The Disappearing Spoon Part 5

The Langevin scandal broke in 1911, and the Swedish Academy of Sciences debated nixing Curie's nomination for her second n.o.bel Prize, fearing the political fallout of attaching itself to her. It decided it couldn't in good scientific conscience do that, but it did ask her not to attend the ceremony in her honor. She flauntingly showed up anyway. (Marie had a habit of flouting convention. Once, while visiting an eminent male scientist's home, she ushered him and a second man into a dark closet to show off a vial of a radioactive metal that glowed in the dark. Just as their eyes adjusted, a curt knock interrupted them. One of the men's wives was aware of Curie's femme fatale reputation and thought they were taking a little long in there.) Marie found a slight reprieve from her rocky personal life* when the cataclysm of World War I and the breakup of European empires resurrected Poland, which enjoyed its first taste of independence in centuries. But naming her first element after Poland contributed nothing to the effort. In fact, it turned out to have been a rash decision. As a metal, polonium is useless. It decays so quickly it might have been a mocking metaphor for Poland itself. And with the demise of Latin, its name calls to mind not Polonia but Polonius, the doddering fool from when the cataclysm of World War I and the breakup of European empires resurrected Poland, which enjoyed its first taste of independence in centuries. But naming her first element after Poland contributed nothing to the effort. In fact, it turned out to have been a rash decision. As a metal, polonium is useless. It decays so quickly it might have been a mocking metaphor for Poland itself. And with the demise of Latin, its name calls to mind not Polonia but Polonius, the doddering fool from Hamlet Hamlet. Worse, the second element, radium, glows a translucent green and soon appeared in consumer products worldwide. People even drank radium-infused water from radium-lined crocks called Revigators as a health tonic. (A competing company, Radithor, sold individual, pre-seeped bottles of radium and thorium water.)* In all, radium overshadowed its brother and caused exactly the sensation Curie had hoped for with polonium. Moreover, polonium has been linked to lung cancer from cigarettes, since tobacco plants absorb polonium excessively well and concentrate it in their leaves. Once incinerated and inhaled, the smoke ravishes lung tissue with radioactivity. Of all the countries in the world, only Russia, the many-time conqueror of Poland, bothers to manufacture polonium anymore. That's why when exKGB spy Alexander Litvinenko ate polonium-laced sus.h.i.+ and appeared in videos looking like a teenage leukemia victim, having lost all his hair, even his eyebrows, his former Kremlin employers became the prime suspects. In all, radium overshadowed its brother and caused exactly the sensation Curie had hoped for with polonium. Moreover, polonium has been linked to lung cancer from cigarettes, since tobacco plants absorb polonium excessively well and concentrate it in their leaves. Once incinerated and inhaled, the smoke ravishes lung tissue with radioactivity. Of all the countries in the world, only Russia, the many-time conqueror of Poland, bothers to manufacture polonium anymore. That's why when exKGB spy Alexander Litvinenko ate polonium-laced sus.h.i.+ and appeared in videos looking like a teenage leukemia victim, having lost all his hair, even his eyebrows, his former Kremlin employers became the prime suspects.

The trendy Revigator, a pottery crock lined with nuclear radium. Users filled the flask with water, which turned radioactive after a night's soak. Instructions suggested drinking six or more refres.h.i.+ng gla.s.ses a day. (National Museum of Nuclear Science and History) Historically, only a single case of acute polonium poisoning has approached the drama of Litvinenko's-that of Irene Joliot-Curie, Marie's slender, sad-eyed daughter. A brilliant scientist herself, Irene and her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie, picked up on Marie's work and soon one-upped her. Rather than just finding radioactive elements, Irene figured out a method for converting tame elements into artificially radioactive atoms by bombarding them with subatomic particles. This work led to her own n.o.bel Prize in 1935. Unfortunately, Joliot-Curie relied on polonium as her atomic bombardier. And one day in 1946, not long after Poland had been wrested from n.a.z.i Germany, only to be taken over as a puppet of the Soviet Union, a capsule of polonium exploded in her laboratory, and she inhaled Marie's beloved element. Though spared Litvinenko's public humiliation, Joliot-Curie died of leukemia in 1956, just as her mother had twenty-two years before.

The helpless death of Irene Joliot-Curie proved doubly ironic because the cheap, artificial radioactive substances she made possible have since become crucial medical tools. When swallowed in small amounts, radioactive "tracers" light up organs and soft tissue as effectively as X-rays do bones. Virtually every hospital in the world uses tracers, and a whole branch of medicine, radiology, deals exclusively in that line. It's startling to learn, then, that tracers began as no more than a stunt by a graduate student-a friend of Joliot-Curie's who sought revenge on his landlady.

In 1910, just before Marie Curie collected her second n.o.bel Prize for radioactivity, young Gyorgy Hevesy arrived in England to study radioactivity himself. His university's lab director in Manchester, Ernest Rutherford, immediately a.s.signed Hevesy the Herculean task of separating out radioactive atoms from nonradioactive atoms inside blocks of lead. Actually, it turned out to be not Herculean but impossible. Rutherford had a.s.sumed the radioactive atoms, known as radium-D, were a unique substance. In fact, radium-D was radioactive lead and therefore could not be separated chemically. Ignorant of this, Hevesy wasted two years tediously trying to tease lead and radium-D apart before giving up.

Hevesy-a bald, droopy-cheeked, mustached aristocrat from Hungary-also faced domestic frustrations. Hevesy was far from home and used to savory Hungarian food, not the English cooking at his boardinghouse. After noticing patterns in the meals served there, Hevesy grew suspicious that, like a high school cafeteria recycling Monday's hamburgers into Thursday's beef chili, his landlady's "fresh" daily meat was anything but. When confronted, she denied this, so Hevesy decided to seek proof.

Miraculously, he'd achieved a breakthrough in the lab around that time. He still couldn't separate radium-D, but he realized he could flip that to his advantage. He'd begun musing over the possibility of injecting minute quant.i.ties of dissolved lead into a living creature and then tracing the element's path, since the creature would metabolize the radioactive and nonradioactive lead the same way, and the radium-D would emit beacons of radioactivity as it moved. If this worked, he could actually track molecules inside veins and organs, an unprecedented degree of resolution.

Before he tried this on a living being, Hevesy decided to test his idea on the tissue of a nonliving being, a test with an ulterior motive. He took too much meat at dinner one night and, when the landlady's back was turned, sprinkled "hot" lead over it. She gathered his leftovers as normal, and the next day Hevesy brought home a newfangled radiation detector from his lab buddy, Hans Geiger. Sure enough, when he waved it over that night's goulash, Geiger's counter went furious: click-click-click-click click-click-click-click. Hevesy confronted his landlady with the evidence. But, being a scientific romantic, Hevesy no doubt laid it on thick as he explained the mysteries of radioactivity. In fact, the landlady was so charmed to be caught so cleverly, with the latest tools of forensic science, that she didn't even get mad. There's no historical record of whether she altered her menu, however.

