Review: Periodic Tales, by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

[Russ Allbery]

Periodic Tales
by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Publisher: HarperCollins
Copyright: February 2011
ISBN:      0-06-207881-X
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     451

Perhaps my favorite chapter in Randall Munroe's What If? is his
examination of what would happen if you assembled a periodic table from
square blocks of each element. As with most What If? questions, the
answer is "everyone in the vicinity dies," but it's all about the
journey. The periodic table is full of so many elements that we rarely
hear about but which have fascinating properties. It was partly in the
memory of that chapter that I bought Periodic Tales on impulse after
seeing a mention of it somewhere on the Internet (I now forget where).

Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a journalist and author, but with a
background in natural sciences. He also has a life-long hobby of
collecting samples of the elements and attempting to complete his own
private copy of the periodic table, albeit with considerably more
precautions and sample containment than Munroe's thought experiment.
Periodic Tales is inspired by that collection. It's a tour and cultural
history of many of the elements, discussing their discovery, their role
in commerce and industry, their appearance, and often some personal
anecdotes. This is not exactly a chemistry book, although there's
certainly some chemistry here, nor is it a history, although
Aldersey-Williams usually includes some historical notes about each
element he discusses. The best term might be an anthropology of the
elements: a discussion of how they've influenced culture and an
examination of the cultural assumptions and connections we've
constructed around them. But primarily it's an idiosyncratic and
personal tour of the things Aldersey-Williams found interesting about
each one.

Periodic Tales is not comprehensive. The completionist in me found that
a bit disappointing, and there are a few elements that I think would
have fit the overall thrust of the book but are missing. (Lithium and
its connection to mental health and now computer batteries comes to
mind.) It's also not organized in the obvious way, either horizontally
or vertically along the periodic table. Instead, Aldersey-Williams has
divided the elements he talks about into five major but fairly
artificial divisions: power (primarily in the economic sense), fire
(focused on burning and light), craft (the materials from which we make
things), beauty, and earth. Obviously, these are fuzzy; silver appears
in craft, but could easily be in power with gold. I'm not sure how
defensible this division was. But it does, for good or for ill, break
the reader's mind away from a purely chemical and analytical treatment
and towards broader cultural associations.

This cultural focus, along with Aldersey-Williams's clear and
conversational style, are what pull this book firmly away from being a
beautified recitation of facts that could be gleamed from Wikipedia. It
also leads to some unexpected choices of focus. For example, the
cultural touchstone he chooses for sodium is not salt (which is a broad
enough topic for an entire book) but sodium street lights, the
ubiquitous and color-distorting light of modern city nights, thus
placing salt in the "fire" category of the book. Discussion of cobalt
is focused on pigments: the brilliant colors of paint made possible by
its many brightly-colored compounds. Arsenic is, of course, a poison,
but it's also a source of green, widely used in wallpaper (and
Aldersey-Williams discusses the connection with the controversial death
of Napoleon). And the discussion of aluminum starts with a sculpture,
and includes a fascinating discussion of "banalization" as we become
used to use of a new metal, which the author continues when looking a
titanium and its currently-occurring cultural transition between the
simply new and modern and a well-established metal with its own unique
cultural associations.

One drawback of the somewhat scattered organization is that, while
Periodic Tales provides fascinating glimmers of the history of
chemistry and the search to isolate elements, those glimmers are
disjointed and presented in no particular order. Recently-discovered
metals are discussed alongside ancient ones, and the huge surge in
elemental isolation in the 1800s is all jumbled together. Wikipedia has
a very useful timeline that helps sort out one's sense of history, but
there was a part of me left wanting a more structured presentation.

I read books like this primarily for the fascinating trivia. Mercury:
known in ancient times, but nearly useless, so used primarily for
ritual and decoration (making the modern reader cringe). Relative
abundancies of different elements, which often aren't at all what one
might think. Rare earths (not actually that rare): isolated through
careful, tedious work by Swedish mining chemists whom most people have
never heard of, unlike the discoverers of many other elements. And the
discovery of the noble gases, which is a fascinating bit of disruptive
science made possible by new technology (the spectroscope), forcing a
rethinking of the periodic table (which had no column for noble gases).
I read a lot of this while on vacation and told interesting tidbits to
my parents over breakfast or dinner. It's that sort of book.

This is definitely in the popular science and popular writing category,
for all the pluses and minuses that brings. It's not a detailed look at
either chemistry or history. But it's very fun to read, it provides a
lot of conversational material, and it takes a cultural approach that
would not have previously occurred to me. Recommended if you like this
sort of thing.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2017-04-29

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>