Of Pea-Soup, Dangers of Coffee in the Morning, and the Test of Mr Marsh

Friday the thirteenth is supposed to be the unlucky day, but for ex-King Eric XIV of Sweden it must have been a Thursday, because Thursdays are pea-soup days, at least in Sweden and Finland. It may only be a persistent myth that the arsenic trioxide (As2O3), which probably killed him, was put in his pea-soup on the order of his half-brother John III. That is, the pea-soup bit may be a myth, not that his brother John was the instigator. He had already held his schizophrenic older brother Eric prisoner for nine years, and a number of incriminating documents have been preserved. Eric died in 1577, and his fate mirrors that of Mary Stuart, who was sentenced to a more conventional execution by her cousin Elizabeth I ten years later. Oddly enough Eric had, with a certain hubris one must say, tried to negotiate marriages with both these distinguished ladies, and was only a few days from sailing off to meet Elizabeth in person when his father Gustav Wasa died in 1560 distracting him with other matters for a while. In 1577 there was no good way to analyse arsenic and establish murder by poison, but in 1829 the situation was different. When John Bodle was tried for having murdered his grandfather, octogenarian George Bodle, on his farm in Plumstead near Woolwich, the prosecution could provide an expert witness, James Marsh, inventor and (among other things) assistant to Michael Faraday. Marsh, through the foresight of the local police, who were already suspicious, and had preserved both the last coffee George Bodle had drunk and his stomach contents, analysed both for arsenic. This he did by adding hydrogen sulphide (H2S), a foul-smelling, flammable, and poisonous gas that used to haunt undergraduate chemistry labs when I was young. Dangerous as it may be, rather elementary precautions make it safe to handle H2S even for first-year students, and it was used in much the same way as by Marsh—for hunting down metal ions.

A Shiny Surface and a Tainted Past

The day Erin Brockovich was driving in Reno and got hit by another driver, brought her in close contact not only with the bumper of the other car, but eventually also with the US legal system, and this would change her life completely. The day Steven Soderbergh asked Julia Roberts to play the part of Erin Brockovich in the film with the same name didn’t really change her life, one presumes, but it would show the world’s moviegoers and critics that the star and Academy Award winning actress of 1990 was really back on the right track. What is the link between these events? The answer is the element chromium. It was chromium that made law-firm clerk Brockovich start a David-against-Goliath struggle with the California energy conglomerate Pacific Gas and Electric Company, that made director Soderbergh make the blockbuster movie that gave Roberts an Oscar for best female actress in 2000 and revitalized her career. I will try not to spoil the picture for those who have not seen it, because it is well worth watching, but the fact that the good guys win in the end is probably not a surprise anyway. However, the role of chromium in this play is not at all evident. And are the good guys really the good guys? There is usually a proper amount of, and a proper place for, everything, and this includes the elements of the periodic table. The main component in steel, a material which has a role to play in this story, is iron, and while we sometimes have too low a level of this element in our bodies, too much of it will kill us. The same goes for chromium: we can’t live without it. Or so it was thought until very recently. It was supposed to help us to break down and metabolize sugars, and thus ‘chromium deficiency’ could possibly be related to diabetes. Now, while low levels seems to do no harm, there are still possibilities of a therapeutic window—that is, concentrations where it may do some good—but it does not any longer seem to be considered an essential element, although official consensus on this has not yet been proclaimed.

Bonaparte’s Bursting Buttons: A Thin Story

On my way to Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, one late November I realized that I had not packed any winter clothes. It turns out that I was not the first to make this blunder. None of the half a million or so Germans, French, Swiss, Poles, Italians, and other nationalities who passed through the town or in its vicinity in June 1812 had packed any winter clothes, something many of them were to later regret. They were on their way, although they did not know it at the time, to Moscow. What they also did not know was that they were going to make what was arguably the world’s worst aller-retour journey ever: Vilna to Moscow and back (at that time the town was known under its Polish name and had recently been acquired by the Russians in the process of the annihilation of the Polish state). It was June, and they were in a good mood, as the Russian Tsar had recently fled Vilna followed by his quarrelling generals, and they were under the command of possibly the most competent military leader since Alexander the Great: Napoleon Bonaparte. The lack of warm clothing was not going to bother me, however. By the morning the snow had melted, and luckily I was not on my way to Moscow on foot. I was in Vilnius to search for some buttons, preferably made of tin. The story of Napoleon’s buttons and their allegedly fateful role in the disastrous 1812 campaign is widespread among scientists and science teachers. This is partly due to the popular book with the same name by the chemists Penny LeCouteur and Jay Burreson, and I wanted to find out whether there could be any truth in it, or whether it was just another of the legends and rumours that has formed around this war. Briefly, the story goes like this: metallic tin is a dense material (lots of atoms per cubic centimetre) and was supposedly the material used for many of the buttons of what was known as la Grande Armée. Unfortunately, metallic tin has a nasty Mr Hyde variation, known as grey tin.