Soon after discovering elemental tracers, Hevesy's career blossomed, and he continued to work on projects that straddled chemistry and physics. Yet those two fields were clearly diverging, and most scientists picked sides. Chemists remained interested in whole atoms bonding to one another. Physicists were fascinated with the individual parts of atoms and with a new field called quantum mechanics, a bizarre but beautiful way to talk about matter. Hevesy left England in 1920 to study in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr, a major quantum physicist. And it was in Copenhagen that Bohr and Hevesy unwittingly opened the crack between chemistry and physics into a real political rift.

In 1922, the box for element seventy-two on the periodic table stood blank. Chemists had figured out that the elements between fifty-seven (lanthanum) and seventy-one (lutetium) all had rare earth DNA. Element seventy-two was ambiguous. No one knew whether to tack it onto the end of the hard-to-separate rare earths-in which case element hunters should sift through samples of the recently discovered lutetium-or to provisionally cla.s.sify it as a transition metal, deserving its own column.

According to lore, Niels Bohr, alone in his office, constructed a nearly euclidean proof that element seventy-two was not not a lutetium-like rare earth. Remember that the role of electrons in chemistry was not well-known, and Bohr supposedly based his proof on the strange mathematics of quantum mechanics, which says that elements can hide only so many electrons in their inner sh.e.l.ls. Lutetium and its f-sh.e.l.ls had electrons stuffed into every sleeve and cranny, and Bohr reasoned that the next element had no choice but to start putting electrons on display and act like a proper transition metal. Therefore, Bohr dispatched Hevesy and physicist Dirk Coster to scrutinize samples of zirconium-the element above number seventy-two on the table and its probable chemical a.n.a.logue. In perhaps the least-sweat discovery in periodic table history, Hevesy and Coster found element seventy-two on their first attempt. They named it hafnium, from Hafnia, the Latin name for Copenhagen. a lutetium-like rare earth. Remember that the role of electrons in chemistry was not well-known, and Bohr supposedly based his proof on the strange mathematics of quantum mechanics, which says that elements can hide only so many electrons in their inner sh.e.l.ls. Lutetium and its f-sh.e.l.ls had electrons stuffed into every sleeve and cranny, and Bohr reasoned that the next element had no choice but to start putting electrons on display and act like a proper transition metal. Therefore, Bohr dispatched Hevesy and physicist Dirk Coster to scrutinize samples of zirconium-the element above number seventy-two on the table and its probable chemical a.n.a.logue. In perhaps the least-sweat discovery in periodic table history, Hevesy and Coster found element seventy-two on their first attempt. They named it hafnium, from Hafnia, the Latin name for Copenhagen.

Quantum mechanics had won over many physicists by then, but it struck chemists as ugly and unintuitive. This wasn't stodginess as much as pragmatism: that funny way of counting electrons seemed to have little to do with real chemistry. However, Bohr's predictions about hafnium, made without setting foot in a lab, forced chemists to swallow hard. Coincidentally, Hevesy and Coster made their discovery just before Bohr accepted the 1922 n.o.bel Prize in Physics. They informed him by telegram in Stockholm, and Bohr announced their discovery in a speech. This made quantum mechanics look like the evolutionary science, since it dug deeper into atomic structure than chemistry could. A whispering campaign began, and as with Mendeleev before him, Bohr's colleagues soon imbued Bohr-already inclined to scientific mysticism-with oracular qualities.

That's the legend anyway. The truth is a little different. At least three scientists preceding Bohr, including a chemist who directly influenced Bohr, wrote papers as far back as 1895 that linked element seventy-two to transition metals such as zirconium. These men weren't geniuses ahead of their time, but pedestrian chemists with little knowledge of or interest in quantum physics. It seems that Bohr poached their arguments when placing hafnium and probably used his quantum calculations to rationalize a less romantic, but still viable, chemical chemical argument about its spot on the table. argument about its spot on the table.*

Yet, as with most legends, what's important isn't the truth but the consequences-how people react to a story. And as the myth was bruited about, people clearly wanted to believe that Bohr had found hafnium through quantum mechanics alone. Physics had always worked by reducing nature's machines into smaller pieces, and for many scientists Bohr had reduced dusty, fusty chemistry to a specialized, and suddenly quaint, branch of physics. Philosophers of science also leapt on the story to proclaim that Mendeleevian chemistry was dead and Bohrian physics ruled the realm. What started as a scientific argument became a political dispute about territory and boundaries. Such is science, such is life.

The legend also lionized the man at the center of the brouhaha, Gyorgy Hevesy. Colleagues had already nominated Hevesy for a n.o.bel Prize by 1924 for discovering hafnium, but there was a dispute over priority with a French chemist and dilettante painter. Georges Urbain-who had once tried and failed to embarra.s.s Henry Moseley with his sample of rare earth elements-had discovered lutetium in 1907. Much later he claimed he had found hafnium-a rare earth flavor of hafnium-mixed in with his samples. Most scientists didn't find Urbain's work convincing, and unfortunately Europe was still divided by the recent unpleasantries in 1924, so the priority dispute took on nationalistic overtones. (The French considered Bohr and Hevesy Germans even though they were Danish and Hungarian, respectively. One French periodical sniffed that the whole thing "stinks of Huns," as if Attila himself had discovered the element.) Chemists also mistrusted Hevesy for his dual "citizens.h.i.+p" in chemistry and physics, and that, along with the political bickering, prevented the n.o.bel committee from giving him the prize. Instead, it left the 1924 prize blank.

Saddened but unbowed, Hevesy left Copenhagen for Germany and continued his important experiments on chemical tracers. In his spare time, he even helped determine how quickly the human body recycles an average water molecule (nine days) by volunteering to drink special "heavy" water,* in which some hydrogen atoms have an extra neutron, and then having his urine weighed each day. (As with the landlady-meat incident, he wasn't big on formal research protocol.) All the while, chemists such as Irene Joliot-Curie repeatedly and futilely nominated him for a n.o.bel Prize. Annually unrewarded, Hevesy grew a little despondent. But unlike with Gilbert Lewis, the obvious injustice aroused sympathy for Hevesy, and the lack of a prize strangely bolstered his status in the international community. in which some hydrogen atoms have an extra neutron, and then having his urine weighed each day. (As with the landlady-meat incident, he wasn't big on formal research protocol.) All the while, chemists such as Irene Joliot-Curie repeatedly and futilely nominated him for a n.o.bel Prize. Annually unrewarded, Hevesy grew a little despondent. But unlike with Gilbert Lewis, the obvious injustice aroused sympathy for Hevesy, and the lack of a prize strangely bolstered his status in the international community.

