7 ELEMENTAL MATTERSCHEMISTRY

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    AS AN ear and respectable sce is often said to date from 1661, whe Boyle of Oxford published The Sceptical Chymist —the first work to distinguishbetwees and alchemists—but it was a slow and ofteic transition. Into theeighteenth tury scholars could feel oddly fortable in both camps—like the GermanJohann Becher, who produced an uionable work on mineralogy called PhysicaSubterranea , but who also was certain that, given the right materials, he could make himselfinvisible.

    Perhaps nothier typifies the strange and often actal nature of chemical s its early days than a discovery made by a German named Hennig Brand in 1675. Brandbecame vihat gold could somehow be distilled from human urihe similarity ofcolor seems to have been a factor in his <big></big>clusion.) He assembled fifty buckets of humanurine, which he kept for months in his cellar. By various redite processes, he verted theurine first into a noxious paste and then into a translut waxy substanone of it yieldedgold, of course, but a strange and iing thing did happen. After a time, the substancebegan to glow. Moreover, when exposed to air, it often spontaneously burst into flame.

    The ercial potential for the stuff—which soon became knohosphorus, fromGreek and Latin roots meaning “light bearing”—was not lost on eager businesspeople, but thedifficulties of manufacture made it too costly to exploit. An ounce of phosphorus retailed forsix guineas—perhaps five hundred dollars in today’s money—or more than gold.

    At first, soldiers were called on to provide the raw material, but su arra washardly ducive to industrial-scale produ. In the 1750s a Swedish chemist named Karl(or Carl) Scheele devised a way to manufacture phosphorus in bulk without the slop or smellof uri was largely because of this mastery of phosphorus that Sweden became, andremains, a leading produatches.

    Scheele was both araordinary araordinarily luckless fellooor pharmacistwith little in the way of advanced apparatus, he discovered eight elements—chlorine, fluorine,manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen—and got credit for hem. In every case, his finds were either overlooked or made it into publication aftersomeone else had made the same discovery indepely. He also discovered many usefulpounds, among them ammonia, gly, and tannic acid, and was the first to see theercial potential of chlorine as a bleach—all breakthroughs that made other peopleextremely wealthy.

    Scheele’s oable shorting was a curious insisten tasting a little of everythinghe worked with, including suotoriously disagreeable substances as mercury, prussic acid(another of his discoveries), and hydroic acid—a pound so famously poisonous that150 years later Erwin Schr?dinger chose it as his toxin of choi a famous thoughtexperiment (see page 146). Scheele’s rashness eventually caught up with him. In 1786, agedjust forty-three, he was found dead at his workbench surrounded by an array of toxicchemicals, any one of which could have ated for the stunned and terminal look on hisface.

    Were the world just and Swedish-speaking, Scheele would have enjoyed universal acclaim.

    Instead credit has teo lodge with more celebrated chemists, mostly from the English-speaking world. Scheele discovered oxygen in 1772, but for various heartbreakinglyplicated reasons could not get his paper published in a timely manner. Instead credit wentto Joseph Priestley, who discovered the same element indepely, but latterly, in thesummer of 1774. Even more remarkable was Scheele’s failure to receive credit for thediscovery of chlorine. Nearly all textbooks still attribute chlorine’s discovery to HumphryDavy, who did indeed find it, but thirty-six years after Scheele had.

    Although chemistry had e a long way in the tury that separated on and Boylefrom Scheele and Priestley and Henry dish, it still had a long way to ght up to theclosing years of the eighteenth tury (and in Priestley’s case a little beyond) stistseverywhere searched for, and sometimes believed they had actually found, things that justweren’t there: vitiated airs, dephlogisticated marine acids, phloxes, calxes, terraqueousexhalations, and, above all, phlogiston, the substahat was thought to be the active agentin bustion. Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious élanvital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life. No one knew where this ethereal essencelay, but two things seemed probable: that you could e with a jolt of electricity (anotion Mary Shelley exploited to full effe her novel Fraein ) and that it existed insome substances but not others, which is why we ended up with two branches of chemistry:

    anic (for those substahat were thought to have it) and inanic (for those that didnot).

