THAT’S THE WAY THE COOKIE CRUMBLES (23 page)

Entering the grand lobby of the Royal Institution of Great Britain is practically a religious experience for anyone with a scientific bent. A portrait of Sir Humphry Davy, the institution’s first leading light, peers down at the visitor over the shoulder of a statue of Michael Faraday, perhaps the greatest scientist and public lecturer who has ever lived. If you close your eyes, you can practically hear the buzzing of the crowd that filled the lobby in the 1800s. People thronged to the institution, ascended the great staircase to the lecture theater, and eagerly awaited fascinating demonstrations by Davy or Faraday.

The Royal Institution of Great Britain was the brainchild of Benjamin Thompson, perhaps better known as Count Rumford. He was by all accounts a ruthless, arrogant, cunning, devious, unprincipled womanizer who was also a philanthropist and a gifted scientist. He had invented a kitchen stove as well as a percolating coffeepot. But his most famous invention was the Royal Institution. Rumford was convinced that science should be a public servant and that people should be aware of its capabilities. The public institution he established in 1799 would be dedicated to “diffusing the knowledge and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical inventions and improvements, and for teaching by courses of philosophical lectures and experiments the application of sciences to the common purposes of life.”

The Royal Institution became a place that not only conveyed a sense of scientific excitement to the general public through regular lectures but also served as a haven for scientific research. Funding was a constant problem, and the institution had to rely heavily on the income from public lectures. It endeavored to present lectures entertaining enough to inspire people to pay good money to attend them — in other words, the lectures had to be pretty spectacular. One of the first, delivered in 1801, featured the first-ever public demonstration of the synthesis and effects of nitrous oxide, better known as laughing gas. The presenter, Thomas Garnett, the institution’s first professor of chemistry, was assisted by a young Humphry Davy, who had already made a name for himself with his work at Thomas Beddoes’s “Pneumatic Institution.”

Beddoes was an English physician who had noticed that cows have sweet breath, presumably due to substances in hay, such as clover. It occurred to him to take cows into the rooms of tubercular patients to purify the air with their sweet breath. Must have been quite a scene, with the patients moaning and the cows mooing. This treatment was quickly abandoned, probably because not everything the animals produced smelled sweet. Still, Beddoes was convinced that physicians could treat disease by having their patients inhale the right chemicals. He hired Davy, who had completed an apprenticeship with an apothecary-surgeon, to pursue this. Davy focused his attention on nitrous oxide. He actually recommended laughing gas as a surgical anesthetic, a recommendation that was ignored for half a century. But people were willing to experiment with nitrous oxide, and laughing gas parties became fashionable, especially after the celebrated public lecture in 1801.

Davy succeeded Garrett as professor of chemistry, and he molded the institution into a center for advanced research and public demonstrations of science. He was a peerless researcher, inventing the miner’s safety lamp; that device featured a flame surrounded by wire gauze, which dissipated heat and prevented ignition of “fire damp” (methane) in mines where numerous previous explosions had occurred. He wrote the first treatise on agricultural chemistry and discovered the elements potassium and sodium when he passed an electric current through their molten compounds. A great discovery, indeed, but not Davy’s greatest. Without a doubt, Sir Humphry’s greatest discovery was Michael Faraday.

Faraday had no formal education. At the age of fourteen, he had been apprenticed to a London bookbinder. One day, someone brought in a volume of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
for repair, and from that day on Faraday was hooked on science. The volume included an entry on electricity, which captivated young Michael’s imagination. He was absolutely thrilled when a customer offered him a ticket to one of Davy’s lectures at the Royal Institution. Afterwards, he resolved to find a way to work with Davy. Faraday had taken detailed notes at the lecture, and he sent these to Davy. The great man was so impressed by Faraday’s clear descriptions that in 1813 he offered him a job as an assistant at the institution. His first duty was to accompany Davy and his wife on a European tour, during which Faraday served as both scientific assistant and personal servant to Lady Davy. He didn’t relish the latter, but the tour provided him with an education that he could not have found elsewhere. In the course of it, he met the leading scientists of the day, including Ampere, Gay-Lussac, and Volta, the Italian inventor of the battery.

By 1820, Faraday had become well versed in electricity, and he was ready to pounce when he heard about Hans Christian Oersted’s amazing discovery at the University of Copenhagen. The Danish scientist had found that he could deflect a compass needle if he placed it near a wire through which a current flowed. This set Faraday off on a series of history-making experiments. Within a year, he had designed a device in which an electric current turned a permanent magnet — the world’s first electric motor. He followed this by showing that a current in a wire could induce a current in a nearby wire — the world’s first transformer. Then, in 1831, Faraday made what was perhaps his greatest discovery. He generated a current in a coil of wire as he moved it back and forth between the poles of a large magnet. The world now had the electrical generator.

Faraday had become director of the institution in 1825, at the age of thirty-four, and went on to conduct an astounding variety of experiments in addition to pursuing his work on electricity. He was the first to isolate benzene from the illuminating gas that was made by heating animal fat — the gas that Londoners used to light their homes in the early 1800s. He made new alloys of metals and produced new optical glasses. He was the first to make tetrachloroethylene, the classic dry-cleaning solvent. He liquefied many gases, allowing them to be transported in cylinders. And he gave public lectures.

