[ Music ]
>> Sam is an author and
he's also a reporter
for Science magazine.
He went to school in Minnesota
where he studied
physics and chemistry.
But not to worry, this isn't
a physicist trying to tell you
about the chemistry
and the periodic table.
In fact, Sam went on to
get a master's degree
in Library Science.
But as a student, as
he'll probably tell you,
he was fascinated by mercury;
he used to play with mercury.
He used to collect mercury
from broken thermometers
so he had a real way to kind
of do his own experiments.
[Pause]
[Laughs] Maybe you'll tell us
about some of those experiments.
But this book,  The Disappearing
 Spoon , made a big hit in 2010.
It was a New York
Times best seller.
Amazon rated it as one of the
top 10 science books of 2010.
The Royal Society nominated
it as one of its best books
of 2010 science books.
And he was acknowledged by
the National Association
of Science Writers
as a runner-up
as the best young science
writer in the United States.
An audio book is
now available too.
He's been featured on NPR,
All Things Considered.
And I have to tell you he has
a tantalizing website as well
with a lot of little gadget
things on the periodic table.
A periodic table
puzzle for example.
Sort of like a map of the
United States, you can sort
of put the states
together; well in this case,
you can put the periodic
table together.
Good for kids.
Videos focused on different
stories of the periodic table;
little cartoons and
things like that.
It's pretty interesting.
Something for your kids to
play with when they get tired
of the Christmas
presents this year.
The book itself, I've read it.
I bought it last year
when Sam gave a talk
at the Washington
Academy of Sciences;
a meeting of the academy.
And I have to tell you the
one thing I liked the most
about the book is that he
takes the story, the history
and the adventure of the
discovery of the elements,
and makes that a
bridge to the real world
and a bridge to new science.
For example; I wouldn't have
thought he would have picked
Bose-Einstein condensation
as a path, but he did.
He took I think rubidium
and he said,
"And here's how Bose-Einstein
condensation works,"
and actually gave
some explanations
of what Bose-Einstein
condensation means.
Sodium; he talked about
laser cooling and trapping.
Radioactivity, obviously
he talked
about when he did
uranium and barium.
Cesium; cesium was a bridge
to talk about atomic clocks.
So there's a lot about NIST
and NBS in the talk and for
that reason I thought
this might be a great talk
for our special Christmas
Colloquium, so would you join me
in welcoming Sam Kean.
[ Applause ]
[ Pause ]
>> Sam Kean: There they are.
[Laughter] Thank you.
[ Laughter ]
Hello everyone.
Thank you for coming
out this morning.
Thank you Bill for
the introduction.
So I had a bad go of things
in about 3rd grade or so.
I came down with strep throat
something like a dozen times
that year and each time
I did, I had to stay home
from school of course.
And my mother would come in
when I was lying on the couch
and she would put one of
those old fashioned mercury
thermometers...you
can see the end
of one here...under my tongue
to take my temperature.
And I admit I was a little
clumsy as a kid; a little prone
to talking to myself, when
people weren't around as well.
Not infrequently when
she would leave the room,
I would start talking and
the thermometer would fall
out of my mouth on
to our hardwood floor
and it would shutter.
But I admit I was never
too upset about that.
In fact, I was kind of secretly
excited whenever that happened
because I loved watching
the mercury come
out of the end of
the thermometer.
Now you can see a broken
thermometer; this is the result.
And so I was always kind of
excited to see the mercury.
It was like these little
liquid ball bearings
that went scattering over
our floor all over the place.
And my mother was very
cool about the whole thing;
she never panicked, she
never evacuated the house
or anything like that.
She would actually get
down on her hands and knees
with a toothpick and would
brush the little spheres
of mercury toward each other
and my favorite part was
when she had two
very near each other
and she would give
them one final nudge
and then they would
jump together
into this slightly
bigger sphere.
And what fascinated me was
that it was perfectly seamless.
You couldn't see where there
had been two balls before;
there was just one remaining.
And I just thought it was the
most fascinating substance I'd
ever seen, this liquid
metal so shiny and gorgeous.
And we actually accumulated
a fair amount
of mercury over the years.
My mother had this
little pill jar she kept
on a knick knack shelf in
our kitchen and every once
in a while she'd get it around
and whisk it around the lid
so we kids could see it.
[ Pause ]
And so when we were introduced
to the periodic table
(maybe even that same year,
3rd grade in school),
the first thing I wanted
to find on there was mercury.
And so I looked and looked
and I couldn't find it;
it just wasn't on there.
And I thought, "Boy
that's weird,
I thought mercury would be an
element and I thought for sure."
And of course it was on there,
but the symbol for it was Hg.
And I thought, "Boy
that's weird,
neither of those
letters are actually
in the word mercury;
why is it called Hg?"