Nonetheless, with his Jewish ancestry, Hevesy soon faced direr problems than the lack of a n.o.bel Prize. He left n.a.z.i Germany in the 1930s for Copenhagen again and remained there through August 1940, when n.a.z.i storm troopers knocked on the front door of Bohr's inst.i.tute. And when the hour called for it, Hevesy proved himself courageous. Two Germans, one Jewish and the other a Jewish sympathizer and defender, had sent their gold n.o.bel Prize medals to Bohr for safekeeping in the 1930s, since the n.a.z.is would likely plunder them in Germany. However, Hitler had made exporting gold a state crime, so the discovery of the medals in Denmark could lead to multiple executions. Hevesy suggested they bury the medals, but Bohr thought that was too obvious. So, as Hevesy later recalled, "while the invading forces marched in the streets of Copenhagen, I was busy dissolving [Max von] Laue's and also James Franck's medals." To do this, he used aqua regia-a caustic mix of nitric and hydrochloric acids that fascinated alchemists because it dissolved "royal metals" such as gold (though not easily, Hevesy remembered). When the n.a.z.is ransacked Bohr's inst.i.tute, they scoured the building for loot or evidence of wrongdoing but left the beaker of orange aqua regia untouched. Hevesy was forced to flee to Stockholm in 1943, but when he returned to his battered laboratory after V-E Day, he found the innocuous beaker undisturbed on a shelf. He precipitated out the gold, and the Swedish Academy later re-cast the medals for Franck and Laue. Hevesy's only complaint about the ordeal was the day of lab work he missed while fleeing Copenhagen.

Amid those adventures, Hevesy continued to collaborate with colleagues, including Joliot-Curie. In fact, Hevesy was an unwitting witness to an enormous blunder by Joliot-Curie, which prevented her from making one of the great scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. That honor fell to another woman, an Austrian Jew, who, like Hevesy, fled n.a.z.i persecution. Unfortunately, Lise Meitner's run-in with politics, both worldly and scientific, ended rather worse than Hevesy's.

Meitner and her slightly younger collaborator, Otto Hahn, began working together in Germany just before the discovery of element ninety-one. Its discoverer, Polish chemist Kazimierz Fajans, had detected only short-lived atoms of the element in 1913, so he named it "brevium." Meitner and Hahn realized in 1917 that most atoms of it actually live hundreds of thousands of years, which made "brevium" sound a little stupid. They rechristened it protactinium, or "parent of actinium," the element into which it (eventually) decayed.

No doubt Fajans protested this rejection of "brevium." Although he was admired for his grace among high-society types, contemporaries say the Pole had a pugnacious and tactless streak in professional matters. Indeed, there's a myth that the n.o.bel committee had voted to award Fajans the vacant 1924 chemistry prize (the one Hevesy supposedly missed) for work on radioactivity but rescinded it, as punishment for hubris, when a photo of Fajans and a story headlined "K. Fajans to Receive n.o.bel Prize" appeared in a Swedish newspaper before the formal announcement. Fajans always maintained that an influential and unfriendly committee member had blocked him for personal reasons.* (Officially, the Swedish Academy said it had left that year's prize blank and kept the prize money to sh.o.r.e up its endowment, which, it complained, had been decimated by high Swedish taxes. But it released that excuse only after a public outcry. At first it just announced there would be no prizes in multiple categories and blamed "a lack of qualified candidates." We may never know the real story, since the academy says that "such information is deemed secret for all times.") (Officially, the Swedish Academy said it had left that year's prize blank and kept the prize money to sh.o.r.e up its endowment, which, it complained, had been decimated by high Swedish taxes. But it released that excuse only after a public outcry. At first it just announced there would be no prizes in multiple categories and blamed "a lack of qualified candidates." We may never know the real story, since the academy says that "such information is deemed secret for all times.") Regardless, "brevium" lost out, "protactinium" stuck,* and Meitner and Hahn sometimes receive credit for codiscovering element ninety-one today. However, there's another, more intriguing story to unpack in the work that led to the new name. The scientific paper that announced the long-lived protactinium betrayed the first signs of Meitner's unusual devotion to Hahn. It was nothing s.e.xual-Meitner never married, and no one has ever found evidence she had a lover-but at least professionally, she was smitten with Hahn. That's probably because Hahn had recognized her worth and chosen to work alongside her in a retrofitted carpentry shop when German officials refused to give Meitner, a woman, a real lab. Isolated in the shop, they fell into a pleasing relations.h.i.+p where he performed the chemistry, identifying what elements were present in radioactive samples, and she performed the physics, figuring out how Hahn had gotten what he said. Unusually, though, Meitner performed and Meitner and Hahn sometimes receive credit for codiscovering element ninety-one today. However, there's another, more intriguing story to unpack in the work that led to the new name. The scientific paper that announced the long-lived protactinium betrayed the first signs of Meitner's unusual devotion to Hahn. It was nothing s.e.xual-Meitner never married, and no one has ever found evidence she had a lover-but at least professionally, she was smitten with Hahn. That's probably because Hahn had recognized her worth and chosen to work alongside her in a retrofitted carpentry shop when German officials refused to give Meitner, a woman, a real lab. Isolated in the shop, they fell into a pleasing relations.h.i.+p where he performed the chemistry, identifying what elements were present in radioactive samples, and she performed the physics, figuring out how Hahn had gotten what he said. Unusually, though, Meitner performed all all the work for the final, published protactinium experiments because Hahn was distracted with Germany's gas warfare during World War I. She nevertheless made sure he received credit. (Remember that favor.) the work for the final, published protactinium experiments because Hahn was distracted with Germany's gas warfare during World War I. She nevertheless made sure he received credit. (Remember that favor.) After the war, they resumed their partners.h.i.+p, but while the decades between the wars were thrilling in Germany scientifically, they proved scary politically. Hahn-strong-jawed, mustached, of good German stock-had nothing to fear from the n.a.z.i takeover in 1932. Yet to his credit, when Hitler ran all the Jewish scientists out of the country in 1933-causing the first major wave of refugee scientists-Hahn resigned his professors.h.i.+p in protest (though he continued to attend seminars). Meitner, though raised a proper Austrian Protestant, had Jewish grandparents. Characteristically, and perhaps because she had at last earned her own real research lab, she downplayed the danger and buried herself in scintillating new discoveries in nuclear physics.

The biggest of those discoveries came in 1934, when Enrico Fermi announced that by pelting uranium atoms with atomic particles, he had fabricated the first transuranic elements. This wasn't true, but people were transfixed by the idea that the periodic table was no longer limited to ninety-two entries. A fireworks display of new ideas about nuclear physics kept scientists busy around the world.

That same year, another leader in the field, Irene Joliot-Curie, did her own bombardments. After careful chemical a.n.a.lysis, she announced that the new transuranic elements betrayed an uncanny similarity to lanthanum, the first rare earth. This, too, was unexpected-so unexpected that Hahn didn't believe it. Elements bigger than uranium simply could not behave exactly like a tiny metallic element nowhere near uranium on the periodic table. He politely told Frederic Joliot-Curie that the lanthanum link was hogwash and vowed to redo Irene's experiments to show that the transuranics were nothing like lanthanum.