    Someone of insight was o thrust chemistry into the me, and it was theFrench who provided him. His name was Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Born in 1743, Lavoisierwas a member of the minor nobility (his father had purchased a title for the family). In 1768,he bought a practig share in a deeply despised institution called the Ferme Générale (eneral Farm), which collected taxes and fees on behalf of the gover. AlthoughLavoisier himself was by all ats mild and fair-mihe pany he worked for washer. For ohing, it did not tax the rich but only the poor, and then often arbitrarily. ForLavoisier, the appeal of the institution was that it provided him with the wealth to follow hisprincipal devotion, sce. At his peak, his personal earnings reached 150,000 livres a year—perhaps $20 million in today’s money.

    Three years after embarking on this lucrative career path, he married the fourteen-year-olddaughter of one of his bosses. The marriage was a meeting of hearts and minds both. MadameLavoisier had an incisive intelled soon was w productively alongside her husband.

    Despite the demands of his job and busy social life, they mao put in five hours ofsost days—two in the early m and three in the evening—as well as thewhole of Sunday, which they called their jour de bonheur (day of happiness). SomehowLavoisier also found the time to be issioner of gunpowder, supervise the building of awall around Paris to deter smugglers, help found the metric system, and coauthor thehandbook Méthode de Nomenclature Chimique , which became the bible freeing on thenames of the elements.

    As a leading member of the Académie Royale des Sces, he was also required to take aninformed and active i in whatever was topical—hypnotism, prison reform, therespiration of is, the water supply of Paris. It was in such a capacity in 1780 thatLavoisier made some dismissive remarks about a heory of bustion that had beensubmitted to the academy by a hopeful young stist. The theory was indeed wrong, but thestist never fave him. His name was Jean-Paul Marat.

    The ohing Lavoisier never did was discover a. At a time when it seemed as ifalmost anybody with a beaker, a flame, and some iing powders could discoversomething new—and when, not ially, some two-thirds of the elements were yet to befound—Lavoisier failed to uncover a single o certainly wasn’t for want of beakers.

    Lavoisier had thirteen thousand of them in what was, to an almost preposterous degree, thefi private laboratory ience.

    Instead he took the discoveries of others and made sense of them. He threw out phlogistonaic airs. He identified oxygen and hydrogen for what they were and gave them boththeir modern names. In short, he helped t rigor, clarity, ahod to chemistry.

    And his fancy equipment did in fae in very handy. For years, he and MadameLavoisier occupied themselves with extremely exag studies requiring the fimeasurements. They determined, for instahat a rusting object doesn’t lose weight, aseveryone had long assumed, but gai—araordinary discovery. Somehow as itrusted the object was attrag elemental particles from the air. It was the first realization thatmatter  be transformed but not eliminated. If you burhis book now, its matter wouldbe ged to ash and smoke, but the  amount of stuff in the universe would be the same.

    This became known as the servation of mass, and it was a revolutionary cept.

    Unfortunately, it cided with aype of revolution—the Frene—and for this oneLavoisier was entirely on the wrong side.

    Not only was he a member of the hated Ferme Générale, but he had enthusiastically builtthe wall that enclosed Paris—an edifice so loathed that it was the first thing attacked by therebellious citizens. Capitalizing on this, in 1791 Marat, now a leading voi the NationalAssembly, denounced Lavoisier and suggested that it was well past time for his hanging.

    Soon afterward the Ferme Générale was shut down. Not long after this Marat was murderedin his bath by an aggrieved young woman named Charlotte Corday, but by this time it was toolate for Lavoisier.