War and Vanity

In my childhood, visits to Gothenburg would always include a long (it seemed at the time) tram ride with my mother, from the centre of town to the north-eastern districts, past the old, red brick, ball-bearing factory of SKF to the vast Kviberg Cemetery to put flowers on my grandmother’s grave. I never ventured on any longer excursions among the neat flower-decorated graves on these well-kept lawns, but had I done so I would perhaps have discovered a different, more uniform, part of the cemetery that relatives seldom visited: the war graves. War graves form a somewhat unexpected discovery in the suburbs of a country that was neutral in both world wars, but there it is. Among the mostly German, American, and British graves we find, in the Commonwealth section, that of Arthur Cownden who, at 17, was probably the youngest to be buried there. He was boy telegraphist on a Royal Navy destroyer, and on the morning of 1 June 1916 his body was washed ashore close to the small fishing village of Fiskebäckskil on the Swedish west coast. His ship, the HMS Shark , was one of many British losses during the preceding day’s Battle of Jutland—the only clash between the main forces of the Royal Navy and the German Hochseeflotte during World War I. By all accounts this was a terrible battle, with loss of lives in the thousands on both sides, and one of the largest naval battles ever fought. The Battle of Jutland remains somewhat controversial for two reasons: the enduring argument between the two British commanders, David Beatty and his superior John Jellicoe, and the purported role of the Royal Navy’s smokeless gunpowder cordite in the sinking of a number of its own ships. We have no business with naval tactics, but the cordite question is related to one of the lesser-known supply problems of World War I, that of acetone. You may be familiar with this molecule as nail varnish remover, but perhaps you also know the disastrous effect it has on the glossy surface of cars.

Rendezvous on the High Plateau

The two men in white anoraks were slowly approaching, skiing in the bitter cold over the Hardangervidda mountain plateau in the winter of 1943. Were they friends or foes? This was a matter of life and death for the six young men watching the only other living beings in sight for miles of snow-clad wilderness. Their pace was slow, the men were thin and didn’t look too well, just as if they might well have spent 130 days of the winter of 1942–43 hidden in a rudimentary hut on the mountain, surviving on moss and poached reindeer. It had to be them. The group’s leader, Joachim Rønneberg, decided to make contact. This story is first a tragedy and then a success, and it does not begin on the Hardangervidda but in Scotland where Britain’s ski capital, the small town of Aviemore in the Cairngorms National Park, is going to be our starting point for several dangerous journeys across the North Sea. A few years ago we drove up the main mountain road, eventually leading to the Cairn Gorm peak itself, 4,084 feet (1,245 metres) above sea level, and passed the park’s visitors’ centre located in pretty surroundings by a small lake. We glimpsed something flapping in the wind that did look a bit like the Union Jack, an unlikely occurrence in the highlands. We turned around and took the path up the hill, and soon discovered that what we first mistook for the British ensign, because of its colours, was in fact the Norwegian national flag. In 1468, when the Norwegians gave away their last Scottish possessions to King James III in Edinburgh, the Norwegian flag had not even been invented, so we were a wee bit curious as to why it was flying here, in the heart of the Cairngorms. But of course, mountains, snow, and skiing—what could be more Norwegian? And this simplistic reasoning is actually closer to the answer than we might have thought, as a commemorative sign told us that on this spot were the lodgings of the famous Kompani Linge during World War II.

