Chemical Education Today
Letters Oliver Sacks in Mendeleev’s Garden In A. Truman Schwartz’s excellent book review of Uncle Tungsten (1), he describes the captivating story of Oliver Sack’s boyhood experiences of “naturalistic, descriptive chemistry of the nineteenth century” as taught to him by family. Owing to the wide readership of this Journal, my wife and I were privileged to witness personally the wonder of Oliver Sacks’s memories. A year before the publication of his book he had read the article about our element collection (2) and wanted to visit. Once in our home he acted like a young boy with a new chemistry set, pulling one element after another down from the display shelves. “Let’s suspend this piece of bismuth with a piece of string and test it with a magnet”, he suggested (see Figure 1). He strung up a bar and teased it with a Fe–Nd–B magnet; the bar spun away and he exclaimed excitedly, “Yes! It is repelled, just like it was years ago! See, it’s diamagnetic!” Turning toward the aluminum, he proposed “Now let’s smear this with mercury and see the white flowers grow!” And then with a spatula he went on to examine uranium nitrate crystals for triboluminescence. Next, with a magnet, a cup of hot water, and an ice cube, he tested gadolinium for its roomtemperature Curie point. Then with a Geiger counter he checked a radium clock for its radioactivity. Turning his attention again, he urged “Let’s test the diamond.” He pressed the pea-sized octahedral crystal to his lips. “Yes, it’s cold”, he reported, carrying out the thermal conductivity test with no equipment, not needing the expensive device that jewelers use to distinguish diamond from cubic zirconia. “Let me show you something you might not know”, I suggested, as I let him touch the sample of beryllia (beryllium oxide) that electronic manufacturers sometimes use for a thermal backplane. “But don’t put it to your lips!” I warned, “it’s poisonous!” He fondled the piece of ceramic beryllia like he did everything he investigated in nature, lovingly, exploring its feel. “It’s cold!” he exclaimed, “This is new, I never saw this before!” (I made him wash his hands afterwards.) As he bounded around, running test after test, I was spellbound by his intimate acquaintance of descriptive chemistry. I even found myself taking notes. Not only was I impressed by the romance of his curiosity, but also by the remarkable accuracy of his historical knowledge. For example, I have found nowhere (except from the curator of the Bologna Mineralogical Museum) a true rendition of the behavior of “phosphoro di Bologna”. According to the traditional accounts, the barium sulfate from the hills above Bologna, Italy, can be made to glow by simply heating—but this is incorrect. Oliver Sacks had it right: as he fondled our “phosphoro di Bologna” that we had personally collected from the muddy hills of Monte Paderno, he
Figure 1. James Marshall and Oliver Sacks (left to right) in front of Marshall’s element collection (http://www.jennymarshall.com/ rediscovery.htm [accessed May 2003]). Sacks is holding an ampule of bromine; the bar of bismuth that demonstrated dimagnetism is seen suspended by a string to the left.
was relating how this material must be reduced to the sulfide before becoming phosphorescent. While studying our radioactive samples with a Geiger counter, he correctly ascribed the discovery of the element radon to Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy, not to Ernst Dorn of the University of Halle, the traditional discoverer. (One summer during our chemical history research, my wife and I had made a special trip to the library archives of this German university and had likewise concluded independently that Dorn, the observer of “radium emanation”, completely misinterpreted the phenomenon.) After returning to New York, Oliver Sacks sent to us a preprint of Uncle Tungsten, which we had the pleasure of perusing for a whole year before publication. After the events of September 11, 2001, my wife and I anxiously awaited word that he was all right. We were relieved—and honored—when in early December we received an autographed copy of Uncle Tungsten (3). We will always treasure Oliver Sacks’s book, his remarkable story of chemistry, and our friendship with him. Literature Cited 1. Schwartz, A. T. J. Chem. Educ. 2002, 79, 312. 2. Marshall, J. L. J. Chem. Educ., 2000, 77, 979–983. 3. Sacks, O. W. Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood; Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2001. James L. Marshall Department of Chemistry University of North Texas Denton, TX 76203
[email protected] JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 80 No. 8 August 2003 • Journal of Chemical Education
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