I enjoyed these experiments, and tried to envisage the processes that were going on, but I did not feel a real chemical passion – a desire to compound, to isolate, to decompose, to see substances changing, familiar ones disappearing and new ones in their stead – until I saw Uncle Dave’s lab and his passion for experiments of all kinds. Now I longed to have a lab of my own – not Uncle Dave’s bench, not the family kitchen, but a place where I could do chemical experiments undisturbed, by myself. As a start, I wanted to lay hands on cobaltite and niccolite, and compounds or minerals of manganese and molybdenum, of uranium and chromium – all those wonderful elements which were discovered in the eighteenth century. I wanted to pulverize them, treat them with acid, roast them, reduce them – whatever was necessary – so I could extract their metals myself. I knew, from looking through a chemical catalog at the factory, that one could buy these metals already purified, but it would be far more fun, far more exciting, I reckoned, to make them myself. This way, I would enter chemistry, start to discover it for myself, in much the same way as its first practitioners did – I would live the history of chemistry in myself.
And so I set up a little lab of my own at home. There was an unused back room I took over, originally a laundry room, which had running water and a sink and drain and various cupboards and shelves. Conveniently, this room led out to the garden, so that if I concocted something that caught fire, or boiled over, or emitted noxious fumes, I could rush outside with it and fling it on the lawn. The lawn soon developed charred and discolored patches, but this, my parents felt, was a small price to pay for my safety – their own, too, perhaps. But seeing occasional flaming globules rushing through the air, and the general turbulence and abandon with which I did things, they were alarmed, and urged me to plan experiments and to be prepared to deal with fires and explosions.
Uncle Dave advised me closely on the choice of apparatus – test tubes, flasks, graduated cylinders, funnels, pipettes, a Bunsen burner, crucibles, watch glasses, a platinum loop, a desiccator, a blowpipe, a retort, a range of spatulas, a balance. He advised me too on basic reagents – acids and alkalis, some of which he gave me from his own lab, along with a supply of stoppered bottles of all sizes, bottles of varied shapes and colors (dark green or brown for light-sensitive chemicals), with perfectly fitting ground-glass stoppers.
Every month or so, I stocked my lab with visits to a chemical supply house far out in Finchley, housed in a large shed set at a distance from its neighbors (who viewed it, I imagined, with a certain trepidation, as a place that might explode or exhale poisonous fumes at any moment). I would hoard my pocket money for weeks – occasionally one of my uncles, approving my secret passion, would slip me a half crown or so – and then take a succession of trains and buses to the shop.
I loved to browse through Griffin & Tatlock as one would browse through a bookshop. The cheaper chemicals were kept in huge stoppered urns of glass; the rarer, more costly substances were kept in smaller bottles behind the counter. Hydrofluoric acid – dangerous stuff, used for etching glass – could not be kept in glass, so it was sold in special small bottles made of gummy brown gutta-percha. Beneath the serried urns and bottles on the shelves were great carboys of acid – sulphuric, nitric, aqua regia; globular china bottles of mercury (seven pounds of this would fit into a bottle the size of a fist), and slabs and ingots of the commoner metals. The shopkeepers soon got to know me – an intense and rather undersized schoolboy, clutching his pocket money, spending hours amid the jars and bottles – and though they would warn me now and then, ‘Go easy with that one!’ they always let me have what I wished.
My first taste was for the spectacular – the frothings, the incandescences, the stinks and the bangs, which almost define a first entry into chemistry. One of my guides was J.J. Griffin’s Chemical Recreations, an 1850ish book I had found in a secondhand bookshop. Griffin had an easy, practical, and above all playful style; chemistry was clearly fun for him, and he made it fun for his readers, readers who must often have been, I decided, boys like myself, for he had sections like ‘Chemistry for the Holidays’ – this included the ‘Volatile Plum Pudding’ (‘when the cover is removed… it leaves its dish and rises to the ceiling’), ‘A Fountain of Fire’ (using phosphorus – ’the operator must take care not to burn himself’), and ‘Brilliant Deflagration’ (here, too, one was warned to ‘remove your hand instantly’). I was amused by the mention of a special formula (sodium tungstate) to render ladies’ dresses and curtains incombustible – were fires that common in Victorian times? – and used it to fireproof a handkerchief for myself.
The book opened with ‘Elementary Experiments’, experiments first with vegetable dyes, seeing their color changes with acids and alkalis. The most common vegetable dye was litmus – it came from a lichen, Griffin said. I used some of the litmus papers that my father kept in his dispensary, and saw how they turned red with different acids or blue with alkaline ammonia.
Griffin suggested experiments with bleaching – here I used my mother’s bleaching powder in place of the chlorine water he suggested, and with this I bleached litmus paper, cabbage juice, and a red handkerchief of my father’s. Griffin also suggested holding a red rose over burning sulphur, so that the sulphur dioxide produced would bleach it. Dipping it into water, miraculously, restored its color.
From here Griffin moved (and I with him) to ‘sympathetic inks’, which became visible only when heated or specially treated. I played with a number of these – lead salts, which turned black with hydrogen sulphide; silver salts, which blackened when exposed to light; cobalt salts, which became visible when dried or heated. All this was fun, but it was chemistry, too.
There were other old chemistry books lying around the house, some of which had been my parents’ when they were medical students, and some, more recent, belonging to my older brothers Marcus and David. One such was Valentin’s Practical Chemistry, a workhorse of a book – straight, uninspired, pedestrian in tone, designed as a practical manual, but nevertheless, for me, filled with wonders. Inside its cover, corroded, discolored, and stained (for it had done time in the lab in its day), it bore the words ‘Best wishes and congratulations 21⁄1⁄13 – Mick’ – it had been given to my mother on her eighteenth birthday by her twenty-five-year-old brother Mick, already a research chemist himself. Uncle Mick, a younger brother of Dave, had gone to South Africa with his brothers, and then worked in a tin mine on his return. He loved tin, I was told, as much as Uncle Dave loved tungsten, and he was sometimes referred to in the family as Uncle Tin. I never knew Uncle Mick, for he died of a malignancy the year I was born – he was only forty-five – a victim, his family thought, of the high levels of radioactivity in the uranium mines in Africa. But my mother had been very close to him, and his memory and image stayed vividly in her mind. The notion that this was my mother’s own chemistry book, and of the never-known, young chemist uncle who gave it to her, made the book especially precious to me.
There was a great popular interest in chemistry in the Victorian era, and many households had their own labs, as they had their ferneries and stereoscopes. Griffin’s Chemical Recreations had originally been published around 1830 and was so popular that it was continually revised and brought out in new editions; I had the tenth, published in 1860.[8]
8
Griffin was not only an educator at many levels – he wrote