Diamonds are Forever and Zirconium is for Submarines

The appearance of a diamond engagement ring in the long and convoluted love story between Botswana’s First Lady Detective, Mma Ramotswe, and the owner and brilliant mechanic of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, seems to signal an end to this particular sub-plot, stretching over several volumes of Alexander McCall Smith’s bestselling and original series of crime novels (that we met in Chapter 1). However, a slight problem involving cubic zirconia is discovered, and the story lingers on until the next book in the series. Similar names for elements and their compounds are a nuisance in chemistry, but oft en arise historically, and zirconium is just one such example. Apart from the pure metal we have zircon and zirconia, all three of which have important applications. Zircon is zirconium silicate, with the formula ZrSiO4, and cubic zirconia is a special form of zirconium dioxide, ZrO2. The latter, as you may have guessed, is an excellent diamond substitute in, among other applications, engagement rings. We are not going to dwell on the details of the element zirconium, but you should know that within the Periodic Table it is located in the large middle chunk called the transition metals. You have probably heard of its cousin titanium, immediately above it, and a sibling, hafnium, straight down the ladder. Why do I call them siblings? Because in the Periodic Table elements in the same column tend to have similar chemical properties. In particular, in the family of transition metals in the central section containing 27 elements—each with a number of properties in common—the two lower elements in each column tend to be the most similar. The similar chemical properties of zirconium and titanium means that we can usually find zirconium where we mine the much more plentiful titanium, and also that once we have separated the titanium from zirconium there will be a small quantity of hafnium trailing along—an impurity that is much harder to get rid of. The sleek jeweller in Gaborone will not care if his fake diamonds contain trace levels of HfO2 mixed with the ZrO2.

Blue Blooded Stones and the Prisoner in the Crystal Cage

You have no doubt heard about blood diamonds, and know that they are not rare red versions of the gemstone, but illicitly mined diamonds used to finance and prolong armed conflicts in some African countries. But have you heard of blue blooded stones? An elaborate marking system known as the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme is currently used, although some claim inefficiently, to sort good diamonds (for example, from Botswana) from blood diamonds that should not be allowed into the market. No such scheme is needed for the blue stones named lapis lazuli, as there is only one mine in the world that produces highquality stones—the Sar-e Sang mine in the Kokcha valley in the Badakhshan province in north-eastern Afghanistan—so there is never any doubt about where they come from. The mine is in such a remote area that even prolific travellers like Marco Polo and Sir Richard Burton never made it there, although Polo refers to them in his travels when crossing the river Oxus (also known as the Amu Darya) of which the Kokcha is a tributary: ‘a mountain in that region where the fi nest azure in the world is found.’ A Scottish explorer, John Wood, visited in 1837, but if his book Journey to the Source of the River Oxus is to be believed, it wasn’t exactly a Sunday School excursion either: ‘If you wish not to go to destruction, avoid the narrow valley of Koran [Kokcha],’ he summarized. One who finally made it there was the British journalist Victoria Finlay, author of the wonderful Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox , and, although reaching the mine in the beginning of the 2000s, this was still quite an achievement. Why would anyone endure various kinds of hardships just to see a mine where you can whack out blue stones from the interior of a mountain? Perhaps because these rare stones have achieved tremendous value over the ages, being the hallmark of kings and aristocracy, or because the trade in them covered such distances even in ancient times, or maybe because this mine is possibly the oldest in the world that is still being worked, having been in business for 5,000–6,000 years.

