Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) (15 page)

Davy loved to conduct experiments in public, and his famous lectures, or lecture-demonstrations, were exciting, eloquent, and often literally explosive. His lectures moved from the most intimate details of his experiments to speculation about the universe and about life, delivered in a style and with a richness of language that nobody else could match.«24» He soon became the most famous and influential lecturer in England, drawing huge crowds that blocked the streets whenever he lectured. 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.’

There still existed, in the early nineteenth century, a union of literary and scientific cultures – there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come – and Davy’s period at Bristol saw the start of a close friendship with Coleridge and the Romantic poets. Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the time; his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together; and these did not seem to exist in separate compartments in his mind.«25»

There was an extraordinary appetite for science, especially chemistry, in these early, palmy days of the Industrial Revolution; it seemed a new and powerful (and not irreverent) way not only of understanding the world but of moving it to a better state. Davy himself seemed to embody this new optimism, to be at the crest of a vast new wave of scientific and technological power, a power that promised, or threatened, to transform the world. He had discovered half a dozen elements, as a start, suggested new forms of lighting, made important innovations in agriculture, and developed an electrical theory of chemical combination, of matter, of the universe itself – all before the age of thirty.

In 1812, Davy, the son of a wood-carver, was knighted for his services to the empire – the first scientist so honored since Isaac Newton. In the same year he married, but this did not seem to distract him from his chemical researches in the least. When he set out for an extended honeymoon on the Continent, determined to do experiments and meet other chemists wherever he went, he brought along a good deal of chemical apparatus and various materials (‘an airpump, an electrical machine, a voltaic battery…a blow-pipe apparatus, a bellows and forge, a mercurial and water gas apparatus, cups and basins of platinum and glass, and the common reagents of chemistry’) – as well as his young research assistant, Michael Faraday. (Faraday, then in his early twenties, had followed Davy’s lectures raptly, and wooed Davy by presenting him with a brilliantly transcribed and annotated version of them.) In Paris, Davy had a visit from Ampere and Gay-Lussac, who brought with them, for his opinion, a sample of a shiny black substance obtained from seaweed, with the remarkable property that when heated, it did not melt, but turned at once into a vapor of a deep violet color. A year earlier, Davy had identified Scheele’s greenish yellow ‘muriatic acid air’ as a new element, chlorine. Now, with his enormous feeling for the concrete«26» and his genius for analogy, Davy sensed that this odoriferous, volatile, highly reactive black solid might be another new element, an analog of chlorine, and soon confirmed that it was. He had already tried, unsuccessfully, to isolate Lavoisier’s ‘fluoric radical,’ realizing that the element it contained, fluorine, would be a lighter and even more active analog of chlorine. But he also felt that the gap in physical and chemical properties between chlorine and iodine was so great as to suggest the existence of an intermediate element, as yet undiscovered, between them. (There was indeed such an element, bromine, but it fell not to Davy to discover it, but to a young French chemist, Balard, in 1826. Liebig himself, it turned out, had actually prepared the fuming brown liquid element before this, but misidentified it as ‘liquid iodine chloride’; after hearing of Balard’s discovery, Liebig put the bottle in his ‘cupboard of mistakes.’)

From France the wedding party moved by stages to Italy, with experiments along the way: collecting crystals from the rim of Vesuvius; analyzing gas from natural vents in the mountains (it turned out to be, Davy found, identical with marsh gas, or methane); and, for the first time, performing a chemical analysis of paint samples from old masterworks (‘mere atoms,’ he announced).

In Florence, he experimented with burning a diamond under controlled conditions, with a giant magnifying glass. Despite the demonstration of diamond’s inflammability by Lavoisier, Davy had been reluctant, up to this point, to believe that diamond and charcoal were, in fact, one and the same element. It was rather rare for elements to have a number of quite different physical forms (this was before the discovery of red phosphorus, or the allotropes of sulphur). Davy wondered if these might represent different forms of ‘aggregation’ of the atoms themselves, but it was only much later, with the rise of structural chemistry, that this could be defined (the hardness of diamond, it was then shown, was due to the tetrahedral form of its atomic lattices, the softness and greasiness of graphite due to the packing of its hexagonal lattices in parallel sheets).

Davy returned to London after his honeymoon to one of the grandest practical challenges of his lifetime. The Industrial Revolution, now warming up, was devouring ever huger amounts of coal; coal mines were being dug ever deeper, deep enough now to run into the inflammable and poisonous gases of ‘fire-damp’ (methane) and ‘choke-damp’ (carbon dioxide). A canary carried down in a cage could serve as a warning of the presence of asphyxiating choke-damp; but the first indication of fire-damp was, all too often, a fatal explosion. It was desperately important to design a miner’s lamp that could be carried into the lightless depths of the mines without any danger of igniting pockets of fire-damp.

Davy made a crucial observation – that a flame could not pass through a wire mesh or gauze, as long as this were kept cool.«27» He made many different sorts of lamps incorporating this principle, the simplest and most reliable being an oil lamp in which the only way air could get in or out was through screens of wire mesh. The perfected lamps were tried in 1816 and proved not only safe but also, by the appearance of the flame, reliable indicators of fire-damp.

