The Disappearing Spoon: Chapter 9: Ouch-Ouch Summary & Analysis

In eighth-century Japan, miners were digging for precious metals such as gold, lead, silver, and copper in the Kamioka mines. It look over a thousand years for people to realize that the mine also contained another, much nastier element: cadmium. While mining for zinc, the miners would heat the zinc and wash with acid in order to remove the excess cadmium, which was then discarded into streams or the soil. Cadmium is too valuable these days to be wasted in this manner—it is used in batteries and computers and it was previously even used as a tanning agent. Moreover, people now understand that cadmium is very poisonous.

In 1912, rice farmers living near the Kamioka mines were struck by a horrifying, unknown illness, which by the 1930s and 40s had spread all over Japan. It came to be known as “itai-itai” or “ouch-ouch.” After the end of World War II, a doctor named Noboru Hagino realized that the disease was being caused by rice absorbing cadmium like a “sponge.” Hagino published his findings and although the mining company initially denied all responsibility, it was eventually forced to pay 2.3 billion yen every year in restitution to the victims.

Unfortunately, this was the fourth time in the 20th century that the Japanese population was struck by poisoning: collectively, these incidents came to be known as “the Big Four Pollution Diseases of Japan.” This is not to mention the radiation poisoning that affected many after the U.S. nuclear attacks in 1945. The very worst poisons on the periodic table are thallium, lead, and polonium, which sit on the bottom right corner of the table. Of these, thallium is the most deadly. In the 1960s, a British man named Graham Frederick Young deliberately poisoned his family members with thallium, which he sprinkled in their tea. He was placed in a mental institution, but after getting out poisoned a series of his bosses, deliberately giving them small doses in order to prolong their suffering.

Young’s victims are just some of a long series of people who have murdered by thallium. The CIA once even tried to humiliate Fidel Castro by lining his socks with thallium, which they hoped would make his hair fall out. (This plan was never actually executed.) Bismuth has a more unexpected role among the poisons of the periodic table. It is an extremely beautiful element and one of the few that expands when it freezes. It also has a half-life (the time it takes for half a substance to decay) of an incredible 20 billion years, meaning it will be the last element to stay intact before going extinct.

Bismuth’s position on the periodic table implies that it should be a terrible poison. However, in actuality it is not harmful at all, and in fact is used in medicinal products, such as Pepto-Bismol. Its location on the table is therefore puzzling. It is a “freakish anomaly” that could be thought of as existing in a hybrid category of its own—a “noble metal.” Polonium, the element below bismuth, is much more sinister. It was used to poison the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.

In the 1990s, a well-meaning 16-year-old Eagle Scout named David Hahn built a nuclear reactor in his backyard in an attempt to solve the global energy crisis. David was obsessed with chemistry and had a habit of performing highly ill-advised experiments, often to disastrous results. At school he was not a capable student, yet in his enthusiasm taught himself about the three main nuclear phenomena: fusion, fission, and radioactive decay. He decided to construct a “breeder reactor,” wearing a dentist’s lead apron and throwing away the clothes he wore while working in order to attempt to protect himself from radioactivity. 

Many of the elements Hahn needed for his reactor were readily available. He ended up importing uranium from a “sketchy supplier” in the Czech Republic but—fortunately for the world—he didn’t get the volatile kind needed for his experiment to work. Despite what hysterical media reports stated afterward, Hahn did not come close to building a successful reactor. He may have given himself radioactive damage, but beyond that his attempt harmed no one. Later in life, Hahn joined the navy before eventually returning to his hometown. In 2007 he was caught stealing smoke detectors from his apartment building, a worrying offence considering smoke detectors contain the radioactive element americium. The bleeding skin visible in Hahn’s mugshot revealed that he’d almost certainly poisoned himself in the process of his experiments.