Death at Number

The five others went first, one by one, and contemporary sources noted how humane the spectacle was, as the participants did not need to see each other. Thousands of Stockholmers had turned out to watch, on this cold day of 30 January 1744, as the last of the six, Gustaf Schedin, accountant at the Insjö copper works, mounted the scaffold. As the culmination of the show, he would be both beheaded and then cut to pieces. The summer before, Schedin had led the fourth Dalecarlian Rebellion: the last march of the free miners and farmers of Dalarna— the mine-rich county 100 miles north-west of Stockholm—to the Swedish capital, in a movement expressing raging discontent with the king, Fredrik I, and his disastrous war with Russia. This sort of thing had been successful before: the fiercely independent-minded people of Dalarna traditionally wielded a certain power, rich as they were in natural resources—the jewel in the crown being the famous Great Copper Mountain mine in Falun. Once it was the largest of its kind in the world, and yielded something like 70 per cent of the world’s copper production. The Falun mine, like many others, was once managed as a cooperative operation, and worked by free miners called mountain-men (bergsmän) with special privileges and laws of their own. But their time was at an end. In 1743 the uprising ended in a bloodbath in Stockholm, and now the six leaders were to be executed. The copper mine was also losing its privileged position. It had given the Swedish kings and queens economic strength for numerous more-or-less successful military adventures down in continental Europe, but was now in decline, and so was the military power of Sweden. This traditionally male activity—becoming angry and getting the lads together to sort things and people out—is chemically related to high levels of the large organic molecule testosterone. For a inorganic chemist inclined to find a good story, it would have been great to now present a direct link between copper and the way we make this molecule in our bodies, starting from cholesterol, claiming that this made the men from Dalarna more inclined to hasty revolutionary actions.

The Actress and the Spin Doctor

This story could begin with a fictional horse named Velvet, or perhaps behind the keyboards in a smoky bar in Halmstad, and it might have had a very different ending were it not for the unlikely excursion of a few medicinal chemists to the exotic southern part of the periodic table into the realm of the Lanthanoids. One or two generations of movie aficionados and the celebrity-hungry populace were upset, intrigued, or just plain nosey when another chapter in what seemed to be the never-ending story of Elizabeth Taylor, last of the great Hollywood divas, was revealed in February 1997. Dame Elizabeth had been diagnosed with a brain tumour just before her 65th birthday and was due for an operation in a few weeks. As it turned out, this non-malignant tumour, which was easily removed by surgery, was probably the least of her medical problems, but when singer Marie Fredriksson fainted in her home in 2002 and the causes were revealed to be a potentially deadly cancer tumour, the situation was radically different. The fate of the 44-year-old, half of the immensely successful pop duo Roxette, affected a different generation to those who had been following the career of Elizabeth Taylor since the 1940s, and was also deeply unsettling since the victim was a woman in the prime of her life with young children. Brain tumours are difficult to deal with—you cannot just break open the skull and poke around until you find them, there far too many sensitive connections and devices that may be broken. Their precise location is a key issue, and for that you need to look inside the head without opening it. The most powerful method is what scientists call Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, known to the public simply as MRI as the little word ‘nuclear’ may have associations that would be unhelpful in situations in which calm and composure may be necessary, both for the patient and relatives. Looking inside human bodies has been of tremendous importance for medicine, but has also meant business opportunities, both for the unscrupulous and the upstanding.

When State Security was a Stinking Business

It is spring 1708, and Sweden has been at war for eight years. Charles XII camps out with the army in Lithuania, still a year from the fatal battle of Poltava in Ukraine, and it is a busy time for seasonal workers Per Larsson Gässaboda and Esbjörn Persson Bölsö. In the southern province of Småland (The Small Lands), the former border region with Denmark now just north of the new Swedish province of the recently occupied Skåne, the cows are out of the barns in which they have spent the cold winter, and it is time for Per and Esbjörn to take out their shovels, load their wagon, and set out on their mission for the King to the farmers of the region. They are part of the army, enrolled men, but not for combat because they are petermen, or ‘sjudare’ (simmers) as they were called in Swedish. The farmers do not look forward to their visits as these men can command their chariots and their horses at will, take the firewood (and they need huge quantities), and wreak havoc to barns, stables, and houses in their quest for the manure and urine-rich soils that form the valuable raw material for their trade. These men make nitrate—or to be specific, potassium nitrate (KNO3), also known as saltpetre—for delivery to the King’s gunpowder factories. More than 100 years ago Henry VIII’s contemporary, the equally shrewd and ruthless King Gustav Wasa, had realized Sweden’s precarious situation when it came to gunpowder, and with a simple stroke of his pen ruled that the soil underneath barns, stables, and cowsheds belonged to the King. In an additional law, perhaps more illustrating his fear of being cheated by innovative farmers than his well-known attention to detail, he also banned any building housing livestock from being paved with a stone floor. In a country in which buildings of stone were virtually unheard of, except for housing the very rich, this was hardly likely anyway, but the King didn’t like to take chances with money and the saltpetre was a valuable commodity that otherwise would have had to be imported.