And so I looked into it
a little more and found
that the name comes
from some Greek words
and then through Latin.
And so I looked into it a
little deeper and I realized
that the element mercury has an
association with a god of theirs
from Greek and Roman times.
And they also associated
mercury with a planet.
And so I looked into it
a little more and tried
to find more references and more
places where mercury would pop
up and I found it through
all sorts of science history;
scientists have used
it for centuries.
Alchemists were also
obsessed with mercury.
And then I started to
find mercury popping
up in some unusual places.
In colonial history, people were
shipping galleons with mercury
in it over to the new
world to help them
with gold and silver mining.
And I even found one kind
of strange connection
to American history, one
of my favorite parts
of American history.
I'm from the Midwest,
I'm from South Dakota,
and so we've always
had a very long Lewis
and Clark section in
our history class.
But I found kind of a strange
story connected to Lewis
and Clark and mercury
through this man right here.
His name was Dr. Benjamin Rush.
He was one of the founding
fathers of the country;
he signed the Declaration
of Independence.
He was a physician who
lived in Philadelphia
and he was best known
for staying behind
in Philadelphia during
a yellow fever epidemic
that struck there in the 1790s.
It was very brave
of him actually.
A lot of physicians sort of fled
the place and he stayed behind
and cared for a lot of people.
Unfortunately, Dr.
Rush's favorite treatment
for pretty much anything
was this sort
of mercury chloride sludge
that he would feed the people,
often until their hair
started falling out,
their teeth would get
loose; it really did a lot
of damage unfortunately.
The idea in medicine
at the time was
that if you had an ugly ailment,
you had to kind of fight it
with something equally ugly;
kind of fighting fire with fire.
But anyway, Dr. Rush went on to
get a patent on his medicine.
He called them "Dr.
Rush's Bilious Pills."
Each was about 4 times
the size of an aspirin;
they were very large pills.
And there's really
no delicate way
to put what these
pills were for;
they were extremely
powerful laxatives.
They called them
"Thunder Clappers."
[Laughter] And the idea
was...the reason he packed 600
of these pills off
with Lewis and Clark
through the wilderness...the
was that if they ate something
that they shouldn't have or they
drank some questionable water
that didn't agree with
them, they could take one
of his bilious pills and it
would basically flush them out;
it would clean their entire
system out very quickly.
But it also had kind of
an unusual side-effect
for archaeologists
and historians today
because they can actually
now pinpoint a few places
where they know Lewis and Clark
must of stayed because the level
of mercury in the
soil is just too high
for it to have been natural.
[Laughter]
So then from this one
element, from just mercury,
I learned some straining
history,
I learned about word
organs and etymology,
I learned about alchemy,
mythology, poison forensics,
a little archaeology; I
learned so many different things
from just this one element.
And that's really
why I wrote the book,
 The Disappearing Spoon , was
because I wanted to get all
of those stories into
one place and kind of dig
into the periodic
table and find some
of those hidden stories there.
Because I knew there were
whole swads [assumed spelling]
of the periodic table that
we just never got to talk
about in chemistry class.
They were a complete
blank to me; many,
many of the elements
on the table.
And I also knew there were some
really great stories out there
about elements that everyone
thought they knew very well,
but that had kind of an unusual
and hidden backstory to them.
And one of those elements
that did have an
unusual backstory is the
element aluminum.
We're all familiar, of course,
with aluminum today and pop cans
and little league baseball
bats and things like that.
But for a long time
in the 1800s,
aluminum was actually the
most precious metal on earth.
It was worth far
more than silver was;
it was worth far
more than gold was.
And the reason why is that even
though aluminum is very common
in the earth's crust (it's
the most common metal
in the earth's crust),
it's almost always bonded
to something else very tightly;
usually the oxygen
the some form.
So it was very hard
to get a pure sample
of aluminum for early chemists.
And when they started to
get the first pure samples
in very small amounts,
it was considered sort
of a miraculous metal.
It was very light
and very strong,
but also had this nice sheen
to it; it was very attractive.
And pretty soon, it became
something of a status symbol
for monarchs and emperors
to get their hands
on samples of aluminum.
Right here you're looking at
a centerpiece that was made
for the emperor Napoleon III.
That's aluminum on top and
that is gold beneath it.
The French also had these
sort of Fort Knox like bars
of aluminum that they
would display next
to their crown jewels when
they wanted to show off.
And Napoleon III also had this
prized set of aluminum cutlery
that he reserved for his most
favorite guests at banquets
and the lesser nobility were
actually reduced to eating
with gold knives and forks.
[Laughter]
And even the United States got
into the game a little bit.
This is the Washington Monument
and you can see right there
at the top, that is a 6th
inch pyramid of aluminum
that they put on the
very tip at the very top
of the Washington
Monument and they did
that for a couple of reasons.