Also in 1938, Meitner's world collapsed. Hitler boldly annexed Austria and embraced all Austrians as his Aryan brethren-except anyone remotely Jewish. After years of willed invisibility, Meitner was suddenly subject to n.a.z.i pogroms. And when a colleague, a chemist, tried to turn her in, she had no choice but to flee, with just her clothes and ten deutsch marks. She found refuge in Sweden and accepted a job at, ironically, one of the n.o.bel science inst.i.tutes.

Despite the hards.h.i.+ps, Hahn remained faithful to Meitner, and the two continued to collaborate, writing letters like clandestine lovers and occasionally rendezvousing in Copenhagen. During one such meeting in late 1938, Hahn arrived a little shaken. After repeating Irene Joliot-Curie's experiments, he had found her elements. And they not only behaved like like lanthanum (and another nearby element she'd found, barium), but, according to every known chemical test, they lanthanum (and another nearby element she'd found, barium), but, according to every known chemical test, they were were lanthanum and barium. Hahn was considered the best chemist in the world, but that finding "contradict[ed] all previous experience," he later admitted. He confessed his humbling bafflement to Meitner. lanthanum and barium. Hahn was considered the best chemist in the world, but that finding "contradict[ed] all previous experience," he later admitted. He confessed his humbling bafflement to Meitner.

Meitner wasn't baffled. Out of all the great minds who worked on transuranic elements, only hard-eyed Meitner grasped that they weren't transuranic at all. She alone (after discussions with her nephew and new partner, physicist Otto Frisch) realized that Fermi hadn't discovered new elements; he'd discovered nuclear fission. He'd cracked uranium into smaller elements and misinterpreted his results. The eka-lanthanum Joliot-Curie had found was plain lanthanum, the fallout of the first tiny nuclear explosions! Hevesy, who saw early drafts of Joliot-Curie's papers from that time, later reminisced on how close she'd come to making that unimaginable discovery. But Joliot-Curie, Hevesy said, "didn't trust herself enough" to believe the correct interpretation. Meitner trusted herself, and she convinced Hahn that everyone else was wrong.

Naturally, Hahn wanted to publish these astounding results, but his collaboration with, and debt to, Meitner made doing so politically tricky. They discussed options, and she, deferential, agreed to name just Hahn and his a.s.sistant on the key paper. Meitner and Frisch's theoretical contributions, which made sense of everything, appeared later in a separate journal. With those publications, nuclear fission was born just in time for Germany's invasion of Poland and the start of World War II.

So began an improbable sequence of events that culminated in the most egregious oversight in the history of the n.o.bel Prize. Even without knowledge of the Manhattan Project, the n.o.bel committee had decided by 1943 to reward nuclear fission with a prize. The question was, who deserved it? Hahn, clearly. But the war had isolated Sweden and made it impossible to interview scientists about Meitner's contributions, an integral part of the committee's decision. The committee therefore relied on scientific journals-which arrived months late or not at all, and many of which, especially prestigious German ones, had barred Meitner. The emerging divisions between chemistry and physics also made it hard to reward interdisciplinary work.

After suspending the prizes in 1940, the Swedish Academy began awarding a few retroactively in 1944. First up, at long last, Hevesy won the vacant 1943 prize for chemistry-though perhaps partly as a political gesture, to honor all refugee scientists. In 1945, the committee took up the more vexed matter of fission. Meitner and Hahn both had strong back-room advocates on the n.o.bel committee, but Hahn's backer had the chutzpah to point out that Meitner had done no work "of great importance" in the previous few years-when she was in hiding from Hitler. (Why the committee never directly interviewed Meitner, who was working at a nearby n.o.bel inst.i.tute, isn't clear, although it's generally bad practice to interview people about whether they deserve a prize.) Meitner's backer argued for a shared prize and probably would have prevailed given time. But when he died unexpectedly, the Axis-friendly committee members mobilized, and Hahn won the 1944 prize alone.

Shamefully, when Hahn got word of his win (the Allies now had him in military custody for suspicion of working on Germany's atomic bomb; he was later cleared), he didn't speak up for Meitner. As a result, the woman he'd once esteemed enough to defy his bosses and work with in a carpentry shop got nothing-a victim, as a few historians had it, of "disciplinary bias, political obtuseness, ignorance, and haste."*

The committee could have rectified this in 1946 or later, of course, after the historical record made Meitner's contributions clear. Even architects of the Manhattan Project admitted how much they owed her. But the n.o.bel committee, famous for what Time Time magazine once called its "old-maid peevishness," is not p.r.o.ne to admit mistakes. Despite being repeatedly nominated her whole life-by, among others, Kazimierz Fajans, who knew the pain of losing a n.o.bel better than anyone-she died in 1968 without her prize. magazine once called its "old-maid peevishness," is not p.r.o.ne to admit mistakes. Despite being repeatedly nominated her whole life-by, among others, Kazimierz Fajans, who knew the pain of losing a n.o.bel better than anyone-she died in 1968 without her prize.

Happily, however, "history has its own balance sheet." The transuranic element 105 was originally named hahnium, after Otto Hahn, by Glenn Seaborg, Al Ghiorso, and others in 1970. But during the dispute over naming rights, an international committee-as if hahnium was Poland-stripped the element of that name in 1997, dubbing it dubnium. Because of the peculiar rules for naming elements*-basically, each name gets one shot-hahnium can never be considered as the name for a new element in the future, either. The n.o.bel Prize is all Hahn gets. And the committee soon crowned Meitner with a far more exclusive honor than a prize given out yearly. Element 109 is now and forever will be known as meitnerium.

Elements as Money

If the periodic table has a history with politics, it has an even longer and cozier relations.h.i.+p with money. The stories of many metallic elements cannot be told without getting tangled up in the history of money, which means the history of those elements is also tangled up with the history of counterfeiting. In different centuries, cattle, spices, porpoise teeth, salt, cocoa beans, cigarettes, beetle legs, and tulips have all pa.s.sed for currency, none of which can be faked convincingly. Metals are easier to doctor. Transition metals especially have similar chemistries and densities because they have similar electron structures, and they can blend together and replace one another in alloys. Different combinations of precious and less-than-precious metals have been fooling people for millennia.

Around 700 BC BC, a prince named Midas inherited the kingdom of Phrygia in what is now Turkey. According to various myths (which might conflate two rulers named Midas), he led an eventful life. Jealous Apollo, the G.o.d of music, asked Midas to judge a showdown between him and the other great lyre strummers of the era, then turned Midas's ears into donkey ears when Midas favored someone else over Apollo. (He didn't deserve human ears if he judged music that badly.) Midas also reportedly maintained the best rose garden in the ancient world. Scientifically, Midas sometimes receives credit for discovering tin (not true, though it was mined in his kingdom) and for discovering the minerals "black lead" (graphite) and "white lead" (a beautiful, bright white, poisonous lead pigment). Of course, no one would remember Midas today if not for another metallurgical novelty, his golden touch. He earned it after tending to the drunken satyr Silenus, who pa.s.sed out in his rose garden one night. Silenus so appreciated the monarch's hospitality that he offered Midas a reward. Midas asked that whatever he touched transform into gold-a delight that soon cost him his daughter when he hugged her and almost cost him his life, since for a time even food transubstantiated into gold at his lips.

