The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table

Chemical warfare dates back to ancient Greece (when Spartans tried to smoke out the Athenians with “noxious bundles of wood, pitch, and stinky sulfur” (81)). But chemical attacks remained rudimentary until World War I. The French “lobbed bromine shells at advancing German troops” (82); called lacrimators, these bombs “could incapacitate even a grown man with hot, searing tears” (82).

Meanwhile, in Germany, famed chemist Fritz Haber discovered how to produce large quantities of ammonia (NH3) for use in fertilizer, which revolutionized farming and “likely saved millions from Malthusian starvation” (83). But ammonia also proved useful in bombs (and still does today, such as in the bomb “that Timothy McVeigh used to blow a hole in an Oklahoma City courthouse in 1995” (83)). Haber spearheaded a bromine gas development program, and by 1915 Germany was firing bromine shells at English and Russian troops. Eventually, Haber turned to chlorine, which, like bromine, has seven electrons in its outer shell and is therefore quite caustic, even more so than bromine.

The most deadly of these chemical weapons is mustard gas, which “maimed hundreds of thousands of people and terrorized millions more” (87). Haber won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for contributions to food production; he was also charged as a war criminal for his work on mustard gas, what Kean calls “a contradictory, almost self-canceling legacy” (87). Haber, a Jewish convert to Christianity, died in 1934; his prewar invention of the Zyklon B insecticide was used by Hitler to kill Jews in gas chambers, “including relatives of Haber” (87).

Kean’s description of the elements of World War I weaponry continues as he traces the path of molybdenum, a metal used in Germany’s Big Bertha cannons, which were so huge and required so much gunpowder that they quickly overheated and warped. Molybdenum can withstand tremendous heat. But the only source of molybdenum was a mine in Colorado. A German-American mining company hired goons to threaten the miners; owner Otis King sold the mine for a pittance, and Germany got the molybdenum. After the war, King became wealthy by selling molybdenum to Henry Ford for use in his car engines.

Kean explains, “By the time World War II rolled around, molybdenum had been superseded in steel production by the element below it on the periodic table, tungsten” (91), an extremely hard metal with an even higher melting point. Nazis traded looted gold for tungsten to use in “machinery and armor-piercing missiles” (91). The main supplier, neutral Portugal, sold tungsten to both sides.

After World War II, many more metals on the periodic table made their entrances onto the industrial stage. Kean enumerates their many uses: “Gadolinium is perfect for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Neodymium makes unprecedentedly powerful lasers” (94). Scandium is added to baseball bats, bike frames, lightweight helicopters, and missile warheads.

Tantalum and niobium are used in cellphones not warfare, but they are nevertheless implicated in conflict, Kean notes. Most tantalum and niobium come from Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa, where war raged beginning in the 1990s. The two elements were found together as coltan in creek beds, so farmers “abandoned their farms for prospecting” (96). This caused a famine, enriched the militias, and exacerbated the war. In the West, “cell phone makers realized they were funding anarchy” (97), and found another source in Australia. However, in 2006 the European Union “outlawed lead solder in consumer goods, and most manufacturers have replaced it with tin—a metal Congo also happens to have in huge supply” (97). By 2010, five million people had died in the ongoing war. 

Kean opens the chapter with a major discovery. In 1913, at the University of Manchester in England, physics professor Ernest Rutherford’s student Henry Moseley fired an electron beam at samples of the various elements; the energy the samples gave off showed that the number of protons in an atom, and not the atom’s total weight, determines its place on the periodic table. This also helped to confirm Rutherford’s theory that every atom contains a central core, called a nucleus, made up of protons and neutrons. Moseley also discovered a number of unknown atoms that helped fill in the table. Scientists raced to fill more gaps. The last missing natural element, promethium, was discovered in 1949.

Next, Kean outlines the discovery in 1932 of a new particle, which solves the puzzle of the atomic nucleus’s mass. The new particle is “the neutral neutron, which adds weight without charge” (105). Some elements have atoms with varying numbers of neutrons; each variety is an isotope. Some isotopes are radioactive: They lose a few protons and neutrons, undergoing “Alpha decay” into lighter elements; others radiate electrons from neutrons in “Beta decay,” which also changes the atomic number of the element (105). The deadliest form of radioactivity, “Gamma decay” (104), is the emission of high-intensity X-rays, “and is today the stuff of nuclear nightmares” (104).

