It's Elements, Dear Watson

Ah, the elements, with all their little atoms and zinging electrons and proton/neutron nuclei.  Just chemistry or physics, well, science at any rate.  After reading Sam Kean's debut book, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, I knew more about the elements, not the weather kind.  Or, I learned history.  Anyway, I learned something from the book and what I learned was basically this: science is as crazy as you think it is if not more so, and I do mean mad scientist crazy, not just run of the mill crazy.

Anyway, on with the review. 

First time book author Kean attempts to make science relatable.  Or simple.  Sometimes both.  The triumphs and tribulations of discovering elements are both represented.  Sometimes there were immense highs in the process of filling out the Periodic Table of Elements (you know the thing I mean: the large wall hogging chart in your Chem class that you hated to use but could never quite avoid looking at for help when you were floundering on your tests).  And oh the things you wouldn't believe about how elements have played a part history from influencing wars to shaping the global economy and even making your computer smaller.  Not to mention pens.  That's right.  The pen.  That mighty weapon greater than a sword in Shakespeare's eye.  'But it was  tip, finally worthy of the rest of the design, and rutheniuim began capping every Parker 51 in 1944' (245).  The Parker 51 is not only considered the bestest pen ever but is apparently to this day a collectors item and once retailed anywhere from $12.50-$50.  Who knew?

It's anecdotes such as those about the Parker 51 that are sprinkled throughout the book that make the science-y sections more digestible.  Be prepared to be a little lost at the beginning as the first few chapters are a bit more dense than you'd expect given the title.  But, it gets better.  And more historical since Kean basically moves through the table not in the elements numerical order, but in terms of history.  We start with Mendeleev.  'Overall, of the seven elements discovered in Ytterby, six were Mendeleev's missing lanthanides.  History would have been very different ... if only he'd made the trip west, across the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea, to this Galapagos Island of the Periodic Table' (62).  Basically, Mendeleev would have filled in a huge gap in his original (and at the time revolutionary) table of the known elements.

So, then we move on to more discoveries, more anecdotes.  We learn about WWI and WWII technology, such as how Molybdenum played a huge part in long range guns.  And, eventually, we arrive at the University of California Berkeley which one might think Sam Kean attended based on the number of name drops he gives the school.  Thus is not the case, but rather we find that UC Berkeley (it's element namesake is Berkelium though Californium was also named by the group who discoverd the element at the school) was a hotbed for scientists to change how the world views the elements forever. 

But perhaps the most frightening story in the book is that of a teenager.  'This Detroit sixteen-year old, as part of a clandestine Eagle Scout project gone berserk in the mid-1990s, erected a nuclear reactor in a  potting shed in his mother's backyard' (161).  The reactor was nowhere near going critical but the fact a teenager was able to produce so much radioactive material (hundreds of times more than a normal neighborhood would and should have) is the most frightening aspect of this story.  Ken Silverstein's book The Radioactive Boyscout is well worth a read should you like more background on this particular incident. 

What we find through the reading of the book is that some elements are basically harmless.  Some are helpful as is often the case in medicine, and others are down right dangerous.  Thankfully, most of the really dangerous ones are hard to come by, unless one has a tendency toward trouble and/or has a lot of desire to create even more dangerous elements.  Maybe best leave that to the folks at Berkeley.  (See, after reading the book, I can't help name dropping the school multiple times either.)

Kean's writing attempts to both simplify and thrill, sometimes succeeding brilliantly while other times never quite capturing the uncapturable.  Nonetheless, the Periodic Table of Elements has never been so accessible as in this book.  By making the history of the table as much the history of discovery, readers find out as much about being human as being a part of society.  In many ways, we are a collaboration of elements ourselves, after all.  An absolute Must Read for fans of science, history, and the mysteries of the world.

Work Cited.
Kean, Sam.  The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements.  New York: Little Brown, 2010.