In a further discovery, Davy found that if a platinum wire was put in an explosive mixture, it would become red-hot and glow. 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. Thus, for instance, the platinum loop we kept above the kitchen stove would glow when put in the stream of gas, and, becoming red-hot, ignite it. This principle of catalysis was to become indispensable in thousands of industrial processes.«28»

To an extent that I was only to realize later, Humphry Davy and his discoveries were part of our lives, from the electroplated cutlery to the catalytic gas-lighting loop, to photography (which he had been one of the first to perform, making photographs on leather, thirty years or more before others rediscovered the process), to the dazzling arc lamp used to project films in the local cinema. Aluminium, once costlier than gold (Napoleon III, famously, used to give his guests plates of gold, while he himself dined on aluminium), had become cheap and available only with the use of Davyan electrolysis to extract it. And the thousand and one synthetics all around us, from artificial fertilizers to our gleaming bakelite telephones, were all made possible by the magic of catalysis. But, crucially, 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 adventur-ousness and sometimes dangerous impulsiveness – he was always at the point of going too far – and it was this which captured my imagination above all.

Images

P
hotography had become another passion of mine, and my little lab, already so overfull, often doubled as a darkroom as well. If I try to remember what drew me to photography, I think of the chemicals involved – my hands were often stained with pyrogallol, and seemed to smell of ‘hypo,’ sodium hyposulphite, all the while; of the special lights – the deep ruby safelight; the large flashbulbs stuffed with shiny, crinkly, inflammable metal foil (usually magnesium or aluminium, occasionally zirconium). I think of the optics – the tiny, flattened image of the world on a ground-glass screen; the delight of different f-stops, of focusing, of different lenses; of all the intriguing emulsions one could use – it was, above all, the processes of photography that fascinated me.

But there was also, of course, the sense of being able to make a very personal and perhaps fugitive perception objective and permanent, especially as I lacked the ability to draw or paint. This was fanned, even before the war, by family photo albums, especially those which went back before my birth, to the beach scenes and bathing machines of the 1920
s
, the street scenes of London at the turn of the century, the stiffly posed grandparents and great-aunts and great-uncles of the 1870
s
. There were also, most precious of all, a couple of daguerreotypes, in special frames, dating from the 1850
s
; these had a detail, a finish, that seemed much finer, more brilliant, than those of the later paper prints. My mother particularly cherished one of these, a photo of her mother’s mother, Judith Weiskopf, taken in Leipzig in 1853.

Then there was the whole wide world outside the family, the printed photos in books and newspapers, some of which struck me with great vividness, like the dramatic photos of the Crystal Palace on fire (these confirmed – or did they suggest? – my own very early memories of it) and photos of airships majestically floating (and another of a Zeppelin coming down in flames). I loved photos of distant people and places, most of all the photos in the
National Geographic
magazine, which would arrive, with its yellow-edged cover, each month. The
National Geographic
, moreover, had pictures in color, and these affected me especially. I had seen hand-tinted photos – Auntie Birdie was adept at such tinting – but I had never seen actual color photos before. An H.G. Wells tale, ‘The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper,’ which I read around this time, describes how Brownlow receives one day, instead of his usual 1931 paper, a newspaper dated 1971. What first arouses Mr. Brownlow’s attention, making him realize that he is confronting something incredible, is the fact that this newspaper has photographs in color – something inconceivable to him, living in the 1930
s
:

Never in all his life had he seen such colour printing – and the buildings and scenery and costumes in the pictures were strange. Strange and yet credible. They were colour photographs of actuality forty years from now.

I sometimes had such a feeling about the color pictures in the
National Geographic;
they, too, pointed to a brilliant, many-colored world of the future, and away from the monochromes of the past.

But I was more deeply drawn to the photographs of the past, with their dim, delicate sepia tones – they abounded in the older family albums and in the old magazines that I once found piled in the lumber room. I was already, by 1945, very conscious of change, of how prewar life had gone irredeemably, forever. But there were still photos, photos often casually taken, that now possessed a special value, photos of summer holidays before the war, photos of friends and neighbors and relatives, caught in the sunlight of 1935 or 1938, with no shadow or premonition of what would come. It seemed to me wonderful that photographs could capture actual moments, clean cross sections, as it were, of time, fixed forever in silver.

I longed to make photos myself, to document and chronicle scenes, objects, people, places, moments, before they changed or disappeared, swallowed by the transformations of memory and time. I took one such picture of Mapesbury Road, caught in the morning sunlight of July 9, 1945, my twelfth birthday. I wished to document, to hold forever, exactly what confronted me when I opened the curtains that morning. (I still have this photo, two photos, actually, designed to form a stereo pair, as a red and green anaglyph. Now, more than half a century later, it has almost replaced the actual memory, so that if I close my eyes and try to visualize the Mapesbury Road of my boyhood, all I see is the photograph I took.)

Such documentation was, in part, forced on me by the war, the wholesale way in which seemingly permanent objects were destroyed or removed. There had been wrought iron railings, beautiful and solid, around our front garden before the war, but when I returned home in 1943, they were no longer there. I found this very disturbing, and was even driven to doubt my own memory. Had there in fact been such railings before the war, or had I, in a fanciful or poetic way, somehow invented them? Seeing photos of my younger self, posed against the railings, was a great relief, proving that the railings were really there. And then there was the giant Cricklewood clock, the clock I remembered, or seemed to remember, at least, twenty feet high, with a golden face, in Chichele Road – this, too, was gone in ‘43. There was a similar clock in Willesden Green, and I assumed that I had somehow doubled it in my mind, endowing Cricklewood, my neighborhood, with its twin. Here again, it was a great relief, years later, to see a photo of this clock, to see that I had not invented it (both the iron railings and the clock had been removed as part of the war effort, when the country was desperate for all the iron it could obtain).

It was similar with the vanished Willesden Hippodrome, if indeed it had ever existed. If I even asked, I imagined, people would say, ‘Willesden Hippodrome, indeed! What’s the boy thinking of? As if there would ever have been a
hippodrome
in Willesden!’ It was only when I saw an old photo that my doubts were banished, and I became confident that there was indeed once such a hippodrome, though it was bombed out of existence during the war.