Under certain conditions, radioactive elements such as uranium and plutonium can split, or fission, and release excess neutrons, which slam into nearby atoms and cause them to splinter, too, in “a cascade known as a chain reaction” (106). This process can be harnessed in bombs, but the exact amounts of the materials required, and how they should be blended and shaped, was fiendishly hard to calculate.

During World War II, American scientists used roomfuls of women to do the calculations assembly-line style. The work included numbers for “how the neutron collided with a plutonium atom; whether it was gobbled up; how many new neutrons if any were released in the process; how many neutrons those in turn released; and so on” (108). Then “the women would start over with different numbers” (108). These women were the first “computers” (109). This process replaced time-consuming and expensive experimentation with, in effect, a series of theoretical simulations.

The best results of the simulation process ended up in the successful designs of the first atomic bombs. The process expanded into other domains, becoming known as the Monte Carlo method in honor of early calculations involving card games. The process stimulated the development of early electronic computers that do calculations quickly and efficiently.

Soon, computerized simulations enabled the development of bombs called “‘supers,’ multistage devices a thousand times more powerful than standard A-bombs” (111). These bombs, first detonated in 1952, “used plutonium and uranium to ignite stellar-style fusion in extraheavy liquid hydrogen” (111). Such weapons can be made deadlier still, modified to irradiate landscapes for decades with the highly radioactive isotope Cobalt-60, but their use by major nuclear powers is unlikely “because the conquering army couldn’t occupy the territory” (114). 

In this chapter, Kean explores a theme prevalent throughout the book: the race to scientific discoveries.

Glenn Seaborg discovered plutonium in 1940. After a stint as a Manhattan Project team leader, and assisted by Al Ghiorso starting in 1946, he “discovered more elements than anyone in history and extended the periodic table by almost one-sixth” (118). The two scientists, working at a lab at the University of California at Berkeley, discovered elements 95 through 100: americium (after America), curium (after Marie Curie), berkelium, californium, einsteinium, and fermium (119)—as well as elements 102 and 103: nobelium and lawrencium (“after Berkeley Radiation Laboratory founder and director Ernest Lawrence” (121)). Seaborg won the Nobel Prize, helped found the Pac 10 sports league, and served as an advisor to six presidents.

The Berkeley team’s discovery of element 101 required “a veritable Rube Goldberg machine” to collect and irradiate tiny amounts of einsteinium, followed by a mad dash at night to a distant lab, where a detector pinged 16 times, as individual mendelevium atoms signaled their existence (120). Kean explains, “Ghiorso had wired his radiation detector to the building’s fire alarm” (121), and the pings set off the alarm to cheers.

Meanwhile, Soviet Russia bankrolled science, although Stalinist ideology punished genetic research along with “quantum mechanics and relativity” (124). Some disfavored scientists were forced to work at a highly polluted Siberian nickel mine, helping the search for toxic elements. Stalin’s idea to exterminate bourgeois physicists was rebutted when it’s “pointed out that this might harm the Soviet nuclear weapons program” (125). Stalin relents, saying, “We can always shoot them later” (125).

Physicist Georgy Flyorov, who helped Russia develop its first atomic bomb, beat Berkeley to elements 104 in 1964 and 105 in 1969. Kean states, “Both teams produced element 106 in 1974, just months apart” (127). German researchers got in on the act as well. Decades of arguments about naming rights ensued; in 1996, an international panel finally assigned the names for elements 104 through 109: rutherfordium, dubnium (for the Russian lab where it was discovered), seaborgium (for Seaborg), borhium, hassium, and meitnerium.

Between 1994 and 2009, the Germans discovered elements 110 through 112: darmstadtium, roentgenium, and copernicium. Berkeley, hoping to rekindle its golden age, hired Victor Ninov from the Germans in 1996. Three years later, Ninov announced the discovery of elements 118 and 116, but no other lab could replicate it, and soon the only major discovery out of Berkeley was that Ninov had falsified the data. He was fired. A Russian-American team claimed 118 in 2006, but as of 2010 the claim is still under review.