One, they needed
a lightning rod;
there's not a whole
lot else down there
to catch the lightning, so they
needed a metal of some sort.
But the reason they chose
aluminum over other metals was
that the U.S. was kind
of bragging a little bit
at the time in the 1880s, and we
were saying, "We're such an up
and coming industrial power that
we can afford to put aluminum
of all metals on our
public monuments.
And of course not long after
aluminum went onto the top
of the Washington Monument,
the aluminum market
crashed completely.
And the reason why it did so was
an American chemist and a couple
of European chemists who
finally figured out how
to produce aluminum
on an industrial scale
and to get a lot of
it produced at once.
The American chemist (a very
famous name) was Charles Hall).
He was working in Ohio
when he figured this out.
And he eventually
founded what became Alcoa;
the Aluminum Company of America.
And probably not until the
silicon semiconductor revolution
about 80 years later did
the demand for an element go
up so much while the price
for it plummeted just
completely to the basement.
When Hall opened Alcoa, he was
shipping out about 50 pounds
of aluminum per day; that was
about all he could ship out.
And that was plenty to meet
the demand at the time.
Two decades later, he was
shipping out 20,000 pounds
of aluminum every single day.
And during that time, the
price of aluminum had gone
from you know dozens
of dollars an ounce
down to a quarter a pound so you
can really see how the supply
and demand went opposite
directions there.
And to me, I always think of
aluminum as having this sort
of classic narrative story arch.
It had a very obscure
beginning when not a lot
of people knew about it.
And then there was the
rising action when emperors
and kings were trying to
get their hands on aluminum
and the U.S. was interested in
putting it on their monuments.
And then there was
the climax where Hall
and the other chemists figured
out that we can produce aluminum
on an industrial scale.
But even though that looked
like a good thing for aluminum
at first, it was kind of a
complex twist of fate for it.
Because after that, at least
the esteem of aluminum went
into a pretty steep decline.
And it went from being one
of the more precious metals
on earth to a passe metal,
but fairly productive.
And I really think it
depends on your temperament.
You could look at it both ways;
whether aluminum was better off
as the world's most
precious metal
or as its most productive metal.
It could go either way.
And I really think it goes
to show how the fortunes
of the elements change over time
and how one generation's
treasure can become something
sort of passe for
the next generation.
[ Pause ]
So if I'd had to give a title
to this talk or a subtotal
at least, I would have
called it something like
"Can the periodic
table tell a story."
Not "Can the periodic
table tell a story?",
but "Can the periodic table
tell a story," no question mark.
Because I always felt like
it was obvious that it could.
There were so many really
great stories out there
about all of the elements.
You know the periodic table
is one thing (perhaps the only
thing) that a lot
of people remember
from high school
chemistry class.
But if you really get into the
stories on there, I really think
that you can learn a
lot more of the science
than you might imagine just
by telling is hearing
those stories.
It just so happens to be how the
human mind remembers information
best, is in story form.
And so when you get into those
stories, I think they just sit
with people a little better
and they get a little more
comfortable with the idea
of the periodic table
and science in general.
And again, the periodic
table is one
of the richer sources
of stories out there.
People eat and breathe
the periodic table.
They bet and lose huge sums of
money on which elements will go
up and down over time.
Philosophers use it to probe
the very meaning of science
and the difference
between physics
and chemistry; things like that.
It also poisons people and
it can help spawn wars too.
And the first section I'm going
to read tonight is...this
morning is about one
of the elements that
actually helped prolong a war.
It's an element I
admit I knew nothing
about before I started
writing the book;
I definitely could not
have pronounced it.
But the element since
them has become one
of my favorite stories
on the periodic table,
it's the element molybdenum.
[ Pause ]
Almost no one knows it
but the most remote battle
of World War I took place not
in Siberia or against Lawrence
of Arabia, but at
a molybdenum mine
in the Rocky Mountains
of Colorado.
After its gas, Germany's most
feared weapons during the war
were its Big Berthas, a suite
of super heavy siege guns
that battered soldiers in the
trenches of Franc and Belgian.
The first Berthas at 43 tons
had to be transported in pieces
by tractors to a launch pad
and it took 200 men 6
hours to assemble them.
The payoff was the ability
to hurl a 16 inch 2,200 pound
shell 9 miles in just seconds.
Still a big flaw
hobbled the Berthas;
lofting a 1 ton mass took
whole kegs of gun powder
which produced massive amounts
of heat which in turn scorched
and warped the 20
foot steel barrels.
After a few days of shooting,
even if the German's
limited themselves
to a few shots per hour, the
gun itself was often shot.
The famous Krupp Armament
Company found a recipe
for strengthening
steel, however,
spiking it with molybdenum.