    In 1793, the Reign of Terror, already intense, ratcheted up to a higher gear. In Oarie Antoie was sent to the guillotihe following month, as Lavoisier and his wifewere making tardy plans to slip away to Scotland, Lavoisier was arrested. In May he andthirty-one fellow farmers-general were brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal (in acourtroom presided over by a bust of Marat). Eight were granted acquittals, but Lavoisier ahers were taken directly to the Place de la Revolution (now the Place de la corde),site of the b９9lｉb?usiest of French guillotines. Lavoisier watched his father-in-law beheaded, thenstepped up and accepted his fate. Less than three months later, on July 27, Robespierrehimself was dispatched in the same way and in the same place, and the Reign of Terrorswiftly ended.

    A hundred years after his death, a statue of Lavoisier was erected in Paris and muchadmired until someone pointed out that it looked nothing like him. Under questioning thesculptor admitted that he had used the head of the mathemati and philosopher the Marquisde dorcet—apparently he had a spare—in the hope that no one would notice or, havingnoticed, would care. In the sed regard he was correct. The statue of Lavoisier-cum-dorcet was allowed to remain in place for another half tury until the Sed WorldWar when, one m, it was taken away aed down for scrap.

    In the early 1800s there arose in England a fashion for inhaling nitrous oxide, or laughinggas, after it was discovered that its use “was attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling.” Forthe  half tury it would be the drug of choice for young people. One learned body, theAskesian Society, was for a time devoted to little else. Theaters put on “laughing gasevenings” where volunteers could refresh themselves with a robust inhalation and theain the audieh their ical staggerings.

    It wasn’t until 1846 that a around to finding a practical use for nitrous oxide, asahetic. Goodness knows how many tens of thousands of people suffered unnecessaryagonies uhe surgeon’s knife because no ohought of the gas’s most obvious practicalapplication.

    I mention this to make the point that chemistry, having e so far in the eighteeury, rather lost its bearings in the first decades of the eenth, in much the way thatgeology would in the early years of the tweh. Partly it was to do with the limitations ofequipment—there were, for instano trifuges until the sed half of the tury,severely restrig many kinds of experiments—and partly it was social. Chemistry was,generally speaking, a sce for businesspeople, for those who worked with coal and potashand dyes, and not gentlemen, who teo be drawn to geology, natural history, and physics.

    (This was slightly less true in tial Europe than in Britain, but only slightly.) It isperhaps telling that one of the most important observations of the tury, Brownian motion,which established the active nature of molecules, was made not by a chemist but by a Scottishbotanist, Robert Brown. (What Brown noticed, in 1827, was that tiny grains of pollensuspended in water remained indefinitely in motion no matter how long he gave them tosettle. The cause of this perpetual motion—he as of invisible molecules—waslong a mystery.)Things might have been worse had it not been for a splendidly improbable character namedt von Rumford, who, despite the grandeur of his title, began life in Woburn,Massachusetts, in 1753 as plain Benjamin Thompson. Thompson was dashing and ambitious,“handsome iure and figure,” occ<cite></cite>asionally ceous and exceedingly bright, butuntroubled by anything so invenieng as a scruple. At een he married a rich widowfourteen years his senior, but at the outbreak of revolution in the ies he unwisely sidedwith the loyalists, for a time spying on their behalf. Ieful year of 1776, fag arrest“for lukewarmness in the cause of liberty,” he abandoned his wife and child and fled justahead of a mob of anti-Royalists armed with buckets of hot tar, bags of feathers, and anear desire to adorn him with both.

    He decamped first to England and then to Germany, where he served as a military advisorto the gover of Bavaria, so impressing the authorities that in 1791 he was named tvon Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire. While in Munich, he also designed and laid out thefamous park known as the English Garden.

    Iween these uakings, he somehow found time to duct a good deal of solidsce. He became the world’s foremost authority on thermodynamid the first toelucidate the principles of the ve of fluids and the circulation of o currents. Healso ied several useful objects, including a drip coffeemaker, thermal underwear, and atype e still known as the Rumford fireplace. In 1805, during a sojourn in France, hewooed and married Madame Lavoisier, widow of Antoine-Laurent. The marriage was not asuccess and they soon parted. Rumford stayed on in France, where he died, universallyesteemed by all but his former wives, in 1814.

