As at least Katherine has noticed, I’ve been sleeping with other magazines moonlighting as a chemist:
It was not until A Levels and a new school brought the hunched figure of Doc Beckett, cross-eyed and stain-fingered, into my life that I was able to rekindle my love affair with the sirens of my youth—and more besides. Doc learned his craft in a different age. We dehydrated glycerol to make acrolein and staggered around the lab coughing. We dropped nitrogen triiodide on the floor and spent the afternoon in a purple haze of tiny explosions. I made black powder and glycerol/permanganate fuses. During a particularly recalcitrant reduction […] Doc returned with a brown bottle from a locked cupboard, ‘Potassium Cyanide’ written in copperplate on the label. I peeked in the cupboard once. What, I wondered, was ‘uranyl acetate’?
By a somewhat roundabout route I found waiting for me, on my return from Brisbane, a letter from the same Doc Beckett. I was somewhat surprised: he’d been close to retirement when I did ‘A’ levels too many years ago. He and the chap who’d read my Chemistry World article, and had himself written to me saying that he knew Doc, still meet once a week to ‘practice science’. Apparently a home laboratory and drinks are involved.
Doc Beckett tells me that electrolysis in U-tubes using transition metal electrodes and electrolytes of differing pHs gives nice colour changes. Redox reactions of organics, apparently, give unquantifiable results. It’s good to know that after a lifetime of chemistry some things are yet mysterious.
And talking of lifetimes, in November last year Hans Freeman died. Until a few weeks before his death he still used a small office just round the corner from my own. We chatted occasionally, and I lent him my book for a paper he was writing.
This afternoon I went into Hans’ office and took a look at his bookshelf. There was a long shelf of PhD theses, and a fair number of old text books. I have a soft spot for old books, and Kate had already been in and secured a copy of lectures by C. P. Snow, which I might review at some point. I found an 1894 edition of German log tables (you can tell they’re German. They’re better organized), and an interesting-looking book called Humour and Humanism in Chemistry by a Professor John Read.
Brilliant! I thought, thumbing through it. Endless material for the blog. And indeed, it looks like an early instance of Lab lit. Naturally, I’ve left the book at work, but googling it this evening I found some interesting snippets:
the man of science is of necessity cold, formal and aloof; narrow in outlook; insensible to the finer human emotions; incapable of expressing himself in the common tongue; devoid of humour and humanism; and a stranger to the humanities [but] Prof. Read claimed that the study of chemistry, if approached befittingly, may reasonably take rank beside the so-called ‘humanities’, as a broadly educative, cultural, and humanising influence.
But here’s the weird part. This evening I went looking for the letter from Doc Beckett, because I wanted to write about it. I picked it up and re-read it. And halfway down the page:
I remember Prof John Read (St Andrews) working in Australia… He wrote a number of books, but it might be worth reading his Humour and Humanism in Chemistry—it even contains a play!
Thank you Doc. And thank you, Hans. Chemistry never ceases to surprise me.
“Apparently a home laboratory and drinks are involved.”
That is awesome – as are the coincidental connections.
And it’s good to hear that someone who retired about
604020 years ago is still alive despite playing with chemicals all his life. (This is a thing that worries me, personally.)And the book sounds awesome, too. Aren’t you supposed to be at that stage where every new acquired item makes you realize that you’re going to have to drag it halfway around the world soon?
My high school chemistry teacher once gave me two boxes of old chemistry books that his wife made him get rid of. (Oh, unfortunate segue. I meant this to be related to the “old chemistry teachers” part of the comment, not the “dragging items halfway around the world” part.) I gave a few of them away, eventually threw some out (see “cross-continental move”), but I kept some of the best ones: a an outdated but very fancy reference book for Organic Chemistry, and a pocket book from 1963 about harnessing power from the sun. It makes predictions about a future which is now in the past! The book is in Dutch, but I might translate some of the good bits.
I mean “newly acquired”.
Excellent post, sir – with a twist ending. Very nice.
I thought perhaps you were going to say you re-discovered your Computational Biology book, dusty and hidden behind back issues of a Bulgarian inorganic chemistry journal, and liberated it.
I also love old books – those 1894 German log tables sound lovely (although I would argue that a book of random numbers, as they used to publish, is more existential somehow). Sadly, my old ones are more along the lines of music education texts, a legacy from my grandmother – not science, but still fun.
the man of science is of necessity cold, formal and aloof; narrow in outlook; insensible to the finer human emotions; incapable of expressing himself in the common tongue; devoid of humour and humanism; and a stranger to the humanities…
Obviously the women of science are a lot more fun!
Hooray for eccentric old-school chemistry teachers who let you blow things up!
I had one myself – Mr (David?) Atkinson, aka Wacko Acko, aka Asbestos Fingers (because he could pick up ridiculously hot glassware with his bare hands).
Obviously the women of science are a lot more fun!
Back in 1934 when that was written, at least.
Aren’t you supposed to be at that stage where every new acquired item makes you realize that you’re going to have to drag it halfway around the world soon?
Ye-es… which is why I didn’t grab some very interesting crystallography texts and tables of absorption edges.
It must be great to hear from old teachers. I once tried to go back to my old high school to thank a particular biology teacher and they had metal detectors on the front doors and wouldn’t let me in. Very depressing.
{Struggles to rationalize how metal detectors on the doors would stop Jenny getting into a school}
I used to be in touch with my form teacher from when I was eleven. We had dinner a year or two before we left the UK; he was impressed at how polite the Pawns were (I didn’t have the heart to tell him we’d actually hired them for the evening). He told my parents (when I was 11!) that I should go to Oxford. I went through three more schools before his prophecy was fulfilled, so that’s reasonably remarkable.
Unfortunately I lost his address in the move to Australia. I’ll have to see if I can trace him when I get back to the UK. And I should write to Doc Beckett, too. Tell him we’re talking about him!