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by
Oliver Sacks
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November 18 - November 26, 2017
cacodyl cyanide,
carboys
potassium cyanide from the chemist’s, the pharmacy, down the road—it was normally used for collecting insects in a killing bottle—
Scents could be distilled, it seemed, from all parts of a plant—leaves, petals, roots, bark. I tried to extract some fragrances by steam distillation, gathering rose petals and magnolia blossoms and grass cuttings from the garden and boiling them with water. Their essential oils would be volatilized in the steam and settle on top of the distillate as it cooled (the heavy, brownish essential oil of onions or garlic, though, would sink to the bottom).
The bad smells, the stenches, always seemed to come from compounds containing sulfur (the smells of garlic and onion were simple organic sulfides, as closely related chemically as they were botanically), and these reached their climax in the sulfuretted alcohols, the mercaptans. The smell of skunks was due to butyl mercaptan, I read—this was pleasant, refreshing, when very dilute, but appalling, overwhelming, at close quarters. (I was delighted, when I read Antic Hay a few years later, to find that Aldous Huxley had named one of his less delectable characters Mercaptan.)
David Park, in The Fire Within the Eye: A Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light,
I sometimes went along with my father on housecalls on Sunday mornings. He loved doing housecalls more than anything else, for they were social and sociable as well as medical, would allow him to enter a family and home, get to know everybody and their circumstances, see the whole complexion and context of a condition. Medicine, for him, was never just diagnosing a disease, but had to be seen and understood in the context of patients’ lives, the particularities of their personalities, their feelings, their reactions.
tellurian
Chemistry as a true science, I read, made its first emergence with the work of Robert Boyle in the middle of the seventeenth century.
He devised the first chemical indicator, a paper soaked with syrup of violets which would turn red in the presence of acid fluids, green with alkaline ones.
Sceptical Chymist,
Boyle’s 1660 New Experiments,
“luciferous
lucriferous”).
Antoine Lavoisier, born almost a century after Boyle, would become known as the real founder, the father, of modern chemistry.
theory of phlogiston,
It was, like Newton’s apple, a fact, a phenomenon, that demanded a new theory of the world.
“dephlogisticated air”
This principle of conservation, moreover, applied not only to the total mass of products and reactants, but to each of the individual elements involved.
The conservation of mass implied a constancy of composition and decomposition. Thus Lavoisier was led to define an element as a material that could not be decomposed by existing means, and this enabled him (with de Morveau and others) to draw up a list of genuine elements—thirty-three distinct, undecomposable, elementary substances, replacing the four Elements of the ancients.
Three years later Lavoisier’s life was ended, at the height of his powers, on the guillotine.
“It required only a moment to sever his head, and one hundred years, perhaps, may not suffice to produce another like it.”
I had fantasies that one might find or make a gas as heavy as water, and bathe in it, float in it, as one floated in water.
famous picture of a Brobdingnagian louse, attached to a human hair as thick as a barge pole).
He judged the frequency of flies’ wingbeats by their musical pitch.
Many of Hooke’s ideas were almost completely ignored and forgotten, so that one scholar observed in 1803, “I do not know a more unaccountable thing in the history of science than the total oblivion of this theory of Dr. Hooke, so clearly expressed, and so likely to catch attention.”
One reason for this oblivion was the implacable enmity of Newton, who developed such a hatred of Hooke that he would not consent to assume the presidency of the Royal Society while Hooke was still alive, and did all he could to extinguish Hooke’s reputation.
Oxygen, by Roald Hoffmann and Carl Djerassi.
Davy melted ice by friction, thus showing that heat was motion, a form of energy, and not a material substance, as Lavoisier had thought.
Pure alkali metals do not exist in nature; nor do the elemental alkaline earth metals—they are too reactive and instantly combine with other elements.
salts
Gravity, he felt, might be the secret of mass, but electricity was the secret of matter.
Even Coleridge, the greatest talker of his age, came to Davy’s lectures, not only to fill his chemical notebooks, but “to renew my stock of metaphors.”
He had discovered the miracle of catalysis: how certain substances, such as the platinum metals, might induce a continuing chemical reaction on their surfaces, without being themselves consumed.
Newton’s emotional singularities—his jealousy and suspiciousness, his intense enmities and rivalries—suggested a profound neurosis; but Cavendish’s remoteness and ingenuousness were much more suggestive of autism or Asperger’s syndrome.
Mary Shelley, as a child, was enthralled by Davy’s inaugural lecture at the Royal Institution, and years later, in Frankenstein, she was to model Professor Waldman’s lecture on chemistry rather closely on some of Davy’s words when, speaking of galvanic electricity, he said, “a new influence has been discovered, which has enabled man to produce from combinations of dead matter effects which were formerly occasioned only by animal organs.”
pyrogallol,
“The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper,”
hippodrome,
I never had a stereo camera myself, but would take two pictures in succession, moving the camera a couple of inches between exposures. If one moved the camera more than this, the parallactic differences were exaggerated, and the two pictures, when fused, gave an exaggerated sense of depth.
It was also intriguing to reverse the pictures. One could easily do this with stereo photographs, but one could also do it by making a pseudoscope, with a short cardboard tube and mirrors, so that the apparent position of the eyes was reversed. This caused distant objects to look closer than nearby ones—a face, for instance, might look like a concave mask. But it produced an interesting rivalry or contradiction, for one’s knowledge, and every other visual cue, might be saying one thing, and the pseudoscopic images saying another, and one would see first one thing then another, as the brain
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Mixtures, basically, had the properties of their ingredients (plus one or two “special” qualities perhaps—the relative hardness of brass, for example, or the lowered freezing point of salt water). But compounds had utterly new properties of their own.
By 1799, Proust had generalized his theory into a law—the law of fixed proportions.
corpuscular or “atomic”
(These atomic weights were not, of course, the actual weights of atoms, but their weights relative to that of a standard—for example, that of a hydrogen atom.)
Dalton later made wooden models of atoms,
“It often happens,” Cannizzaro concluded, “that the mind of a person who is learning a new science, has to pass through all the phases which the science itself has exhibited in its historical evolution.”
I've often had this same thought myself: learning is similar to the human history of the topic. It is a type of evolution. Each brain adds, subtracts, loses, or gains more information. A spark is ignited sometimes.
Gramophone records at the time were made of vulcanite
corposant,
Daniell cell