    But our purpose iioning him here is that in 1799, during a paratively briefinterlude in London, he fouhe Royal Institutio another of the many learnedsocieties that popped into being all over Britain ie eighteenth and early eeuries. For a time it was almost the only institution of standing to actively promote theyoung sce of chemistry, and that was thanks almost eo a brilliant young mannamed Humphry Davy, who oihe institution’s professor of chemistry shortlyafter its iion and rapidly gained fame as an outstandiurer and productiveexperimentalist.

    Soon after taking up his position, Davy began to bang out new elements oeranother—potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, and aluminum or aluminium,depending on which branch of English you favor.

    1He discovered so many elements not somuch because he was serially astute as because he developed an ingenious teique ofapplyiricity to a molten substarolysis, as it is known. Altogether hediscovered a dozes, a fifth of the known total of his day. Davy might have done farmore, but unfortunately as a young man he developed an abiding attat to the buoyantpleasures of nitrous oxide. He grew so attached to the gas that he drew on it (literally) three orfour times a day. Eventually, in 1829, it is thought to have killed him.

    Fortunately more sober types were at work elsewhere. In 1808, a dour Quaker named JohnDalton became the first person to intimate the nature of an atom (progress that will bediscussed more pletely a little further on), and in 1811 an Italian with the splendidlyoperatiame of Lorenzo Romano Amadeo Carlo Avogadro, t of Quarequa ao,made a discovery that would prove highly signifit in the long term—namely, that twoequal volumes of gases of any type, if kept at the same pressure and temperature, will taiiumbers of molecules.

    Two things were notable about Avogadro’s Principle, as it became known. First, itprovided a basis for more accurately measuring the size a of atoms. UsingAvogadro’s mathematics, chemists were eventually able to work out, for instahat atypical atom had a diameter of 0.00000008 timeters, which is very little indeed. Andsed, almost no one knew about Avogadro’s appealingly simple principle for almost fiftyyears.

    2Partly this was because Avogadro himself was a retiring fellow—he worked alone,corresponded very little with fellow stists, published feers, and attended ings—but also it was because there were ings to attend and few chemicaljournals in which to publish. This is a fairly extraordinary fact. The Industrial Revolution was1The fusiohe aluminum/aluminium spelling arose b cause of some uncharacteristidecisiveness onDavys part. When he first isolated the element in 1808, he called it alumium. For son reasohought better ofthat and ged it to aluminum four years later. Ameris dutifully adopted the erm, but mai Britishusers disliked aluminum, pointing out that it disrupted the -ium patterablished by sodium, calcium, andstrontium, so they added a vowel and syllable.

    2The principle led to the much later adoption of Avogadros number, a basiit of measure iry, whichwas named for Avogadro long after his death. It is the number of molecules found in 2.016 grams of hydrogengas (or an equal volume of any as). Its value is placed at 6.0221367 x 1023, which is an enormously largenumber. Chemistry students have long amused themselves by puting just how large a  is, so I report that it is equivalent to the number of pop kernels o cover the Uates to a depth of ninemiles, or cupfuls of water in the Pacific O, or soft drink s that would, evenly stacked, cover the Earth to adepth of 200 miles. An equivalent number of Ameri pennies would be enough to make every person oha dollar trillio is a big number.

    driven in large part by developments iry, a as an anized sce chemistrybarely existed for decades.

    The Chemical Society of London was not founded until 1841 and didn’t begin to produce aregular journal until 1848, by which time most learned societies in Britain—Geological,Geographical, Zoological, Horticultural, and Linnaean (for naturalists and botanists)—were atleast twenty years old and often much more. The rival Institute of Chemistry didn’t e intobeing until 1877, a year after the founding of the Ameri Chemical Society. Becausechemistry was so slow to get anized, news of Avogadro’s important breakthrough of 1811didn’t begin to bee general until the first iional chemistry gress, in Karlsruhe,in 1860.