Molybdenum could withstand the
excessive heat because it melts
at about 4,800 degrees
Fahrenheit;
thousands of degrees hotter than
iron, the main metal in steel.
Doping steel with big
molybdenum atoms also gummed
up the iron atoms and
helped prevent them
from sliding around.
The Germans were soon blazing
away at the French and British
with a second generation
of Molly steel guns.
But Germany soon faced
another huge Bertha setback;
it had no supply of molybdenum
and risked running out.
In fact the only known supplier
was a bankrupt nearly abandoned
mine on Bartlett
Mountain in Colorado.
Before World War I, a
local had laid claim
to Bartlett upon
discovering veins of ore
that looked like lead or tin.
Those metals would
have been worth
at least a few cents per pound.
But the useless molybdenum
he found cost more to mine
than it fetched, so he sold his
mining rights to one Otis King;
a feisty 5 foot 5
banker from Nebraska.
Always enterprising,
King adopted a new
extraction technique
that no one had bothered
to invent before
and quickly liberated 5,800
pounds of pure molybdenum
which more or less ruined him.
Those nearly 3 tons exceeded
the yearly world demand
for molybdenum by 50%
which meant King hadn't
just flooded the market,
he drowned it.
Noting at least the
novelty of King's attempt,
the U.S. government mentioned it
in a mineralogical
bulletin in 1915.
[ Pause ]
Few noticed the bulletin except
for a Behemoth International
Mining Company based
in Frankfurt, Germany who
a U.S. branch in New York.
According to contemporary
accounts,
[inaudible foreign name] had
smelters, mines, refineries,
and other "tentacles"
all over the world.
As soon as the company
director's read
about King's molybdenum,
they mobilized
and ordered their top man
in Colorado, Max Schott,
to seize Bartlett Mountain.
Schott, a man described
as having eyes penetrating
to the point of hypnosis,
sent in claim jumpers to set
up stakes and harass
King in court.
A major drain on an
already floundering mine.
The more belligerent claim
jumpers threatened the wives
and children of miners
and destroyed their
camps during a winter
in which the temperatures
often dropped to 20 below.
King hired a limping
outlaw named Two-Gun Adams
for protection, but
the German agents got
to King anyway mugging him
with knives and pickaxes
on a mountain pass and
hurling him off a sheer cliff.
Only a well-placed snow
bank saved his neck.
As the self-described "tomboy
bride" of one miner put it
in her memoirs, the Germans
did "everything short
of downright slaughter to
hinder the work of his company."
King's gritty workers took
to calling the unpronounceable
metal they risked their lives
to dig up "Molly be damned."
King eventually sold the
mining rights to Schott
for a paltry $40,000 and
started shipping the metal
through underground
channels to Germany.
The U.S. government
eventually caught on
and [inaudible foreign
name] admitted
that well it just
happened to be shipping all
that molybdenum to their enemy.
Sadly though, those
efforts came too late
to disable Germany's
Big Berthas.
As late as 1918, Germany
was using Molly steel guns
to shell Paris from the
astonishing distance
of 75 miles.
The only justice was that
Schott's company went bankrupt
after the Armistice when
molybdenum prices bottomed out.
King returned to mining
and became a millionaire
by convincing Henry Ford to
use Molly steel in car engines.
Molly's days in warfare
were over.
By the time World
War II rolled around,
molybdenum had been
superseded in steel production
by the element right below it
on the periodic table; tungsten.
And unfortunately, history sort
of repeated itself
during the next World War
with the element right
below it; tungsten.
Once again, Germany needed
to strengthen their steel
and they found out that
putting tungsten was even better
than putting molybdenum
in the steel
because tungsten has an even
higher melting temperature.
But again they didn't have
any native source of tungsten,
so they started to get shipments
of it from wherever they could.
And it just so happened that
Portugal had lots and lots
of tungsten and Portugal was
supposedly neutral during World
War II, but they were shipping
hundreds and hundreds of tons
of it into Germany through
underground channels throughout
France mostly.
So these two elements,
molybdenum and tungsten,
went a long way in explaining
why Germany was able to hang
on as long as they did during
both of the world wars.
And of course after World War
II ended, the cold war descended
on the U.S. and Europe.
And the cold war actually
so permeated our society
that in some small way, the
periodic table became kind
of a new theater
for the cold war.
It became sort of a proxy
fight over the periodic table.
And this story has to do
with a couple of scientists
at the University of
California at Berkley.
Especially the scientist in
the middle there, very famous;
his name is Glenn Seaborg,
so remember that
name; Glenn Seaborg.
And these scientists
were working
in the...they started
off working
in the 1940s/1950s trying
to create new elements
on the periodic table.