Obviously, none of that probably ever happened to the real king. But there's evidence that Midas earned his legendary status for good reason. It all traces back to the Bronze Age, which began in Midas's neighborhood around 3000 BC BC. Casting bronze, an alloy of tin and copper, was the high-tech field of the day, and although the metal remained expensive, the technology had penetrated most kingdoms by the time of Midas's reign. The skeleton of a king popularly called Midas (but proved later to be his father, Gordias) was found in its tomb in Phrygia surrounded by bronze cauldrons and handsome bronze bowls with inscriptions, and the otherwise naked skeleton itself was found wearing a bronze belt. But in saying "bronze," we need to be more specific. It's not like water, where two parts hydrogen always combine with one part oxygen. A number of different alloys with different ratios of metals all count as bronze, and bronze metals around the ancient world differed in color depending on the percentages of tin, copper, and other elements where the metals were mined.

One unique feature of the metallic deposits near Phrygia was the abundance of ores with zinc. Zinc and tin ores commonly commingle in nature, and deposits of one metal can easily be mistaken for the other. What's interesting is that zinc mixed with copper doesn't form bronze; it forms bra.s.s. And the earliest known bra.s.s foundries existed in, of all places, the part of Asia Minor where Midas once reigned.

Is it obvious yet? Go find something bronze and something bra.s.s and examine them. The bronze is s.h.i.+ny, but with overtones of copper. You wouldn't mistake it for anything else. The s.h.i.+ne of bra.s.s is more alluring, more subtle, a little more... golden. Midas's touch, then, was possibly nothing more than an accidental touch of zinc in the soil of his corner of Asia Minor.

To test that theory, in 2007 a professor of metallurgy at Ankara University in Turkey and a few historians constructed a primitive Midas-era furnace, into which they loaded local ores. They melted them, poured the resulting liquid into molds, and let it cool. Mirabile dictu, it hardened into an uncannily golden bullion. Naturally, it's impossible to know whether the contemporaries of King Midas believed that his precious zinc-laden bowls and statues and belts were actually gold. But they weren't necessarily the ones making up legends about him. More probably, the Greek travelers who later colonized that region of Asia Minor simply grew smitten with the Phrygian "bronzes," so much brighter than their own. The tales they sent home could have swelled century by century, until golden-hued bra.s.s trans.m.u.ted into real gold, and a local hero's earthly power trans.m.u.ted into the supernatural power to create precious metals at a touch. After that, it took only the genius of Ovid to touch up the story for his Metamorphoses, Metamorphoses, and voila: a myth with a more-than-plausible origin. and voila: a myth with a more-than-plausible origin.

An even deeper archetype in human culture than Midas is the lost city of gold-of travelers in far-off, alien lands stumbling onto unimaginable wealth. El Dorado. In modern and (slightly) more realistic times, this dream often takes the form of gold rushes. Anyone who paid an iota of attention in history cla.s.s knows that real gold rushes were awful, dirty, dangerous affairs, with bears and lice and mine collapses and lots of pathetic whoring and gambling. And the chances that a person would end up rich were almost zilch. Yet almost no one with an iota of imagination hasn't dreamed of throwing over everything in his humdrum life and rus.h.i.+ng off to prospect for a few pure nuggets. The desire for a great adventure and the love of riches are practically built into human nature. As such, history is dotted with innumerable gold rushes.

Nature, naturally, doesn't want to part with her treasure so easily, so she invented iron pyrite (iron disulfide) to thwart amateur prospectors. Perversely, iron pyrite s.h.i.+nes with a l.u.s.ter more golden than real gold, like cartoon gold or gold in the imagination. And more than a few greenhorns and people blinded by greed have been taken in during a fool's gold rush. But in all of history, probably the most confounded gold rush ever took place in 1896, on rough frontier land in the Australian outback. If iron pyrite is faux gold, then this gold rush in Australia-which eventually found desperate prospectors knocking down their own chimneys with pickaxes and sifting through the rubble-was perhaps the first stampede in history caused by "fool's fool's gold."

Three Irishmen, including Patrick (Paddy) Hannan, were traversing the outback in 1893 when one of their horses lost a shoe twenty miles from home. It might have been the luckiest breakdown in history. Within days, without having to dig an inch into the dirt, they'd collected eight pounds of gold nuggets just walking around. Honest but dim, the trio filed a claim with territory officials, which put the location on public record. Within a week, hundreds of prospectors were storming Hannan's Find, as the post became known, to try their luck.

In a way, the expanse was easy pickings. During those first months in the desert, gold was more plentiful than water. But while that sounds great, it wasn't. You can't drink gold, and as more and more miners piled in, the prices of supplies soared, and compet.i.tion for mining sites grew fierce. People started having to dig for gold, and some fellows figured out there was easier money to be had in building up a real town instead. Breweries and brothels popped up in Hannan's Find, as did houses and even paved roads. For bricks, cement, and mortar, builders collected the excess rock dug out during excavations. Miners just cast it aside, and as long as they were going to keep digging, there was nothing better to do with the rubble.

Or so they a.s.sumed. Gold is an aloof metal. You won't find it mixed inside minerals and ores, because it doesn't bond with other elements. Its flakes and nuggets are usually pure, besides a few odd alloys. The exception, the single element that will bond to gold, is tellurium, a vampirish element first isolated in Transylvania in 1782. Tellurium combines with gold to form some garish-sounding minerals-krennerite, petzite, sylvanite, and calaverite-with some equally atrocious chemical formulas. Instead of nice proportions such as H2O and CO2, krennerite is (Au0.8, Ag0.2)Te2. Those tellurides vary in color, too, and one of them, calaverite, s.h.i.+nes sort of yellow.

Actually it s.h.i.+nes more like bra.s.s or iron pyrite than deep-hued gold, but it's probably close enough to trick you if you've been out in the sun all day. You can imagine a raw, dirty eighteen-year-old hauling in calaverite nuggets to the local appraiser in Hannan's Find, only to hear the appraiser dismiss them as a sackful of what mineralogists cla.s.sify as bagos.h.i.+te. Remember, too, that some tellurium compounds (not calaverite, but others) smell pungent, like garlic magnified a thousand times, an odor notoriously difficult to get rid of. Better to sell it and bury it in roads, where it won't stink, and get back to digging for the real McCoy.