    Because chemists for so long worked in isolation, ventions were slow to emerge. Untilwell into the sed half of the tury, the formula H2O2might mean water to one chemistbut hydrogen peroxide to another. C2H4could signify ethylene or marsh gas. There was hardlya molecule that was uniformly represented everywhere.

    Chemists also used a bewildering variety of symbols and abbreviations, often self-ied.

    Sweden’s J. J. Berzelius brought a mueeded measure of order to matters by decreeing thatthe elements be abbreviated on the basis of their Greek or Latin names, which is why theabbreviation for iron is Fe (from the Latin ferrum ) and that for silver is Ag (from the Latium ). That so many of the other abbreviations accord with their English names (N fornitrogen, O for Oxygen, H for hydrogen, and so on) reflects English’s Latiure, not itsexalted status. To indicate the number of atoms in a molecule, Berzelius employed asuperscript notation, as in H2O. Later, for no special reason, the fashion became to rehenumber as subscript: H2O.

    Despite the occasional tidyings-up, chemistry by the sed half of the eenth turywas in something of a mess, which is why everybody was so pleased by the rise toprominen 1869 of an odd and crazed-looking professor at the Uy of St. Petersburgnamed Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev.

    Mendeleyev (also sometimes spelled Mendeleev or Mendeléef) was born in 1834 atTobolsk, in the far west of Siberia, into a well-educated, reasonably prosperous, and verylarge family—se, in fact, that history has lost track of exactly how many Mendeleyevsthere were: some sources say there were fourteen children, some say seventeen. All agree, atany rate, that Dmitri was the you. Luck was not always with the Mendeleyevs. WhenDmitri was small his father, the headmaster of a local school, went blind and his mother hadto go out to work. Clearly araordinary woman, she eventually became the manager of asuccessful glass factory. All went well until 1848, when the factory burned down and thefamily was reduced to penury. Determio get her you child an education, theindomitable Mrs. Mendeleyev hitchhiked with young Dmitri four thousand miles to St.

    Petersburg—that’s equivalent to traveling from London to Equatorial Guinea—and depositedhim at the Institute of Pedagogy. Worn out by her efforts, she died soon after.

    Mendeleyev dutifully pleted his studies aually landed a position at the loiversity. There he was a petent but not terribly outstanding chemist, known more forhis wild hair and beard, which he had trimmed just once a year, than for his gifts in thelaboratory.

    However, in 1869, at the age of thirty-five, he began to toy with a way te theelements. At the time, elements were normally grouped in two ways—either by atomic weight(using Avogadro’s Principle) or by on properties (whether they were metals ases,for instance). Mendeleyev’s breakthrough was to see that the two could be bined in asiable.

    As is often the way in sce, the principle had actually been anticipated three yearspreviously by an amateur chemist in England named John Newlands. He suggested that whes were arranged by weight they appeared to repeat certain properties—in a seoharmo every eighth place along the scale. Slightly unwisely, for this was an ideawhose time had not quite yet e, Newlands called it the Law of Octaves and likehearrao the octaves on a piano keyboard. Perhaps there was something in Newlands’smanner of presentation, but the idea was sidered fually preposterous and widelymocked. At gatherings, droller members of the audience would sometimes ask him if he couldget his elements to play them a little tune. Disced, Newlands gave up pushing the ideaand soon dropped from view altogether.

    Mendeleyev used a slightly different approach, plag his elements into groups of seven,but employed fually the same principle. Suddenly the idea seemed brilliant andwondrously perceptive. Because the properties repeated themselves periodically, the iionbecame known as the periodic table.

    Mendeleyev was said to have been inspired by the card game known as solitaire in NorthAmerid patience elsewhere, wherein cards are arranged by suit horizontally and bynumber vertically. Using a broadly similar cept, he arrahe elements in horizontalrows called periods aical ns called groups. This instantly showed o ofrelationships when read up and down and another when read from side to side. Specifically,the vertical ns put together chemicals that have similar properties. Thus copper sits ontop of silver and silver sits on top of gold because of their chemical affinities as metals, whilehelium, neon, and argon are in a n made up of gases. (The actual, formal determinant inthe  is something called their ele valences, for which you will have to enroll innight classes if you wish an uanding.) The horizontal rows, meanwhile, arrahechemicals in asding order by the number of protons in their nuclei—what is known as theiratomiumber.