And this was a very prestigious
area of science at the time,
still is, but back then
especially it was very
prestigious because
they were working
with really basic science.
And until then, until about
the 1940s, the greatest science
in the world was
going on in Europe.
The U.S. had always
been pretty good,
but really the top scientists
at the time were all in Europe.
And if you really wanted to be
a top scientist, you almost had
to go over there and
spend some time in Europe.
It was almost required of you.
But U.S. scientists were gamely
trying to do their own work,
trying to find new elements,
trying to create them,
but they never quite could do
as good a job asset the
European scientists.
How many people here
today have lived in
or maybe are from Alabama?
One; ok.
What about Illinois?
Ok a few more.
How about Virginia?
Ok a few.
Well all three of those states
should have had elements named
after them.
There should have been "alabame"
[assumed spelling] there should
have been "illinium"
[assumed spelling],
and there should have been
virginium [assumed spelling].
U.S. scientists discovered
these, tried to name them
after their home state or
where they were working,
submitted them to journals,
and the European scientists got
a hold of the work and looked at
and they said, "No, we don't
think you actually found these
elements; nice try."
And so they rejected
the claims for them.
Then the European
scientists turned around
and they discovered them and
named them things like francium
so that they could get
credit for these elements.
So it was kind of a
disappointment to a lot
of U.S. scientists that they
weren't able to name elements
after places; they weren't
the one's discovering them.
But this all changed with
Glenn Seaborg and the group
at University of
California Berkley.
They started to discover
new elements,
starting with neptunium
(#93), then plutonium (#94),
then element #95,
96, 97, 98, 99, 100,
101, and so on and so on.
Box after box the periodic
table they were inking in.
And again, there
was a lot of pride
that Americans were
the ones doing this.
This was the Cold War era.
It was before and during
the Sputnik crisis.
And so we were very proud that
we were able to show the world
with this really fundamental
science of the periodic table
that we were the world leaders.
But of course, there
were teams across world
that were watching
the Americans,
trying to emulate them.
There was one team in the
Soviet Union especially
that was working on this.
But the Soviet Union team
had a bit of an obstacle
that the Americans did
not have doing their work
and that obstacle was this
man right here; Joseph Stalin.
Stalin considered
himself an expert
on pretty much every single
subject; all sciences included.
He was especially good
with the human sciences;
you now psychology, economics,
some biology, things like that.
But he also considered
himself an expert
in the physical sciences
as well, except he didn't
like the turn that
physical sciences had taken
in the 20th century.
He didn't like quantum mechanics
and he did not like relativity.
They were both sort of
spooky to him; they were kind
of counter-intuitive
and he didn't want good
Soviet scientists working
on quantum mechanics
or relativity.
So he was getting set to
ban it in the Soviet Union
and was actually going
to ship any scientist
who didn't renounce
it off to the gulag
and basically let
them die there.
And he was getting
ready to do this
when a very brave advisor sort
of raised his hand and pointed
out that if Stalin did this,
it might hurt the Soviet nuclear
weapon program just a little bit
if all the physicists
were in the gulag.
And nuclear science was
really Stalin's kind of pet.
He really liked it;
he really wanted it.
And so we thought about it for
a moment and he thought, "Yeah,
you're probably right
about that,"
and he made a very magnanimous
announcement and he said,
"Leave the physicists in peace;
we can always shoot them later."
[Laughter] And so these
were the kinds of pressures
that Soviet scientists
were facing sort
of on a day-to-day
basis and the work
with the periodic table didn't
escape that because again,
they were working with
things like platinum.
But the Soviet scientists
eventually figured out a way
to sort of get around this.
Joseph Stalin died
eventually, thankfully for them.
And they setup their own lab,
started watching the Berkley
team; reading their papers.
Meanwhile the Berkley team
was making more elements.
But then in the early
1960s, the Soviet team ended
up beating the Americans
to an element
and the Americans were
not very happy about this;
they did not take it very well.
They got the Soviet team's
paper and they looked it over,
looked at their methods, and
then they went back to them
and they said, "No, we don't
think you actually found
this element."
So basically they did
to the Soviet team what the
Europeans have been doing
to the Americans for so long.
And meanwhile the
Soviet team kept working,
the Berkley team found the
element (they announced
that they had it), and
the Soviet team said, "No,
we don't think you
found this element."
Meanwhile, the Soviet team
found another new element
and the Berkley team said, "NO,
we don't think you found it."
And this kept going back
and forth like this,
year after year after year.
One team would find it; the
other one would say, "No,
but actually we discovered it
while you were doing your sort
of not very effectual
experiment.
And this kept going
back and forth
and they were really disputing
who had discovered
these elements.
And they kept fighting
all through the 1960s,
all through the 1970s,
all through the 1980s,
and then the Soviet Union
collapsed, communism fell apart.
