Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

by Oliver Sacks

My friend Jonathan Miller, visiting the house for the first time—this was soon after the war—said it seemed like a rented house to him, there was so little evidence of personal taste or decision. I was as indifferent as my parents to the decor of the house, though I was angered and bewildered by Jonathan’s comment. For, to me, 37 was full of mysteries and wonders—the stage, the mythic background, on which my life was lived.

All of them, like my mother, were heavy smokers, and after warming themselves by the fire, they would sit on the sofa and smoke, lobbing their wet fag ends into the fire. They were, by and large, terrible shots, and the damp butts would hit the brick wall surrounding the fireplace and adhere there, disgustingly, until they finally burned away.

I remember being frightened, as a child, by observing that many of my aunts and uncles had coal black tongues—would my own, I wondered, turn black when I grew up? I was greatly relieved when Auntie Len, divining my fears, told me that her tongue was not really black, that its blackness came from chewing charcoal biscuits, and that they all ate these because they had gas.

On another occasion, an incendiary bomb, a thermite bomb, fell behind our house and burned with a terrible, white-hot heat. My father had a stirrup pump, and my brothers carried pails of water to him, but water seemed useless against this infernal fire—indeed, made it burn even more furiously. There was a vicious hissing and sputtering when the water hit the white-hot metal, and meanwhile the bomb was melting its own casing and throwing blobs and jets of molten metal in all directions. The lawn was as scarred and charred as a volcanic landscape the next morning, but littered, to my delight, with beautiful gleaming shrapnel that I could show off at school after the holidays.

For when I was suddenly abandoned by my parents (as I saw it), my trust in them, my love for them, was rudely shaken, and with this my belief in God, too. What evidence was there, I kept asking myself, for God’s existence? At Braefield, I determined on an experiment to resolve the matter decisively: I planted two rows of radishes side by side in the vegetable garden, and asked God to bless one or curse one, whichever He wished, so that I might see a clear difference between them. The two rows of radishes came up identical, and this was proof for me that no God existed. But I longed now even more for something to believe in.

My situation was perhaps similar to that which Freeman Dyson describes in his autobiographical essay “To Teach or Not to Teach.” I 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.

“Nature offers you copper and silver and gold native, as pure metals,” Uncle would say, “and in South America and the Urals, she offers the platinum metals, too.” He liked to pull out the native metals from his cabinet—twists and spangles of rosy copper; wiry, darkened silver; grains of gold panned by miners in South Africa.

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.” And yet, it was realized, they were very close to metals and could indeed be converted into metals if heated with charcoal; while pure metals became calxes if heated in air.

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.

One needed something additional, a material that would shine with special brilliance when heated in a gas flame. 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,”

I was persuaded (or forced—I can no longer remember) to join the Cub Scouts. This, it was felt, would be good for me, would make me mix with others of my own age, teach me “needed” skills for the outdoor life, like making a fire, camping, tracking—though it was not quite clear how such skills would be deployed in urban London. And for some reason, I never really learned them.

My reading was voracious but unsystematic: I skimmed, I hovered, I browsed, as I wished, and though my interests were already firmly planted in the sciences, I would also, on occasion, take out adventure or detective stories as well.

The museums, especially, allowed me to wander in my own way, at leisure, going from one cabinet to another, one exhibit to another, without being forced to follow any curriculum, to attend to lessons, to take exams or compete. There was something passive, and forced upon one, about sitting in school, whereas in museums one could be active, explore, as in the world. The museums—and the zoo, and the botanical garden at Kew—made me want to go out into the world and explore for myself, be a rock hound, a plant collector, a zoologist or paleontologist. (Fifty years later, it is still natural history museums and botanical gardens I seek out whenever I visit a new city or country.)

A great favorite was cryolite—ice stone, from Greenland, so low in refractive index that it was transparent, almost ghostly, and, like ice, became invisible in water.

I longed to go to Greenland, where, I imagined, there were whole mountain ranges, transparent, scarcely visible, of ghostly cryolite.