But people just kept piling into Hannan's Find, and food and water didn't get any cheaper. At one point, tensions over supplies ran so high that a full-on riot erupted. And as things got desperate, rumors circulated about that yellowish tellurium rock they were digging up and throwing away. Even if hardscrabble miners weren't acquainted with calaverite, geologists had been for years and knew its properties. For one, it decomposes at low temperatures, which makes separating out the gold darn easy. Calaverite had first been found in Colorado in the 1860s.* Historians suspect that campers who'd built a fire one night noticed that, um, the rocks they'd ringed the fire pit with were oozing gold. Pretty soon, stories to that effect made their way to Hannan's Find. Historians suspect that campers who'd built a fire one night noticed that, um, the rocks they'd ringed the fire pit with were oozing gold. Pretty soon, stories to that effect made their way to Hannan's Find.

h.e.l.l finally broke loose on May 29, 1896. Some of the calaverite used to build Hannan's Find contained five hundred ounces of gold per ton of rock, and miners were soon tearing out every d.a.m.n ounce they could find. People attacked refuse heaps first, scrabbling among them for discarded rock. When those were picked clean, they went after the town itself. Paved-over potholes became potholes again; sidewalks were chiseled out; and you can bet the miner who built the chimney and hearth for his new home out of gold tellurideinfused brick wasn't too sentimental about tearing it apart again.

In later decades, the region around Hannan's Find, soon renamed Kalgoorlie, became the world's largest gold producer. The Golden Mile, they called it, and Kalgoorlie bragged that its engineers outpaced the rest of the world when it came to extracting gold from the ground. Seems like the later generations learned their lesson-not to be throwing aside rocks all w.i.l.l.y-nilly-after their fathers' fool's fool's gold rush.

Midas's zinc and Kalgoorlie's tellurium were rare cases of unintentional deception: two innocent moments in monetary history surrounded by aeons of deliberate counterfeiting. A century after Midas, the first real money, coins made of a natural silver-gold alloy called electrum, appeared in Lydia, in Asia Minor. Shortly after that, another fabulously wealthy ancient ruler, the Lydian king Croesus, figured out how to separate electrum into silver and gold coins, in the process establis.h.i.+ng a real currency system. And within a few years of Croesus's feat, in 540 BC BC, King Polycrates, on the Greek isle Samos, began buying off his enemies in Sparta with lead slugs plated with gold. Ever since then, counterfeiters have used elements such as lead, copper, tin, and iron the way cheap barkeeps use water in kegs of beer-to make the real money stretch a little further.

Today counterfeiting is considered a straight case of fraud, but for most of history, a kingdom's precious-metal currency was so tied up with its economic health that kings considered counterfeiting a high crime-treason. Those convicted of such treason faced hanging, if not worse. Counterfeiting has always attracted people who do not understand opportunity costs-the basic economic law that you can make far more money plying an honest trade than spending hundreds of hours making "free" money. Nevertheless, it has taken some brilliant minds to thwart those criminals and design anything approaching foolproof currency.

For instance, long after Isaac Newton had derived the laws of calculus and his monumental theory of gravity, he became master of the Royal Mint of England in the last few years of the 1600s. Newton, in his early fifties, just wanted a well-paying government post, but to his credit he didn't approach it as a sinecure. Counterfeiting-especially "clipping" coins by shaving the edges and melting the sc.r.a.ps together to make new coins-was endemic in the seedier parts of London. The great Newton found himself entangled with spies, lowlifes, drunkards, and thieves-an entanglement he thoroughly enjoyed. A pious Christian, Newton prosecuted the wrongdoers he uncovered with the wrath of the Old Testament G.o.d, refusing pleas for clemency. He even had one notorious but slippery "coiner," William Chaloner-who'd goaded Newton for years with accusations of fraud at the mint-hanged and publicly disemboweled.

The counterfeiting of coins dominated Newton's tenure, but not long after he resigned, the world financial system faced new threats from fake paper currency. A Mongol emperor in China, Kublai Khan, had introduced paper money there in the 1200s. The innovation spread quickly in Asia at first-partly because Kublai Khan executed anyone who refused to use it-but only intermittently in Europe. Still, by the time the Bank of England began issuing paper notes in 1694, the advantages of paper currency had grown obvious. The ores for making coins were expensive, coins themselves were c.u.mbersome, and the wealth based on them depended too much on unevenly distributed mineral resources. Coins also, since knowledge of metalworking was more widespread in centuries past, were easier for most people to counterfeit than paper money. (Nowadays the situation is vice versa. Anyone with a laser printer can make a decent $20 bill. Do you have a single acquaintance who could cast a pa.s.sable nickel, even if such a thing were worth doing?) If the alloy-friendly chemistry of metal coins once favored swindlers, in the age of paper money the unique chemistry of metals like europium helps governments combat swindling. It all traces back to the chemistry of europium, especially the movement of electrons within its atoms. So far we've discussed only electron bonds, the movement of electrons between atoms. But electrons constantly whirl around their own nuclei, too, movement often compared to planets circling a sun. Although that's a pretty good a.n.a.logy, it has a flaw if taken literally. Earth in theory could have ended up on many different orbits around the sun. Electrons cannot take any old path around a nucleus. They move within sh.e.l.ls at different energy levels, and because there's no energy level between one and two, or two and three, and so on, the paths of electrons are highly circ.u.mscribed: they orbit only at certain distances from their "sun" and orbit in oblong shapes at funny angles. Also unlike a planet, an electron-if excited by heat or light-can leap from its low-energy sh.e.l.l to an empty, high-energy sh.e.l.l. The electron cannot stay in the high-energy state for long, so it soon crashes back down. But this isn't a simple back-and-forth motion, because as it crashes, the electron jettisons energy by emitting light.

The color of the emitted light depends on the relative heights of the starting and ending energy levels. A crash between closely s.p.a.ced levels (such as two and one) releases a pulse of low-energy reddish light, while a crash between more widely s.p.a.ced levels (say, five and two) releases high-energy purple light. Because the electrons' options about where to jump are limited to whole-number energy levels, the emitted light is also constrained. Light emitted by electrons in atoms is not like the white light from a lightbulb. Instead, electrons emit light of very specific, very pure colors. Each element's sh.e.l.ls sit at different heights, so each element releases characteristic bands of color-the very bands Robert Bunsen observed with his burner and spectroscope. Later, the realization that electrons jump to whole-number levels and never orbit at fractional levels was a fundamental insight of quantum mechanics. Everything wacky you've ever heard about quantum mechanics derives directly or indirectly from these discontinuous leaps.

