The Disappearing Spoon

Chemical warfare began in Ancient Greece—yet back then, the gas used by the Spartans against the Athenians was more irritating than dangerous. Chemical weapons were rarely used in the ensuing centuries, and the Hague Convention of 1899 banned the use of them in war. Unfortunately, this didn’t actually stop them being used. French forces used bromine weapons at the beginning of World War I, and although these were completely ineffective, they sparked terror across the world. Research on chemical warfare was quickly escalated by a German scientist named Fritz Haber, who devised a process to capture nitrogen from the air and turn it into ammonia, which is the basis of all the fertilizers used in agriculture today.

Unfortunately, Haber was far more interested in chemical weapons than feeding the hungry. His wife, Clara Immerwahr, was also a scientist; she often worked as his assistant but she was appalled by his work on chemical weapons and refused to assist with the bromine project. As with the French efforts, the Germans’ initial use of bromine in battle was a failure, such that the British troops against whom it was used didn’t even notice the attack. Haber decided to switch to chlorine, a chemical that has horrifying effects on the body: turning a person’s skin yellow, green, and black and filling their lungs with water so they die by drowning. This innovation revolutionized chemical warfare. Haber designed a calculation, Haber’s Law, which measured the relationship between the concentration of gas, endurance of exposure, and death.

Immerwahr begged Haber to stop his work on chlorine weapons, but he didn’t listen. Immerwahr ended up killing herself, although even this didn’t stop Haber. In 1918 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on ammonia fertilizers and the following year he was charged as a war criminal. He tried and failed to join the efforts to pay the enormous reparations imposed on Germany. The Nazi military ultimately used Zyklon A, the insecticide Haber created, to produce Zyklon B, the gas used to murder millions of Jewish people—including family members of Haber, who was a Jewish convert to Lutheranism and who fled to England as a refugee in 1934.

As World War II approached, the German military became fixated on a new element: tungsten. Back in World War I, the Germans needed a metal far more durable than iron for their weaponry. They had been using molybdenum but they were concerned about their supply running out. The only known source of molybdenum was a mine in Colorado, and the mining rights belonged to a Nebraskan banker named Otis King. Hoping to seize it for themselves, a mining company in Frankfurt, Germany sent a team of agents, including their “top man,” Max Schott, to Colorado. Schott managed to successfully harass King to the point that he sold the rights to Schott for the low sum of $40,000.

The U.S. government shut down the transport of molybdenum to Germany as soon as it learned what the Frankfurt mining company was doing, but it was too late—the metal was already on the other side of the Atlantic, being used to construct German weapons. However, by the time World War II arrived, molybdenum was replaced by tungsten as the element of choice for weapons. The source of this tungsten was Portugal, a country that was supposedly neutral but in reality tended to play both sides at once in the war. Portugal’s dictator, Antonio Salazar, used his country’s monopoly on tungsten to export it at hugely inflated prices. The metal was highly coveted for use in weapons due to its extreme durability and strength.

As Germany took as much tungsten as it physically could from Portugal, the Nazi regime paid in gold seized from Jewish citizens. The U.S. encouraged the U.K. to stop Portugal from supplying tungsten to Germany. Finally, in 1944, Portugal put on embargo on selling tungsten to Germany—but at this point the war was coming to an end. Beyond a small handful, most of the metals on the periodic table were not put to use until after 1950. Two metals in particular caused trouble in the postwar period: tantalum and niobium. Because they charge well, they are present in most cell phones, and the country with the biggest supply in the world is the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In 1996, the horrific genocide that took place in Rwanda spilled over to the neighboring Congo. The intense demand for tantalum and niobium was a driving force in the brutal war that ensued. The war technically ended in 2003 although conflict continues. 5 million people have died: a terrible testament to the worst side of human interaction with the period table.