But through the mid-1990s,
they were still fighting
about who had the rights
to name these elements,
over 30 years later
in some cases.
And what they were
really fighting above,
what they really, really wanted
credit for wasn't discovering,
as much as they wanted the
right to name these elements.
That's what's really important
with the periodic table.
You know if you discover a
new species of salamander
or something, or some
creator on the back of Mars,
you get to name it and that's
a very nice privilege for you.
But it's not going to be hanging
up in every single science
classroom from now until the end
of our civilization the
way the periodic table is.
It's really the most precious
real estate in all of science
and that's why they
wanted to get you rights
to name these elements.
And eventually they couldn't
sort this out, so they turned it
over to a tribunal of
international chemists
and they huddled; they
talked about who is going
to get the right to
name the elements.
And during this, the
Americans had done something;
submitted a name for an element
that really made the
rest of the world mad.
They weren't very happy that
the Americans had decided
to name an element
after a living person;
after Glenn Seaborg.
And it was supposed to be
sort of like postage stamps;
you had to wait until someone
was dead for a few years,
and then name an
element after them.
But the Berkley team said, "No,
Seaborg was the most important
scientist in this area
that there's ever
been so we really want
to name this element
in honor of him."
But the tribunal came back and
they said, "No we're sorry,
we can't let you do this."
So the Americans said, "Fine,
we no longer recognize
your authority.
We're going to keep using the
names we want to in the U.S.
in all of our journals
and everything
and people will just
have to get used to it."
And this took the tribunal back
a little bit and they went back
and huddled and talked about
what was going to happen.
And they came back
to the Americans
and said, "Ok, we buckle."
They basically gave in to
what the American's wanted.
And you can see right
here that's a picture
of a very aged Glenn Seaborg and
his finger is sort of pointing
at element 106 down
there which is now
and forever will be
known as seaborgium.
And I just love this picture
for a number of reasons.
One is it's just
a sweet picture.
You can tell he's very
happy about the whole thing.
But also it doesn't really
betray how fraught the entire
situation was and how much
conflict went into getting
to this point where they
could name an element
after a living person.
And since then, they've
officially changed the rules
for naming elements.
So he is the only person
and is the only person
who will ever get to see his
own name on the periodic table.
So that's another reason
why I think this is just a
fantastic picture.
[ Pause ]
But another reason why I wanted
to write this book in addition
to these big stories about
things like the Cold War
and World Wars was I really
wanted to talk about a lot
of the personalities
on the periodic table.
A lot of the scientists and
other people who've contributed
to the periodic table either
by discovering elements
or contributing to
its lore in some way.
Marie Curie, a very
famous scientist (one
of the only woman
scientists of her era),
discovered the properties
of radioactive elements.
Really expanded the idea
of what elements could be
and how they behaved.
But I also came across
some stories about people
that I really hadn't expected
to with the periodic table,
people like Mark Twain.
Everyone knows him, of
course, from his sort
of laddish [assumed
spelling] riverboat novels
but toward the end of his
life, Twain started to dabble
in what we might
recognize as kind
of science fictiony [assumed
spelling] type stories.
And he even wrote one
in the early 1900s
about the periodic
table, about two elements
on the periodic table;
radium and polonium.
Marie Curie had just discovered
these elements just a few years
before and they really captured
a lot of people's imaginations.
But Twain took a bit of
an unusual turn on them.
The Story's called
"Sold to Satan;
it's about a metal
speculator and what he does
to try to win his soul back.
But he really goes into
some detail about how
to get these elements and their
properties and things like that.
And it just sort of captured
my imagination that someone
like Mark Twain was
so fascinated
with these new elements that
he felt the need to put them
in a story and write about them.
But the next section I'm going
to read is about a scientist.
Someone who really
had a big personality,
but he's not very well-known
even though I think he deserves
to be both for his personality
and for the really fundamental
work he did on some areas
of the periodic table.
He was a Hungarian scientist;
his name was George de Hevesy.
[ Pause ]
And there's Mr. Hevesy.
Alright.
[ Pause ]
In 1910, young George de
Hevesy arrived in England
to study radioactivity.
His university's lab director in
Manchester, Ernest Rutherford,
immediately assigned Hevesy the
herculean task of separating
out radioactive atoms
from non-radioactive atoms
inside blocks of lead.
And actually it turned out to be
not herculean, but impossible.
Rutherford had assumed
the radioactive atoms
at the time...the radioactive
atoms known at the time
as radium D were a
unique substance.
In fact, radium D was just
radioactive lead and, therefore,
it could not be separated
chemically from the normal lead.
Ignorant of this, Hevesy wasted
two years tediously trying
to tease lead and radium D
apart before finally giving up.