    The structure of atoms and the significe of protons will e in a following chapter, sofor the moment all that is necessary is to appreciate the anizing principle: hydrogen hasjust one proton, and so it has an atomiumber of one and es first on the chart; uraniumhas wo protons, and so it es he end and has an atomiumber of wo.

    In this sense, as Philip Ball has pointed out, chemistry really is just a matter of ting.

    (Atomiumber, ially, is not to be fused with atomic weight, which is the numberof protons plus the number of rons in a give.) There was still a great deal thatwasn’t known or uood. Hydrogen is the most o in the universe, ano one would guess as much for ahirty years. Helium, the seost abunda, had only been found the year before—its existence hadn’t even been suspectedbefore that—and then not oh but in the Sun, where it was found with a spectroscopeduring a solar eclipse, which is why it honors the Greek sun god Helios. It wouldn’t beisolated until 1895. Even so, thanks to Mendeleyev’s iion, chemistry was now on a firmfooting.

    For most of us, the periodic table is a thing of beauty in the abstract, but for chemists itestablished an immediate orderliness and clarity that  hardly be overstated. “Without adoubt, the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements is the most elegant anizational chartever devised,” wrote Robert E. Krebs in The History and Use of Our Earth’s ChemicalElements, and you  find similar ses in virtually every history of chemistry in print.

    Today we have “120 or so” knows—wo naturally  ones plus acouple of dozen that have beeed in labs. The actual number is slightly tentiousbecause the heavy, synthesized eleme for only millionths of seds and chemistssometimes argue over whether they have really beeed or not. In Mendeleyev’s dayjust sixty-three elements were known, but part of his cleverness was to realize that theelements as then known didn’t make a plete picture, that many pieces were missing. Histable predicted, with pleasing accuracy, where new elements would slot ihey werefound.

    No one knows, ially, how high the number of elements might go, though anythingbeyond 168 as an atomic weight is sidered “purely speculative,” but what is certain is thatanything that is found will fit ly into Mendeleyev’s great scheme.

    The eenth tury held one last great surprise for chemists. It began in 1896 whenHenri Becquerel in Paris carelessly left a packet of uranium salts on a ed photographicplate in a drawer. Wheook the plate out some time later, he was surprised to discoverthat the salts had burned an impression in it, just as if the plate had been exposed to light. Thesalts were emitting rays of some sort.

    sidering the importance of what he had found, Becquerel did a very strahing: heturhe matter over to a graduate student for iigation. Fortuhe student was aret émigré from Poland named Marie Curie. W with her new husband, Pierre, Curiefound that certain kinds of rocks poured out stant araordinary amounts of energy,yet without diminishing in size or ging in aable way. What she and her husbandcouldn’t know—what no one could know until Einstein explaihings the followingdecade—was that the rocks were verting mass into energy in an exceedingly effit way.

    Marie Curie dubbed the effect “radioactivity.” In the process of their work, the Curies alsofound two new elements—polonium, which they named after her native try, and radium.

    In 1903 the Curies and Becquerel were jointly awarded the Nobel Pribbr></abbr>ze in physics. (MarieCurie would win a sed prize, iry, in 1911, the only person to win in bothchemistry and physics.)At McGill Uy in Mohe young New Zealand–born Er Rutherford becameied in the new radioactive materials. With a colleague named Frederick Soddy hediscovered that immense reserves of energy were bound up in these small amounts of matter,and that the radioactive decay of these reserves could at for most of the Earth’s warmth.

    They also discovered that radioactive elements decayed into other elements—that one dayyou had an atom of uranium, say, and the  you had an atom of lead. This was trulyextraordinary. It was alchemy, pure and simple; no one had ever imagihat such a thingcould happen naturally and spontaneously.

