Whenever I visited the factory, he would take me around the machines, or have his foreman do so. (The foreman was a short, muscular man, a Popeye with enormous forearms, a palpable testament to the benefits of working with tungsten.) I never tired of the ingenious machines, always beautifully clean and sleek and oiled, or the furnace where the black powder was compacted from a powdery incoherence into dense, hard bars with a grey sheen.
During my visits to the factory, and sometimes at home, Uncle Dave would teach me about metals with little experiments. I knew that mercury, that strange liquid metal, was incredibly heavy and dense. Even lead floated on it, as my uncle showed me by floating a lead bullet in a bowl of quicksilver. But then he pulled out a small grey bar from his pocket, and to my amazement, this sank immediately to the bottom. That, he said, was his metal, tungsten.
Uncle loved the density of the tungsten he made, and its refractoriness, its great chemical stability. He loved to handle it – the wire, the powder, but the massy little bars and ingots most of all. He caressed them, balanced them (tenderly, it seemed to me) in his hands. ‘Feel it, Oliver’, he would say, thrusting a bar at me. ‘Nothing in the world feels like sintered tungsten.’ He would tap the little bars and they would emit a deep clink. ‘The sound of tungsten’, Uncle Dave would say, ‘nothing like it.’ I did not know whether this was true, but I never questioned it.
As the youngest of almost the youngest (I was the last of four, and my mother the sixteenth of eighteen), I was born almost a hundred years after my maternal grandfather and never knew him. He was born Mordechai Fredkin, in 1837, in a small village in Russia. As a youth he managed to avoid being impressed into the Cossack army and fled Russia using the passport of a dead man named Landau; he was just sixteen. As Marcus Landau, he made his way to Paris and then Frankfurt, where he married (his wife was sixteen too). Two years later, in 1855, now with the first of their children, they moved to England.
My mother’s father was, by all accounts, a man drawn equally to the spiritual and the physical. He was by profession a boot and shoe manufacturer, a shochet (a kosher slaughterer), and later a grocer – but he was also a Hebrew scholar, a mystic, an amateur mathematician, and an inventor. He had a wide-ranging mind: he published a newspaper, the Jewish Standard, in his basement, from 1888 to 1891; he was interested in the new science of aeronautics and corresponded with the Wright brothers, who paid him a visit when they came to London in the early 1900s (some of my uncles could still remember this). He had a passion, my aunts and uncles told me, for intricate arithmetical calculations, which he would do in his head while lying in the bath. But he was drawn above all to the invention of lamps – safety lamps for mines, carriage lamps, streetlamps – and he patented many of these in the 1870s.
A polymath and autodidact himself, Grandfather was passionately keen on education – and, most especially, a scientific education – for all his children, for his nine daughters no less than his nine sons. Whether it was this or the sharing of his own passionate enthusiasms, seven of his sons were eventually drawn to mathematics and the physical sciences, as he was. His daughters, by contrast, were by and large drawn to the human sciences – to biology, to medicine, to education and sociology. Two of them founded schools. Two others were teachers. My mother was at first torn between the physical and the human sciences: she was particularly attracted to chemistry as a girl (her older brother Mick had just begun a career as a chemist), but later became an anatomist and surgeon. She never lost her love of, her feeling for, the physical sciences, nor the desire to go beneath the surfaces of things, to explain. Thus the thousand and one questions I asked as a child were seldom met by impatient or peremptory answers, but careful ones which enthralled me (though they were often above my head). I was encouraged from the start to interrogate, to investigate.
Given all my aunts and uncles (and a couple more on my father’s side), my cousins numbered almost a hundred; and since the family, for the most part, was centered in London (though there were far-flung American, Continental, and South African branches), we would all meet frequently, tribally, on family occasions. This sense of extended family was one I knew and enjoyed as far back as memory goes, and it went with a sense that it was our business, the family business, to ask questions, to be ‘scientific’, just as we were Jewish or English. I was among the youngest of the cousins – I had cousins in South Africa who were forty-five years my senior – and some of these cousins were already practicing scientists or mathematicians; others, only a little older than myself, were already in love with science. One cousin was a young physics teacher; three were reading chemistry at university; and one, a precocious fifteen-year-old, was showing great mathematical promise. All of us, I could not help imagining, had a bit of the old man in us.
2. ‘37’
I grew up just before the Second World War in a huge, rambling Edwardian house in northwest London. Being a corner house, at the junction of Mapesbury and Exeter Roads, number 37 Mapesbury Road faced onto both, and was larger than its neighbors. The house was basically square, almost cubical, but with a front porch that jutted out, V-shaped at the top, like the entry to a church. There were bow windows that also protruded on each side, with recesses in between, and thus the roof had a most complex shape, resembling, to my eyes, nothing so much as a giant crystal. The house was built of red brick of a peculiarly soft, dusky color. I imagined this, after I learned some geology, as being old red sandstone from the Devonian age, a thought encouraged by the fact that all the roads around us – Exeter, Teignmouth, Dartmouth, Dawlish – themselves had Devonian names.
There were double front doors, with a little vestibule between them, and these led onto a hall, and thence to a passage that led back toward the kitchen; the hall and the passage had a floor of tesselated colored stones. To the right of the hall, as one entered, the staircase curved upward, its heavy bannister polished smooth by my brothers sliding down it.
Certain rooms in the house had a magical or sacred quality, perhaps my parents’ surgery (both of them were physicians) above all, with its bottles of medicine, its balance for weighing out powders, the racks of test tubes and beakers, the spirit lamp, and the examining table. There were all sorts of medicines, lotions, and elixirs in a large cabinet – it looked like an old-fashioned chemist’s shop in miniature – there was a microscope, and bottles of reagents for testing patients’ urine, like the bright blue Fehling’s solution, which turned yellow when there was sugar in the urine.
It was from this special room, where patients were admitted, but not (unless the door was left unlocked) my childish self, that I sometimes saw a glow of violet light coming out under the door and smelled a strange, seaside smell, which I later learned was ozone – this was the old ultraviolet lamp at work. I was not too sure, as a child, what doctors ‘did’, and glimpses of catheters and bougies in their kidney dishes, retractors and speculums, rubber gloves, catgut thread and forceps – all this, I think, rather frightened me, though it fascinated me too. Once, when the door was left accidentally open, I saw a patient with her legs up in stirrups (in what I later learned was the ‘lithotomy position’). My mother’s obstetric bag and anesthetic bag were always ready to be grabbed in an emergency, and I knew when they would be needed, for I would hear comments like, ‘She’s half-a-crown dilated’ – comments which by their unintelligibility and mysterious-ness (were they a sort of code?) stimulated my imagination in all sorts of ways.