Hevesy, a bald, droopy
cheeked, mustached aristocrat
from Hungary also faced
domestic frustrations.
Hevesy was far from home and
used to savory Hungarian food,
not the English cooking
at his boarding house.
After noticing patterns
in the meals served there,
Hevesy grew suspicious that
like a high school cafeteria
recycling Monday's hamburgers
into Tuesday's beef chili,
his landlady's fresh daily
meat was anything but.
When confronted, she denied this
so Hevesy decided to seek proof.
Miraculously he'd
achieved a breakthrough
in lab around that time.
He still couldn't
separate the radium D out,
but he realized he could maybe
flip that to his advantage.
He'd begun using the possibility
of injecting minute quantities
of dissolved lead
into a living creator
and then tracing
the element's path.
The creator would
metabolize the radioactive
and the non-radioactive
atoms in the same way
and the radium D would then emit
little beacons of radioactivity
as it moved throughout the body.
If this worked, he could
actually track molecules inside
veins and organs
in unprecedented
degree of resolution.
Before he tried this on a living
being though, Hevesy decided
to test his idea on the
tissue of a non-living being;
a test with an ulterior motive.
He took too much meat
at dinner one night
and when his landlady's
back was turned,
sprinkled hot powdered
radioactive lead over it.
She gathered his leftovers
as normal and the next day,
Hevesy brought home a new
fangled radiation detector
from his lab buddy; Hans Geiger.
Sure enough when he waived
it over that night's goulash,
Geiger's counter went furious;
click, click, click, click,
click, click, click,
click, click.
Hevesy confronted his
landlady with the evidence
but being a scientific romantic,
Hevesy no doubt laid it
on a little thick
as he explained the
mysteries of radioactivity.
In fact the landlady was so
charmed to be caught so cleverly
with the latest tools of science
that she didn't even get mad.
There's no historical record
of whether she altered
her menu, however.
[Laughs] I'm going to skip ahead
a few pages in Hevesy's life.
During the upcoming
years, the 1920s and 1930s,
he was traveling around Europe
to a lot of different places
and he continued his
work in what became known
as chemical tracers;
the radioactive elements
that move throughout the body.
This became very important work,
the chemical tracers; still,
of course, used in
medicine today.
And he kept getting
nominated for the Noble Prize
for this work, but he kept
losing out for various reasons;
some of them not so good.
He was kind of disappointed
that he kept losing out,
but he kept soldering on.
Saddened, but unbowed,
Hevesy left Copenhagen
for Germany again and continued
his important experiments
on chemical tracers.
All the while, chemists
such as Irene Joliot-Curie,
Marie Curie's daughter,
repeatedly
and futilely nominated
him for a Nobel Prize.
Annually unrewarded, Hevesy
grew a little despondent,
but the obvious injustice
aroused sympathy for Hevesy
and lack of a prize
strangely bolstered his status
in the international community.
Nonetheless with
his Jewish ancestry,
Hevesy soon faced direr problems
than a lack of a Nobel Prize.
He left Nazi Germany in
the 1930s for Copenhagen
and remained there
through August,
1940 when Nazi storm troopers
knocked on the front door
of Niels Bohr Institute where
he was working at the time.
But when the hour called for it,
Hevesy proved himself
courageous.
Two terminus, one Jewish and
the other a Jewish sympathizer
and defender, had sent their
Gold Nobel Prize metals to Bohr
for safekeeping in the 1930s
since the Nazi's would likely
plunder them if left in Germany.
However, Hitler had made
sporting gold a state crime
so the discovery of the
medals in Denmark could lead
to multiple executions.
Hevesy suggested
they burry the medals
in the institute's back
yard, but Bohr thought
that that was a little obvious.
So as Hevesy later recalled,
while the invading forces
marched in the streets
of Copenhagen, I was quickly
dissolving the medals in liquid.
To do this, he used acquaragia;
a caustic mix of nitric
and hydrochloric acids
that fascinated alchemists
because it dissolved oil
metals, such as gold.
When the Nazi's ransacked
Bohr's Institute,
they scoured the building for
loot or evidence of wrongdoing,
but left the beaker of
orange acquaragia untouched.
Hevesy was forced to
flee Stockholm in 1943,
but when he returned to
his battered laboratory
after VE day, he found the
innocuous beaker undisturbed
on a shelf.
He precipitated out the gold
and the Swedish academy
later recast the medals
for the scientists
who'd sent them.
Hevesy's only complaint about
the whole ordeal was the day
of lab work he missed
while fleeing Copenhagen.
[Laughter] And I'm happy
to announce that shortly
after that, Hevesy did end
up winning the Nobel Prize
and won it for the
chemical tracer work.
So the stunt with his landlady
ended up paying off for him
with the Nobel Prize,
so a good lesson there.