Seeing the minerals in the museum incited me to get little bags of “mixed minerals” from a local shop for a few pennies; these would contain little pieces of pyrites, galena, fluorite, cuprite, hematite, gypsum, siderite, malachite, and different forms of quartz, to which Uncle Dave might contribute rarer things, like tiny fragments of scheelite which had broken off his larger piece. Most of my mineral specimens were rather battered, often tiny ones that a real collector would sniff at, but they gave me a feeling of having a sample of nature for myself.

Cryolite was the chief mineral in a vast pegmatitic mass in Ivigtut, Greenland, and this ore was mined continuously for more than a century. The miners, who had sailed from Denmark, would sometimes take boulders of the transparent cryolite to use as anchors for their boats, and never quite got used to the way in which these vanished, became invisible, the instant they sank below the surface of the water.

I wanted to pulverize them, treat them with acid, roast them, reduce them—whatever was necessary—so I could extract their metals myself. I knew, from looking through a chemical catalog at the factory, that one could buy these metals already purified, but it would be far more fun, far more exciting, I reckoned, to make them myself. This way, 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.

There was an unused back room I took over, originally a laundry room, which had running water and a sink and drain and various cupboards and shelves. Conveniently, this room led out to the garden, so that if I concocted something that caught fire, or boiled over, or emitted noxious fumes, I could rush outside with it and fling it on the lawn. The lawn soon developed charred and discolored patches, but this, my parents felt, was a small price to pay for my safety—their own, too, perhaps.

the incendiary bombs used during the war, and how they could not be quenched by carbon dioxide or water, or even by sand. Indeed, if one heated magnesium with sand, silicon dioxide—and what could be more inert than sand?—the magnesium would burn brilliantly, pulling the oxygen out of the sand, producing elemental silicon or a mixture of silicon with magnesium silicide. (Nonetheless, sand was used to suffocate ordinary fires that had been started by incendiary bombs, even if it was useless against burning magnesium itself, and one saw sand buckets everywhere in London during the war; every house had its own.)

It was really only later, when I thought about it, that I became astonished at the nonchalant way in which Griffin (and my other books) proposed the use of intensely poisonous substances. I had not the least difficulty getting potassium cyanide from the chemist’s, the pharmacy, down the road—it was normally used for collecting insects in a killing bottle—but I could rather easily have killed myself with the stuff. I gathered, over a couple of years, a variety of chemicals that could have poisoned or blown up the entire street, but I was careful—or lucky.

Uncle Dave told me how phosgene, carbonyl chloride, the terrible poison gas used in the First World War, instead of signaling its danger by a halogenlike smell, had a deceptive scent like new-mown hay. This sweet, rustic smell, redolent of the hayfields of their boyhood, was the last sensation phosgene-gassed soldiers had just before they died.)

Hydrogen selenide, I decided, was perhaps the worst smell in the world. But hydrogen telluride came close, was also a smell from hell. An up-to-date hell, I decided, would have not just rivers of fiery brimstone, but lakes of boiling selenium and tellurium, too.

it was Davy’s personality that appealed to me—not modest, like Scheele, not systematic, like Lavoisier, but filled with the exuberance and enthusiasm of a boy, with a wonderful adventurousness and sometimes dangerous impulsiveness—he was always at the point of going too far—and it was this which captured my imagination above all.

Many years later, I reread Wilson’s astonishing biography and wondered what (in clinical terms) Cavendish “had.” 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. I now think Wilson’s biography may be the fullest account we are ever likely to have of the life and mind of a unique autistic genius.

My parents, clearheaded and independent in most other ways, seemed to become soft and helpless in the face of these demands, perhaps driven by a sense of obligation or anxiety. My own feelings (which I never discussed with them) were passionately negative: I came to hate Zionism and evangelism and politicking of every sort, which I regarded as noisy and intrusive and bullying. I longed for the quiet discourse, the rationality, of science.

We would beat our breasts and wail: “We have done this, we have done that”—all possible sins were mentioned (including many I had never thought of), sins of commission and omission, sins deliberate and inadvertent. The terrifying thing was that one did not know whether one’s breast-beating was convincing to God, or whether one’s sins were even, in fact, forgivable. One did not know whether He would reinscribe one in the Book of Life, as the liturgy had it, or whether one would die and be cast into outer darkness.