Lights – the old family passion – continue to evolve in wonderful ways. Sodium lights, a yellow glory, became widespread in the 1950s, and quartz-iodine lights, blazing halogen lamps, came out in the 1960s. 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.
Acknowledgments
I owe a huge debt to my brothers, my cousins, and, not least, my old friends, who have shared memories, letters, photographs, and memorabilia of all kinds; I could not have reconstructed the events of so long ago without them. I have written of them, and others, with some trepidation: ‘It is always dangerous’, as Primo Levi remarked, ‘transforming a person into a character.’
Kate Edgar, my assistant, and editor of many of my previous books, has been a virtual collaborator on this one, not only editing the innumerable drafts I produced, but meeting chemists with me, going down mines, enduring smells and explosions, electrical discharges and occasional radioactive emanations, and putting up with an office increasingly filled with periodic tables, spectroscopes, crystals dangling in supersaturated solutions, coils of wire, batteries, chemicals, and minerals. This book would still be a two-million-word excavation had it not been for her powers of distillation.
Sheryl Carter, also working with me, has opened the wonders of the Internet for me (I am computer-illiterate, and I do all my writing with a pen or an old typewriter), and has found books and articles and scientific instruments and toys of all sorts which I could never have got for myself.
In 1993, I wrote an essay-review in the New York Review of Books of David Knight’s book on Humphry Davy, which in many ways rekindled my long-dormant interest in chemistry. I am grateful to Bob Silvers for encouraging me in this.
My article ‘Brilliant Light’, an early fragment of this book which appeared in The New Yorker, was brilliantly edited (and titled) by my editor there, John Bennet; and Dan Frank, at Knopf, has been crucial in helping to steer the book to its present form.
Soon after starting this book I had the great pleasure of meeting a boyhood hero, Glenn Seaborg, and I have subsequently met or corresponded with chemists all over the world. These chemists, too many to name, have been astonishingly hospitable to an outsider, an ex-boy-enthusiast, and have shown me wonders that the wildest science fiction of my boyhood could not have conceived, such as ‘seeing’ actual atoms (through the tungsten tip of an atomic force microscope), as well as humoring some nostalgic desires to see, once again, among other things, the deep blue of sodium dissolved in liquid ammonia; and tiny magnets levitated over superconductors cooled in liquid nitrogen, the magical, gravity-defying floating I had dreamed of as a child.
But, above all, it has been Roald Hoffmann who has been infinitely stimulating and supportive, and who has done more than anyone else to show me the marvelous thing which chemistry is now – and it is to Roald, therefore, that I dedicate this book.