    Ever the pragmatist, Rutherford was the first to see that there could be a valuable practicalapplication in this. He noticed that in any sample of radioactive material, it always took thesame amount of time for half the sample to decay—the celebrated half-life—and that thissteady, reliable rate of decay could be used as a kind of clock. By calculating backwards fromhow much radiation a material had now and how swiftly it was deg, you could work outits age. He tested a piece of pitchblehe principal ore of uranium, and found it to be 700million years old—very much older than the age most people were prepared to grant theEarth.

    In the spring of 1904, Rutherford traveled to London to give a lecture at the RoyalInstitution—the august anization founded by t von Rumford only 105 years before,though that powdery and periwigged age now seemed a distant eon pared with the roll-your-sleeves-up robustness of the late Victorians. Rutherford was there to talk about his newdisiion theory of radioactivity, as part of which he brought out his piece of pitchblende.

    Tactfully—for the aging Kelvin resent, if not always fully awake—Rutherford hat Kelvin himself had suggested that the discovery of some other source of heat wouldthrow his calculations out. Rutherford had found that other source. Thanks to radioactivity theEarth could be—and self-evidently was—much older thawenty-four million yearsKelvin’s calculations allowed.

    Kelvin beamed at Rutherford’s respectful presentation, but was in famoved. He neveraccepted the revised figures and to his dying day believed his work on the age of the Earth hismost astute and important tribution to sce—far greater than his work onthermodynamics.

    As  with  most  stific  revolutions,  Rutherford’s new findings were not universallyaccepted. John Joly of Dublin strenuously insisted well into the 1930s that the Earth was nomore thay-nine million years old, and was stopped only then by his owh. an to worry that Rutherford had now giveoo much time. But even withradiometric dating, as decay measurements became known, it would be decades before we gotwithin a billion years or so of Earth’s actual age. Sce was on the right track, but still wayout.

    Kelvin died in 1907. That year also saw the death of Dmitri Mendeleyev. Like Kelvin, hisproductive work was far behind him, but his deing years were notably less serene. As heaged, Mendeleyev became increasingly etric—he refused to aowledge the existenceof radiation or the ele or anything else much that was new—and difficult. His finaldecades were spent mostly st out of labs aure halls all across Europe. In 1955,element 101 was named mendelevium in his honor. “Appropriately,” notes Paul Strathern, “itis an unstable element.”

    Radiation, of course, went on and on, literally and in ways nobody expected. In the early1900s Pierre Curie began to experience clear signs of radiation siess—notably dull achesin his bones and ic feelings of malaise—which doubtless would have progressedunpleasantly. We shall never know for certain because in 1906 he was fatally run over by acarriage while crossing a Paris street.

    Marie Curie spent the rest of her life w with distin in the field, helping to f<u></u>oundthe celebrated Radium Institute of the Uy of Paris in 1914. Despite her two NobelPrizes, she was never elected to the Academy of Sces, in large part because after the deathof Pierre she ducted an affair with a married physicist that was suffitly indiscreet tosdalize even the French—or at least the old men who ran the academy, which is perhapsanother matter.

    For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously eic as radioactivitymust be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactivethorium in their products, and at least until the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in the FingerLakes region of New York (and doubtless others as well) featured with pride the therapeuticeffects of its “Radioactive mineral springs.” Radioactivity wasn’t banned in erproducts until 1938. By this time it was much too late for Madame Curie, who died ofleukemia in 1934. Radiation, in fact, is so pernicious and long lasting that even now herpapers from the 1890s—even her cookbooks—are too dangerous to handle. Her lab books arekept in lead-lined boxes, and those who wish to see them must don protective clothing.

    Thanks to the devoted and unwittingly high-risk work of the first atomic stists, by theearly years of the tweh tury it was being clear that Earth was uionablyvenerable, though another half tury of sce would have to be done before anyone couldfidently say quite how venerable. Sce, meanwhile, was about to get a new age of itsowomie.

    PART  III   A NEW AGE DAhysicist is the atoms’ way of thinking about atoms.

    -Anonymous

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