I'm going to wrap up tonight
with a little bit of reflection
on the periodic table itself.
The Cold War story shows that
there have been a lot of changes
to the periodic table.
I've had people come up and talk
to me or send me an email saying
that they hadn't looked at
the periodic table in 30, 40,
sometimes 50 years and
they were really surprised
that the periodic table looked
like it had changed shape
some of them remember.
They were also surprised at
how many new elements were
on the periodic table.
And one thing people always want
to know, they always ask me is,
"Well, are there more
new elements out there
to be discovered; will
scientists find more of them?"
And the answer is,
"Well, kind of."
Of course scientists aren't
going out in the world anymore
and getting their fingernails
dirty in nature trying
to find these elements;
they're actually creating them
in laboratories.
The newest new element added
to the periodic table
was element 117;
the name is ununseptium.
That's Latin for 117 and
that's just a provisional name
until they can actually
confirm that they discovered it.
So there are new elements being
added to the periodic table.
But element 117 was sort of
special in that it filled
in a gap down there
on the periodic table
in the bottom row.
Before that, it was just
sort of this glaring hold.
But when they got
that element in there,
it completed that last row.
It sort of squared it off
down there kind of nicely.
And the rest of the elements
on the periodic table
were discovered in sort
of a haphazard order;
just wherever scientists
sort of came across one.
So it's really the first time
that we've ever had a full
and complete row on the
periodic table like this;
it's the first complete periodic
table we've ever had right now.
And it could be the only
complete periodic table
that we will ever have.
Scientists are already,
of course,
working on making
another new element.
The next one might be 119
(unununium) or could be 120.
And when they do that, they'll,
of course, have to put it
on the bottom row and start
over; start adding more.
But the elements down there
on the very bottom row are
so fragile and fall
apart so quickly
that they might only get 5 or 6
atoms of those elements at once.
And the only way they know
that they exist is they have
a computer readout somewhere
that has some 1s instead
of 0s in certain places
that tell them that they exist.
The scientist might spend
a decade you know working
on these elements
trying to create them
and then it can take a
decade or more to confirm
that these elements
actually exist;
they're that fragile
and that rare.
So it's kind of an open
question whether we'll be able
to get all the way across and
complete a whole other row
of the periodic table
and some people think
that we just won't be able
to; the atoms won't make it.
So at that point, people
want to know, "Well,
is the periodic table kaput;
is it done at that point?"
And the answer again is, "Well,
you know maybe, but maybe not."
One thing I really
enjoyed writing the book
that I didn't expect to find out
a lot about is that there are
so many different arrangements
of the periodic table out there.
We're sort of used to our
you know sort of castles
with turrets look with
a little landing strip
on the bottom here.
[Laughter] But there are so
many different arrangements;
people have put in
so many thousands
of hours making new ones.
There's a periodic table galaxy
with the smaller elements
in the center and
the other's sort
of spiraling around it outside.
There are periodic tables
that look like board games.
There are periodic
tables with sort
of a double helix
motif going on.
There are periodic tables
that are mapped topologically
onto taxi cabs and elephants
and things like that.
This is actually down at
American Chemical Society
in Washington, D.C. There
are periodic tables that look
like mobius strips [assumed
spelling] with this sort
of part coming out
in three dimensions
and little twists there.
There's a periodic
table Rubik's Cube
where you can take the
elements and you can turn them
and put them in different
arrangements.
I'm not exactly sure what good
that is to be able to do it,
but a man holds a U.S. patent on
the Periodic Table Rubik's Cube.
One of my favorite alternative
periodic tables was a woman came
up to me after a talk and she
admitted that she had gone
to a photo booth at a fair or
an arcade a few years before,
one of the ones where you make
a funny face in each picture,
and she'd actually gone back
something like 20 or 30 times,
gotten lots and lots of
pictures, different face
in each one, and then she'd
actually made a periodic table
of herself and she had
put it on her fridge
so that she could see herself
as the periodic table
every single morning.
And I just thought, "God
bless you for doing something
so strange like that."
[Laughter] It just shows the
periodic table means so much
to people and it means a
lot of really different
and unusual things
to different people.
And I really think the
different arrangements
of the periodic table
show you they help keep
in mind something very
important about the table.
There's something universal
about the periodic table;
the arrangements and the
relationships of the elements.
But the way we actually put
it down on paper is sort
of contingent on what
way we want to see it
or what use we want
to get out of it.
And I really think that shows
that the periodic table is
still this amazing double thing.
It's the basis of so
much fundamental science;
it's literally universal.
But at the same time,
it's a trove of stories
and it's really a reflection of
all of our different passions
and obsessions and
I'm constantly amazed
at all the different things that
we've been able to fit in there.
So thank you again for all
coming out this morning.
[ Applause ]
