Overview

What is it made of? What is in it? We have become a society fascinated about composition, and for good reason. Lead in petrol shows up in the snow fields of the Antarctic and mercury poisons fish in South America. Radon from the Earth poses health hazards in regions built on basaltic rocks and natural arsenic contaminates wells in Bangladesh. Calcium supplements combat bone-wasting diseases and iron alleviates anaemia. There are elements that we crave, and those we do our best to avoid. This book reveals that the story of the elements is not simply a tale of a hundred or so different types of atom, each with its unique properties and idiosyncrasies, but a story about our cultural interactions with the nature and composition of matter. It shows that understanding the elements is not merely a matter of reading a list, but of engaging with the reasons why people have long believed the world to be an elaborate composite of simpler materials, and how they sought to identify those primary substances.

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An engaging chronology of the elements, from the Greek philosophers who thought the world was made only from earth, air, fire, and water, to the work of twentieth-century radiochemistry in extending the periodic table.

Having taken readers on a guided tour of molecules (Stories of the Invisible, 2001), Nature consultant editor Ball now turns his attention to the elements. As is so often the case in science, the story begins with the Greeks. The philosopher Empedocles postulated that matter is made up of four basic ingredients: earth, air, water, and fire. All earthly substances were understood to be mixtures of these four, hence the alchemists' conviction that with the proper procedures, base metals could be transmuted into gold. The four elements meshed so neatly with other philosophical notions that it took 2,000 years for chemists to realize that the real world didn't conform to the elegant paradigm. Even then, the notion of elemental substances was not abandoned; instead, Cavendish, Lavoisier, Dalton, and their 18th-century followers found the classical elements to be mixtures of other, more elemental substances. At that point, the focus of chemistry changed to identification of those elements: iron, oxygen, sulfur, gold, and other, far less familiar ones. The number of elements has steadily increased to well over a hundred, with new ones still being added. A second great breakthrough was the Russian chemist Mendeleyev's realization that when arranged in the right order the elements fell into clear-cut families. With this key insight, embodied in the familiar periodic table, chemistry became a more exact science. The discovery of radioactivity opened more doors, notably the understanding that elements were not eternally fixed but capable of being changed-although by processes requiring far more energy than the alchemists had at their command. Ball covers the history of his field with admirable conciseness, taking welcome detours into the colorful lore of certain members of the periodic table, notably gold, which perhaps even today remains the single most charismatic of earthly substances. Solid scientific history, entertainingly presented. (Kirkus Reviews)

In this companion volume to Stories Of The Invisible, Philip Ball has achieved another tour de force, this time using human history and culture to tell the story of our struggle to understand what things are made of - and why. Again, Ball demonstrates his breadth of knowledge, and uses his mastery of disciplines other than his own to make the scientifically obscure relevant and interesting. This volume is replete with history and personalities, from the ancient Greek philosophers to the scientists responsible for creating today's manufactured elements. Here Plato and Shakespeare share territory with Lavoisier, Rutherford and Curie. Ball expertly uses the way in which certain elements became cultural symbols to slip in the facts about their chemical composition amid a welter of intriguing social detail - gold, the lubricant of trade, was displaced from Roman coins after Nero removed much of it from circulation by constructing a Golden House with jewel-encrusted walls, the resulting advent of copper and silver currencies representing a form of devaluation. The elements themselves are discussed in terms of our relationship with matter, from the minerals necessary for bodily function to the influence of South Africa's gold, or the effects of the mining of uranium. Ball moves smoothly from the Iron Age and alchemy to today's silicon-based electronics; discusses the importance of water, air and rust; reveals how carbon forms both diamonds and coal and is the element on which life is based, and describes the diverse effects of elements capable of creating radiation - from supreme poison to anti-cancer treatments, fundamental to the atom bomb and to modern high-tech diagnostics, enabling radiocarbon dating and intricate tracking of the Earth's climate fluctuations. These are expert revelations of the interactions of chemistry with culture and politics, well written and readily accessible even to the non-scientist. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Philip Ball is a science writer and consultant editor for Nature. He is the author of Self-Made Tapestry, Designing the Molecular World, Stories of the Invisible: A Guided Tour of Molecules, and Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water. He lives in London.

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