Europium can emit light as described above, but not very well: it and its brother lanthanides don't absorb incoming light or heat efficiently (another reason chemists had trouble identifying them for so long). But light is an international currency, redeemable in many forms in the atomic world, and lanthanides can emit light in a way other than simple absorption. It's called fluorescence,* which is familiar to most people from black lights and psychedelic posters. In general, normal emissions of light involve just electrons, but fluorescence involves whole molecules. And whereas electrons absorb and emit light of the same color (yellow in, yellow out), fluorescent molecules absorb high-energy light (ultraviolet light) but emit that energy as lower-energy, visible light. Depending on the molecule it's attached to, europium can emit red, green, or blue light. which is familiar to most people from black lights and psychedelic posters. In general, normal emissions of light involve just electrons, but fluorescence involves whole molecules. And whereas electrons absorb and emit light of the same color (yellow in, yellow out), fluorescent molecules absorb high-energy light (ultraviolet light) but emit that energy as lower-energy, visible light. Depending on the molecule it's attached to, europium can emit red, green, or blue light.

That versatility is a bugbear for counterfeiters and makes europium a great anticounterfeiting tool. The European Union (EU), in fact, uses its eponymous element in the ink on its paper bills. To prepare the ink, EU treasury chemists lace a fluorescing dye with europium ions, which latch onto one end of the dye molecules. (No one really knows which dyes, since the EU has reportedly outlawed looking into it. Law-abiding chemists can only guess.) Despite the anonymity, chemists know the europium dyes consist of two parts. First is the receiver, or antenna, which forms the bulk of the molecule. The antenna captures incoming light energy, which europium cannot absorb; transforms it into vibrational energy, which europium can absorb; and wriggles that energy down to the molecule's tip. There the europium stirs up its electrons, which jump to higher energy levels. But just before the electrons jump and crash and emit, a bit of the incoming wave of energy "bounces" back into the antenna. That wouldn't happen with isolated europium atoms, but here the bulky part of the molecule dampens the energy and dissipates it. Because of that loss, when electrons crash back down, they produce lower-energy light.

So why is that s.h.i.+ft useful? The fluorescing dyes are selected so that europium appears dull under visible light, and a counterfeiter might be lulled into thinking he has a perfect replica. Slide a euro note beneath a special laser, though, and the laser will tickle the invisible ink. The paper itself goes black, but small, randomly oriented fibers laced with europium pop out like parti-colored constellations. The charcoal sketch of Europe on the bills glows green, as it might look to alien eyes from s.p.a.ce. A pastel wreath of stars gains a corona of yellow or red, and monuments and signatures and hidden seals s.h.i.+ne royal blue. Officials nab counterfeits simply by looking for bills that don't show all these signs.

There are really two euros on each banknote, then: the one we see day to day and a second, hidden euro mapped directly onto the first-an embedded code. This effect is extremely hard to fake without professional training, and the europium dyes, in tandem with other security features, make the euro the most sophisticated piece of currency ever devised. Euro banknotes certainly haven't stopped counterfeiting; that's probably impossible as long as people like holding cash. But in the periodic tablewide struggle to slow it down, europium has taken a place among the most precious metals.

Despite all the counterfeiting, many elements have been used as legitimate currency throughout history. Some, such as antimony, were a bust. Others became money under gruesome circ.u.mstances. While working in a prison chemical plant during World War II, the Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi began stealing small sticks of cerium. Cerium sparks when struck, making it an ideal flint for cigarette lighters, and he traded the sticks to civilian workers in exchange for bread and soup. Levi came into the concentration camps fairly late, nearly starved there, and began bartering with cerium only in November 1944. He estimated that it bought him two months' worth of rations, of life, enough to last until the Soviet army liberated his camp in January 1945. His knowledge of cerium is why we have his post-Holocaust masterpiece The Periodic Table The Periodic Table today. today.

Other proposals for elemental currency were less pragmatic and more eccentric. Glenn Seaborg, caught up in nuclear enthusiasm, once suggested that plutonium would become the new gold in world finance, because it's so valuable for nuclear applications. Perhaps as a send-up of Seaborg, a science fiction writer once suggested that radioactive waste would be a better currency for global capitalism, since coins stamped from it would certainly circulate quickly. And, of course, during every economic crisis, people bellyache about reverting to a gold or silver standard. Most countries considered paper bills the equivalent of actual gold or silver until the twentieth century, and people could freely trade the paper for the metal. Some literary scholars think that L. Frank Baum's 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz The Wonderful Wizard of Oz-whose Dorothy wore silver, not ruby, slippers and traveled on a gold-colored brick road to a cash-green city-was really an allegory about the relative merits of the silver versus the gold standard.

However antiquated a metals-based economy seems, such people have a point. Although metals are quite illiquid, the metals markets are one of the most stable long-term sources of wealth. It doesn't even have to be gold or silver. Ounce by ounce, the most valuable element, among the elements you can actually buy, is rhodium. (That's why, to trump a mere platinum record, the Guinness Book of Records Guinness Book of Records gave former Beatle Paul McCartney a disk made of rhodium in 1979 to celebrate his becoming the bestselling musician of all time.) But no one ever made more money more quickly with an element on the periodic table than the American chemist Charles Hall did with aluminium. gave former Beatle Paul McCartney a disk made of rhodium in 1979 to celebrate his becoming the bestselling musician of all time.) But no one ever made more money more quickly with an element on the periodic table than the American chemist Charles Hall did with aluminium.

A number of brilliant chemists devoted their careers to aluminium throughout the 1800s, and it's hard to judge whether the element was better or worse off afterward. A Danish chemist and a German chemist simultaneously extracted this metal from the ancient astringent alum around 1825. (Alum is the powder cartoon characters like Sylvester the cat sometimes swallow that makes their mouths pucker.) Because of its l.u.s.ter, mineralogists immediately cla.s.sified aluminium as a precious metal, like silver or platinum, worth hundreds of dollars an ounce.

Twenty years later, a Frenchman figured out how to scale up these methods for industry, making aluminium available commercially. For a price. It was still more expensive than even gold. That's because, despite being the most common metal in the earth's crust-around 8 percent of it by weight, hundreds of millions of times more common than gold-aluminium never appears in pure, mother lode-al form. It's always bonded to something, usually oxygen. Pure samples were considered miracles. The French once displayed Fort Knoxlike aluminium bars next to their crown jewels, and the minor emperor Napoleon III reserved a prized set of aluminium cutlery for special guests at banquets. (Less favored guests used gold knives and forks.) In the United States, government engineers, to show off their country's industrial prowess, capped the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument with a six-pound pyramid of aluminium in 1884. A historian reports that one ounce of shavings from the pyramid would have paid a day's wages for each of the laborers who erected it.

Dapper engineers refurbish the aluminium cap atop the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument. The U.S. government crowned the monument with aluminium in 1884 because it was the most expensive (and therefore most impressive) metal in the world, far dearer than gold. (Bettmann/Corbis) Aluminium's sixty-year reign as the world's most precious substance was glorious, but soon an American chemist ruined everything. The metal's properties-light, strong, attractive-tantalized manufacturers, and its omnipresence in the earth's crust had the potential to revolutionize metal production. It obsessed people, but no one could figure out an efficient way to separate it from oxygen. At Oberlin College in Ohio, a chemistry professor named Frank Fanning Jewett would regale his students with tales of the aluminium El Dorado that awaited whoever mastered this element. And at least one of his students had the naivete to take his professor seriously.

