Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2001. viii + 337 pp. ISBN 0-375-40448-1. $25.00. reviewed by A. Truman Schwartz
In late 1997, Roald Hoffmann sent Oliver Sacks a large illustrated poster of the periodic table, a chemical catalog, and a small bar of tungsten. The contents of that unusual parcel rekindled in Sacks a love affair that had been dormant for 50 years—a love affair with chemistry. Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood is a chronicle of that infatuation. It is in part a memoir of growing up in Blitz-besieged Britain, in part a history of chemistry, and above all a love song to our discipline. It is ironic that the author of this paean of praise is not a chemist, but an internationally known neurologist and author of the best seller The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Perhaps Uncle Tungsten, one of nine best books for 2001 selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review, will have similar success. If so, it should give chemistry some much-needed positive public exposure. The Uncle Tungsten of the title was Sacks’s mother’s brother David Landau. The 18 Landau children appear to have been a truly remarkable lot. Uncle Dave (the “chemistry uncle”) and Uncle Abe (the “physics uncle”) were codirectors of the Tungstalite Company, which manufactured a wide range of incandescent bulbs and later fluorescent and vacuum tubes. The two generously supplied young Oliver with chemicals, equipment, information, and avuncular advice. In addition, Sacks’s Auntie Len took him on botanical field trips, and his physician mother, Elsie, had him dissecting stillborn human fetuses at 11. A rather shy boy, traumatized by wartime evacuation from London to a harsh country school run by a sadistic headmaster, Oliver took refuge in chemistry. “I did not feel,” he writes, “a real chemical passion—a desire to compound, to isolate, to decompose, to see substances changing, familiar ones disappearing and new ones in their stead—until I saw Uncle Dave’s lab and his passion for experiments of all kinds.” Soon young Sacks had his own home laboratory, where he carried out a series of investigations that would cause apoplexy at OSHA. He exploded nitrogen triiodide, made ammonium dichromate volcanoes, and burned yellow phosphorus. “Chemical exploration, chemical discovery, was all the more romantic for its dangers.” Indeed, his vivid descriptions bring back many memories of the happy, hazardous days of the home chemistry set. But Oliver’s interests were more than just stinks and bangs. He set out to learn as much as he could about chem-
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istry and its history. “I would enter chemistry, start to discover it for myself, in much the same way as its first practitioners did—I would live the history of chemistry in myself.” And so he did, repeating many crucial experiments. In the book, Sacks provides accurate but economical summaries of the work of his heroes—Scheele, Priestley, Lavoisier, Davy, Dalton, and especially Mendeleev. In was in 1945 that Oliver first saw the giant periodic table, with samples of most of the elements, in the Science Museum in South Kensington. “In this first, sensuous glance I saw the table as a gorgeous banquet, a huge table set with eighty-odd different dishes.” Later he writes that “seeing the table, ‘getting’ it, altered my life.” Chapter 16, which explores “Mendeleev’s Garden”, is a profoundly eloquent tribute to the wonder of matter and its beautiful coherence. The author’s account of his predictions of the properties of the then missing elements, numbers 43 (Tc), 61 (Pm), 85 (At), and 87 (Fr), suggests spectacularly sophisticated insight for a 12-year-old. Moreover, he appears to have independently speculated (before Glenn Seaborg’s announcement) that thorium, protactinium, uranium, and any transuranium elements might constitute a long period analogous to the first rare earth series. Given such prescience and precocity, one wonders what Oliver Sacks might have accomplished as a chemist, but unfortunately, our science had some formidable competition. “I started to find sexuality as a subject extremely intriguing, almost as interesting, in its way, as valency or periodicity.” Changes in chemistry also contributed to the gradual end of the affair. Sacks describes his fascination with the explanatory and predictive powers of quantum mechanics. But abstraction, computation, complementarity, and indeterminacy seemed destined to replace “the lovingly detailed, naturalistic, descriptive chemistry of the nineteenth century. … The chemistry I loved was either finished or changing its character, advancing beyond me (or so I thought at the time). I felt I had come to the end of the road, the end of my road, at least, that I had taken my journey into chemistry as far as I could.” Chemistry’s loss has been neurology’s gain. But chemists should be indebted to Oliver Sacks for this wonderful compilation of Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. We should be similarly grateful to Roald Hoffmann for catalyzing its creation. The book is gracefully written, is illustrated with 24 drawings and four pages of family photographs, and has a binding that will look very much at home on a chemist’s bookshelf. It definitely belongs there. I can think of two books that should be read by all chemists. One is Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, a miraculous book about elements and human beings that only a chemist could have written. The other is Uncle Tungsten. A. Truman Schwartz is in the Department of Chemistry, Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN;
[email protected].
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 79 No. 3 March 2002 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
