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by
Oliver Sacks
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November 18 - November 26, 2017
She would show me how easily it scratched glass, and then tell me to put it to my lips. It was strangely, startlingly cold; metals felt cool to the touch, but the diamond was icy. That was because it conducted heat so well, she said—better than any metal—so it drew the body heat away from one’s lips when they touched it.
if one touched a diamond to a cube of ice, it would draw heat from one’s hand into the ice and cut straight through it as if it were butter.
she would put the electrified amber against my ear, and I would hear and feel a tiny snap, a spark.
coruscations—
His firm was called Tungstalite, and I often visited him in the old factory in Farringdon and watched him at work,
sintered
polymath
autodidact
Devonian names.
“lithotomy position”).
Ludo,
Although the Battle of Britain was over, the Blitz was still at its height.
Need to look up. Thought these were the same.
an incendiary bomb, a thermite bomb,
I imagined, too, that this occurred all over the universe, the Sabbath descending on far-off star systems and galaxies, enfolding them all in the peace of God.
belonged to a small minority of boys who were lacking in physical strength and athletic prowess … and squeezed between the twin oppressions of [a vicious headmaster and bullying boys].… We found our refuge in a territory that was equally inaccessible to our Latin-obsessed headmaster and our football-obsessed schoolmates. We found our refuge in science.… We learned … that science is a territory of freedom and friendship in the midst of tyranny and hatred.
I made a grid, ten by ten, of the first hundred numbers, with the primes blacked in, but I could see no pattern, no logic to their distribution. I made larger tables, increased my grids to twenty squared, thirty squared, but still could discern no obvious pattern. And yet I was convinced that there must be one.
Numbers, my aunt said, are the way God thinks.
There was even one labeled “Bulb of the Future?” It had no filament, but the word Rhenium was inscribed on a card beside it.
mythopoeia.
expatiating
alumina.
One of tungsten’s mineral ores, scheelite,
great Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele,
The ore was so dense that miners called it “heavy sto...
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Though scheelite was the largest source of tungsten, the metal had first been obtained from a different mineral, called wolframite. Indeed, tungsten was sometimes called wolfram, and still retained the chemical symbol W. This thrilled me, because my own middle name was Wolf.
But most metals occurred in the form of oxides, or “earths.” Earths, he said, were sometimes called calxes, and these ores were known to be insoluble, incombustible, infusible, and to be, as one eighteenth-century chemist wrote, “destitute of metallic splendour.”
We know now, he went on, that when one heats the oxides with charcoal, the carbon in the charcoal combines with their oxygen and in this way “reduces” them, leaving the pure metal.
“There’s another way we could make it,” Uncle said. “It’s more spectacular.” He mixed the tungstic oxide with finely powdered aluminum, and then placed some sugar, some potassium perchlorate, and a little sulfuric acid on top. The sugar and perchlorate and acid took fire at once, and this in turn ignited the aluminum and tungstic oxide, which burned furiously, sending up a shower of brilliant sparks. When the sparks cleared, I saw a white-hot globule of tungsten in the crucible. “That is one of the most violent reactions there is,” said Uncle. “They call this the thermite process; you can see
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silicon carbide (which is now called moissanite).
H. G. Wells’s story “The Diamond Maker.”
After they returned to Spain, the brothers explored the heavy black mineral wolframite and obtained from it a dense yellow powder (“wolframic acid”) which they realized to be identical to the tungstic acid Scheele had obtained from the mineral “tung-sten” in Sweden, and which, he was convinced, contained a new element. They went ahead, as Scheele had not, to heat this with charcoal, and obtained the pure new metallic element (which they named wolframium) in 1783.
The incandescent bulb had done more to alter social habits, human lives, Uncle would say, than any other invention he could think of.
the history of chemical discovery was inseparable from the quest for light.
Such a substance was calcia—calcium oxide, or lime—which shone with an intense greenish white light when heated. This “limelight,” Uncle Dave said, was discovered in the 1820s and used to illuminate the stages in theaters for many decades—that was why we still talked about “the limelight,” even though we no longer used lime for incandescence.
The first viable tungsten lamps were made in 1911, and could operate briefly at very high temperatures, though they would soon blacken with the evaporation of tungsten and its deposition on the inner surface of the glass.
(Langmuir, he told me, was the first industrial chemist ever to get a Nobel prize).
Dampers, I understood, were hard, baked discs of unleavened flour,
Mary Elvira Weeks, The Discovery of the Elements.
This is how chemistry, real chemistry, got on its feet, investigating countless different minerals, analyzing them, breaking them down, to see what they contained.
gutta-percha.
J. J. Griffin’s Chemical Recreations,
The most common vegetable dye was litmus—it came from a lichen, Griffin said.
Griffin also suggested holding a red rose over burning sulfur, so that the sulfur dioxide produced would bleach it. Dipping it into water, miraculously, restored its color.
The Science of Home Life, by A. J. Bernays,
The Chemistry of Common Life, by J.F.W. Johnston,
The Chemical Pocket-Book or Memoranda Chemica, written in 1803. The author was a James Parkinson, of Hoxton, whom I would reencounter in my biology days as the founder of paleontology, and then again, when I was a medical student, as the author of the famous Essay on the Shaking Palsy—which came to be known as Parkinson’s disease.
“You see,” he explained, “an acid and a base come together, and they neutralize each other; they combine and make a salt.”
the proportions had to be exact: 23 parts of sodium, by weight, to 35.5 of chlorine. I was struck by these numbers, for they were already familiar: I had seen them in lists in my books; they were the “atomic weights” of these elements. I had learned these numbers by rote, in the same mindless way one learns multiplication tables. But when Uncle Dave brought up these selfsame numbers in relation to the chemical combination of two elements, a slow, underground questioning started in my head.
And with a little vanadium, the corundum began to resemble alexandrite, alternating magically between red and green—red in incandescent light, green in daylight.
I want jewelry with this.
plutonic forces,