In his later years, Professor Jewett bragged to old college chums that "my greatest discovery was the discovery of a man"-Charles Hall. Hall worked with Jewett on separating aluminium throughout his undergraduate years at Oberlin. He failed and failed and failed again, but failed a little more smartly each time. Finally, in 1886, Hall ran an electric current from handmade batteries (power lines didn't exist) through a liquid with dissolved aluminium compounds. The energy from the current zapped and liberated the pure metal, which collected in minute silver nuggets on the bottom of the tank. The process was cheap and easy, and it would work just as well in huge vats as on the lab bench. This had been the most sought-after chemical prize since the philosopher's stone, and Hall had found it. The "aluminium boy wonder" was just twenty-three.

Hall's fortune, however, was not made instantly. Chemist Paul Heroult in France stumbled on more or less the same process at the same time. (Today Hall and Heroult share credit for the discovery that crashed the aluminium market.) An Austrian invented another separation method in 1887, and with the compet.i.tion bearing down on Hall, he quickly founded what became the Aluminum Company of America, or Alcoa, in Pittsburgh. It turned into one of the most successful business ventures in history.

Aluminium production at Alcoa grew at exponential rates. In its first months in 1888, Alcoa eked out 50 pounds of aluminium per day; two decades later, it had to s.h.i.+p 88,000 pounds per day to meet the demand. And while production soared, prices plummeted. Years before Hall was born, one man's breakthrough had dropped aluminium from $550 per pound to $18 per pound in seven years. Fifty years later, not even adjusting for inflation, Hall's company drove down the price to 25 cents per pound. Such growth has been surpa.s.sed probably only one other time in American history, during the silicon semiconductor revolution eighty years later,* and like our latter-day computer barons, Hall cleaned up. At his death in 1914, he owned Alcoa shares worth $30 million and like our latter-day computer barons, Hall cleaned up. At his death in 1914, he owned Alcoa shares worth $30 million* (around $650 million today). And thanks to Hall, aluminium became the utterly blase metal we all know, the basis for pop cans and pinging Little League bats and airplane bodies. (A little anachronistically, it still sits atop the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument, too.) I suppose it depends on your taste and temperament whether you think aluminium was better off as the world's most precious or most productive metal. (around $650 million today). And thanks to Hall, aluminium became the utterly blase metal we all know, the basis for pop cans and pinging Little League bats and airplane bodies. (A little anachronistically, it still sits atop the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument, too.) I suppose it depends on your taste and temperament whether you think aluminium was better off as the world's most precious or most productive metal.

Incidentally, I use the international spelling "aluminium" instead of the strictly American "aluminum" throughout this book. This spelling disagreement* traces its roots back to the rapid rise of this metal. When chemists in the early 1800s speculated about the existence of element thirteen, they used both spellings but eventually settled on the extra traces its roots back to the rapid rise of this metal. When chemists in the early 1800s speculated about the existence of element thirteen, they used both spellings but eventually settled on the extra i. i. That spelling paralleled the recently discovered barium, magnesium, sodium, and strontium. When Charles Hall applied for patents on his electric current process, he used the extra That spelling paralleled the recently discovered barium, magnesium, sodium, and strontium. When Charles Hall applied for patents on his electric current process, he used the extra i, i, too. However, when advertising his s.h.i.+ny metal, Hall was looser with his language. There's debate about whether cutting the too. However, when advertising his s.h.i.+ny metal, Hall was looser with his language. There's debate about whether cutting the i i was intentional or a fortuitous mistake on advertising fliers, but when Hall saw "aluminum," he thought it a brilliant coinage. He dropped the vowel permanently, and with it a syllable, which aligned his product with cla.s.sy platinum. His new metal caught on so quickly and grew so economically important that "aluminum" became indelibly stamped on the American psyche. As always in the United States, money talks. was intentional or a fortuitous mistake on advertising fliers, but when Hall saw "aluminum," he thought it a brilliant coinage. He dropped the vowel permanently, and with it a syllable, which aligned his product with cla.s.sy platinum. His new metal caught on so quickly and grew so economically important that "aluminum" became indelibly stamped on the American psyche. As always in the United States, money talks.

Artistic Elements

As science grew more sophisticated throughout its history, it grew correspondingly expensive, and money, big money, began to dictate if, when, and how science got done. Already by 1956, the German-English novelist Sybille Bedford could write* that many generations had pa.s.sed since "the laws of the universe were something a man might deal with pleasantly in a workshop set up behind the stables." that many generations had pa.s.sed since "the laws of the universe were something a man might deal with pleasantly in a workshop set up behind the stables."

Of course, very few people, mostly landed gentlemen, could have afforded a little workshop in which to do their science during the eras Bedford was pining for, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To be sure, it's no coincidence that people from the upper cla.s.ses were usually the ones doing things like discovering new elements: no one else had the leisure to sit around and argue about what some obscure rocks were made of.

This mark of aristocracy lingers on the periodic table, an influence you can read without an iota of knowledge about chemistry. Gentlemen throughout Europe received educations heavy in the cla.s.sics, and many element names-cerium, thorium, promethium-point to ancient myths. The really funny-looking names, too, such as praseodymium, molybdenum, and dysprosium, are amalgams of Latin and Greek. Dysprosium means "little hidden one," since it's tricky to separate from its brother elements. Praseodymium means "green twin" for similar reasons (its other half is neodymium, "new twin"). The names of n.o.ble gases mostly mean "stranger" or "inactive." Even proud French gentlemen as late as the 1880s chose not "France" and "Paris" when enshrining new elements but the philologically moribund "Gallia" (gallium) and "Lutetia" (lutetium), respectively, as if sucking up to Julius Caesar.

All this seems odd today-scientists receiving more training in antique languages than, well, in science-but for centuries science was less a profession than a hobby* for amateurs, like philately. Science wasn't yet mathematized, the barriers for entry were low, and a n.o.bleman with the clout of, say, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe could bully his way into scientific discussions, qualified or not. for amateurs, like philately. Science wasn't yet mathematized, the barriers for entry were low, and a n.o.bleman with the clout of, say, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe could bully his way into scientific discussions, qualified or not.

Today Goethe is remembered as a writer whose range and emotive power many critics rank second only to Shakespeare's, and beyond his writing, he took an active role in government and in policy debates in nearly every field. Many people still rank him as the greatest, most accomplished German ever to live. But I have to admit that my first impression of Goethe was that he was a bit of a fraud.

One summer in college, I worked for a physics professor who, though a wonderful storyteller, was forever running out of really basic supplies like electronic cables, which meant I had to visit the departmental supply room in the bas.e.m.e.nt to beg. The dungeon master there was a German-speaking man. In keeping with his Quasimodo-like job, he was often unshaven and had shoul