A Short History of Nearly Everything: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

Chemistry evolved almost accidentally out of alchemy in the 1600s, mentioning a German named Henning Brand who attempts to distill gold out of human urine in 1675. Brand fails, but he does accidentally create phosphorous after noticing that a batch of urine glows and spontaneously bursts into flames. Ironically, phosphorous is deemed so commercially potent that its retail price surpasses the price of gold after Swedish chemist Karl Scheele devises a way to mass produce it in the 1750s (catapulting Sweden into becoming the world’s largest producer of matches). Scheele insists on tasting every substance he works with, and he’s eventually found dead at his workbench surrounded by toxic substances in 1786.

Chemistry is “thrust into the modern age” by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, who amasses wealth from France’s poor with his despised tax collection company Fermé Générale. Though Lavoisier never discovers an element, he devises the system for naming elements (along with his wife, Madame Lavoisier). During the French Revolution, Lavoisier is denounced by his failed rival Jean-Paul Marat, and he meets his fate at the guillotine in 1793. Almost a hundred years later, a prestigious statue of Lavoisier is discovered to have been built using the wrong severed head as its model, and it’s melted for scrap metal during World War II. 

Bryson argues that chemistry “lost its bearings” in the early 1800s, noting that nitrous oxide becomes popularized as the recreational “drug of choice” among England’s fashionable youth decades before its potential as an anesthetic is realized. The field of chemistry also suffers because of limitations in technology, and it also has a lower status because it’s seen as a commercial—rather than academic—enterprise. Eventually, an American named Benjamin Thompson (later Count von Rumford) sets up the British Institute after narrowly escaping being tar-and-feathered in the American Revolution and inventing the drip coffee maker. Humphry Davy, the institution’s professor of chemistry, develops electrolysis and discovers many new elements— including aluminum, potassium, sodium, calcium, and magnesium—before dying from his nitrous oxide habit.

Chemistry isn’t formally established until the mid-1800s after J. J. Berzelius standardizes element symbols, and Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev devises the periodic table of elements in 1869. Incidentally, Mendeleyev only studied chemistry because his destitute mother hitchhiked 4,000 miles across Russia and convinced a scientific school to take him in when he was young.

Mendeleyev—inspired by the card game solitaire—organizes elements according to atomic number (number of protons per atom): hydrogen (one proton) comes first, while uranium (92 protons) comes last. Mendeleyev astutely assumes that the 63 elements discovered in his time aren’t the full picture, and so he devises the periodic table with placeholder spots that accurately predict where many new elements will slot in, allowing for further additions to be easily integrated. The periodic table is widely considered history’s most elegant chart, accommodating today’s 92 natural elements and a further 28 synthetic ones created thus far.

Another defining moment in chemistry’s history arises in 1896, when graduate student Marie Curie is tasked with figuring out why her supervisor’s uranium salts burned an image (like light rays would) onto a wrapped photographic plate in his drawer. Curie names the effect “radioactivity” and goes on to become the only person in history to win Nobel Prizes in both Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911). Radioactive material is swiftly commercialized—finding its way into toothpaste and laxatives—before its fatal effects are discovered in the 1930s. Even today, many of Curie’s papers are still so radioactive that they’re too dangerous to be handled.

Not long after Curie’s discovery, the previous chapter’s young farm boy, Ernest Rutherford, is  studying chemistry in Canada when he discovers that it always takes the same amount of time for half a sample of radioactive material to decay. He realizes that “half-life” could be used to calculate radioactive material’s age based on the amount of radiation and rate of decay. When testing his idea on a piece of uranium, he discovers that it’s 700 million years old, proving Earth is much older than anyone previously estimated, despite Kelvin’s protestations to the contrary. Kelvin later dies still adamant that his greatest contribution to science is his calculation of Earth’s age as 20 million years old.