phenomena to enable it to be taken up by science.

C21: Madan Curie’s Element

When he was ten, Sacks was gifted with, and read, a biography of Madam Curie. It was the first portrait of a scientist Sacks had ever read, and left an impression on him.
While most scientists ignored Berquerl’s discovery, the Curies were excited by it and embarked on a systematic search for other elements which behaved like Uranium. The only other known element the found was Thorium. Then they began to investigate common minerals containing Uranium and Thorium, they found some — like Pitchblende — that were far more powerful the either element on its own. The Curie’s theorized that it meant that there was another as-yet-unknown element in the mineral, and set out to isolate it. They found two new elements, Polonium and Radium, and were able to isolate enough of each to generate spectra that showed they were new elements.
There were all sorts of crazy applications of radioactivity, one of the scariest being “Thorium inhalers.”
Sacks concludes by discussing the mystery of where radioactive elements’ energy was coming from, and includes a speculation — retracted shortly after it was ventured, that it could come from a disintegration of atoms. However, as the whole idea of atoms as indivisible was the root of the concept, this idea did not catch on.

…reading break…

C22: Cannery Row

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C23: The World Set Free

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C24: The Brilliant Light

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C25: The End of the Affair

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Afterword

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END