Uncle Tungsten

Afterword

Toward the end of 1997, Roald Hoffmann – we had been friends since I had read his Chemistry Imagined a few years before – knowing something of my chemical boyhood, sent me an intriguing parcel. It contained a large poster of the periodic table with photographs of each element; a chemical catalog, so I could order a few things; and a little bar of a very dense, greyish metal, which fell onto the floor as I opened the package, landing with a resonant clonk. I recognized it at once by its feel and its sound (‘the sound of sintered tungsten’, my uncle used to say, ‘nothing like it’).

The clonk served as a sort of Proustian mnemonic, and instantly brought Uncle Tungsten to mind, sitting in his lab in his wing collar, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his hands black from powdered tungsten. Other pictures rose immediately in my mind: his factory where the lightbulbs were made, his collections of old lightbulbs, and heavy metals, and minerals. And my own initiation by him, when I was ten, into the wonders of metallurgy and chemistry. I thought I might write a brief sketch of Uncle Tungsten, but the memories, now started, continued to emerge – memories not just of Uncle Tungsten but of all the events of early life, of my boyhood, many forgotten for fifty years or more. What had started as a page of writing became a vast mining operation, a four-year excavation of two million words or more – from which, somehow, a book began to crystallize out.

I have pulled out my old books (and bought many new ones), set the little tungsten bar on a tiny pedestal, and papered the kitchen with chemical charts. I read lists of cosmic abundances in the bath. On cold, dismal Saturday afternoons, I may curl up with a fat volume of Thorpe’s Dictionary of Applied Chemistry – it was one of Uncle Tungsten’s favorite books – opening it anywhere and reading at random.

The passion for chemistry, which I had thought dead at fourteen, has clearly survived, deep inside me, throughout the intervening years. Though my life has taken a different direction, I have followed the new discoveries in chemistry with excitement. In my day, elements stopped with number 92, uranium, but I have watched closely as new elements – elements up to 118! – have been made. These new elements probably exist only in the lab and do not occur anywhere else in the universe, but I was delighted to learn that the very latest of them, though still radioactive, are thought to belong to a long-sought ‘island of stability’, in which the atomic nuclei are almost a million times more stable than those of the preceding elements.

Astronomers now wonder about giant planets with cores of metallic hydrogen, stars made of diamond, and stars with crusts of iron helide. The inert gases have been coaxed into combination, and I have seen fluorides of xenon – almost unthinkable, a fantasy for me, in the 1940^s. The rare-earth elements, which both Uncle Tungsten and Uncle Abe so loved, have now become common and find countless uses in fluorescent materials, phosphors of every color, high-temperature superconductors, and tiny magnets of an unbelievable strength. The powers of synthetic chemistry have become prodigious: we can design molecules now with almost any structure, any property, we wish.

Tungsten, with its density and hardness, has found new uses in darts and tennis rackets and – disturbingly – in coating shells and missiles. But it also turns out – this is much more to my taste – to be indispensable to certain primitive bacteria which get their energy by metabolizing sulphur compounds in the hydrothermal vents of the ocean depths. If (as is now speculated) such bacteria were the first organisms on earth, then tungsten may have been crucial for the origin of life.

The old enthusiasm surfaces every so often in odd associations and impulses: a sudden desire for a ball of cadmium, or to feel the coldness of diamond against my face. The license plates of cars immediately suggest elements, especially in New York, where so many of them begin with U, V, W, and Y – that is, uranium, vanadium, tungsten, and yttrium. It is an added pleasure, a bonus, a grace, if the symbol of an element is followed by its atomic number, as in W74 or Y39. Flowers, too, bring elements to mind: the color of lilacs in spring for me is that of divalent vanadium. Radishes, for me, evoke the smell of selenium.

Lights – the old family passion – continue to evolve in wonderful ways. Sodium lights, a yellow glory, became widespread in the 1950^s, and quartz-iodine lights, blazing halogen lamps, came out in the 1960^s. If I wandered with a pocket spectroscope as a twelve-year-old in Piccadilly after the war, I have rediscovered the same joy now, walking with a pocket spectroscope through Times Square, seeing the city lights of New York as atomic emissions.

And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. The location of tungsten, at the intersection of Group VI and Period 6, becomes synonymous here with the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Sixth Street. (There is no such intersection in New York, of course, but it exists, conspicuously, in the New York of my dreams.) I dream of eating hamburgers made of scandium. Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive ‘cry’). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals – my old and valued friends – Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.