In 1825, Faraday initiated the Friday Evening Discourses, which have continued to this day. One of the greatest honors that can be bestowed upon a scientist is an invitation to lecture at one of these sessions. There are some interesting traditions that go along with the honor. Before the lecture, the presenter is locked in a room with nothing but a bottle of whiskey and a chamber pot. This is because of Charles Wheatstone, a leading physicist of his day. In 1846, Wheatstone became unnerved before he was to give a lecture, panicked, and ran away. Faraday had helped prepare the lecture and was now forced to step into the breach. According to tradition, the lectures had to last exactly one hour, not a minute more or less, and Faraday ran into trouble. He finished lecturing in forty minutes; left with twenty more minutes to fill, he continued on, discussing his ideas on the relationship between light and magnetism. He had not yet refined these ideas, and he was later criticized on that score. He therefore decided that no lecturer would ever be allowed to flee again — and that explains the locked room, the whiskey, and the chamber pot.

These public lectures became so popular, especially the special Christmas lectures for children, that the street the institution stood on, Albemarle Street, became the first one-way thoroughfare in London. This eased the congestion created by the carriages bringing people to the scientific spectacles. Now, perhaps, you understand why the Royal Institution is such a special place for anyone who is interested in conveying science to the public. I had to have a picture of the famous lobby. But in order to get both the Davy portrait and the Faraday statue into the frame, I had to bow down in front of Michael Faraday. I didn’t mind that one bit. It seemed the appropriate thing to do.

I learned a terrific chemical magic trick from the great English scientist Robert Boyle. He didn’t teach it to me personally, since he lived roughly three hundred years ago, but Boyle was the first to record the little stunt. Onlookers were absolutely flabbergasted when, seemingly at Boyle’s command, a blank piece of paper spontaneously caught fire and the flames traced out clearly legible letters. The work of the devil, they must have thought. Well, it wasn’t — but it was the work of an element that some would later refer to as the devil’s own. The chemical magic was performed by phosphorus.

The crafty Boyle had taken a lump of the metal from a little vial in which it sat covered with water, and he’d used it to write on the paper. As the paper dried, the phosphorus came into contact with oxygen from the air and ignited, providing a spectacular display; it was like an unseen hand writing with fire. I have always enjoyed reproducing this effect for two reasons. First, it serves as a great introduction to a discussion of the chemistry of elemental phosphorus. Second, and even more important, it marks the turning point in history from the archaic practice of alchemy to the modern pursuit of chemistry.

Although we commonly regard Robert Boyle as one of the founders of chemistry, he spent his early life searching for the philosopher’s stone. This was a decidedly alchemical endeavor. The philosopher’s stone was a mythical substance that could convert metals such as iron or lead to gold. The alchemists who tried to concoct it typically recorded their experiments in secret codes understandable only to themselves.

But this changed when Boyle became infatuated with phosphorus. He began to write up his observations and experiments in a way that was understandable to all. His focus shifted from trying to make gold to studying and recording the properties of matter. The secretive alchemist had undergone a transformation himself. He had become a scientific chemist.

Robert Boyle did not discover phosphorus. He learned about it from Daniel Kraft, a German who had been asked by King Charles II to come to England and demonstrate the wonderful substance that had amused the royal courts of Europe. Charles was very interested in the workings of the world, and he’d already instituted the Royal Society with the aim of promoting the study of science. Boyle was a member of the society, and he invited Kraft to his home so that he could see for himself the miraculous material he had heard so much about. Kraft wrote the word
Domini
on a piece of paper with a finger dipped in phosphorus; the letters glowed in the dark and ignited. Next he set fire to some gunpowder using nothing but a bit of phosphorus. Boyle was hooked. Kraft would not reveal the source of the substance, but after Boyle badgered and pleaded for a while, he did yield a clue. He told his host that it came from “somewhat that belonged to the body of man.”

This precipitated some active research by Boyle into urine as well as into what, at the time, people referred to as “nightsoil.” None of the alchemical reactions that Boyle was familiar with produced phosphorus. Ambrose Godfrey, one of Boyle’s assistants, thought that he knew where they might look for help. He had apprenticed in Germany and had heard about a Hamburg alchemist who had discovered some strange substance that glowed in the dark. Boyle sent Godfrey to seek him out. From the meeting between Ambrose Godfrey and Hennig Brandt came the solution to the puzzle.

Brandt was indeed the discoverer of phosphorus. He hadn’t been searching for a new element; he’d been looking for the key to immortality. Gold was considered to be an immortal metal. Unlike others, it didn’t rust or tarnish. Alchemists figured that if they could isolate the property of gold that rendered it immortal, then they could use it to extend human life. Brandt’s attention turned to urine. It was gold in color, and it came from the body. Maybe the body gradually lost its vitality as it lost this gold essence. In an attempt to isolate the essence, Brandt collected large amounts of urine and concentrated it by boiling it down. One day, a batch boiled dry. Brandt was shocked to see the residue glow eerily in the dark. It then burst into flame. The residue was phosphorus; in Greek, the name means “light bearer.”

Brandt eventually sold his secret to Daniel Kraft, who, in turn, made a small fortune by demonstrating its properties to the rich and famous. The secret that Brandt revealed to Ambrose Godfrey was that the urine residue had to be heated to a very high temperature to yield phosphorus. This knowledge was all Boyle needed to devise his own preparation method. Soon, he had created a supply for experimentation purposes. In retrospect, we can understand the mysteries of the urine method. Phosphates — substances in which phosphorus is chemically linked to oxygen — are plentiful in the human diet. Indeed, they are essential, because our bones are composed mostly of calcium phosphate. Molecules of DNA also incorporate phosphates, and they could not function without these units. We ingest more phosphates than the body requires, so we release the excess in our urine. Urine also contains a variety of organic substances, such as urea and creatine, which break down at high temperatures and decompose to yield elemental carbon. This carbon reacts with phosphates, stripping off the oxygen atoms to form carbon dioxide, leaving behind elemental phosphorus. Phosphorus ignites on exposure to air, a phenomenon that made Boyle’s chemical magic possible.