Accidental Blogger

In my inaugural post I had indicated that my first choice of name for this blog was Periodic Table. I explained why in the end I decided to call it Accidental Blogger. Author Sam Kean's (who also writes for 3 Quarks Daily) book The Disappearing Spoon is about the Periodic Table. I plan to read it. Judging from the chapter on mercury (Hg), I know that these will be stories I will relate to happily. (Do read the excerpt of the mercury chapter) The Periodic Table of chemistry is a treasure trove of narratives – every element a glimpse into our world. The story "behind" the Periodic Table is fascinating as well, putting its creator Dimitri Mendeleyev right up there with the Oracle of Delphi and Nostradamus – only less inscrutable and far more accurate.

As a child in the early 1980s, I tended to talk with things in my mouth — food, dentist’s tubes, balloons that would fly away, whatever — and if no one else was around, I’d talk anyway. This habit led to my fascination with the periodic table the first time I was left alone with a thermometer under my tongue. I came down with strep throat something like a dozen times in the second and third grades, and for days on end it would hurt to swallow. I didn’t mind staying home from school and medicating myself with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. Being sick always gave me another chance to break an old-fashioned mercury thermometer, too…

…Mercury also came up in science class. When first presented with the jumble of the periodic table, I scanned for mercury and couldn’t find it. It is there — between gold, which is also dense and soft, and thallium, which is also poisonous. But the symbol for mercury, Hg, consists of two letters that don’t even appear in its name. Unraveling that mystery — it’s from hydragyrum, Latin for “water silver” — helped me understand how heavily ancient languages and mythology influenced the periodic table, something you can still see in the Latin names for the newer, superheavy elements along the bottom row.

I found mercury in literature class, too. Hat manufacturers once used a bright orange mercury wash to separate fur from pelts, and the common hatters who dredged around in the steamy vats, like the mad one in Alice in Wonderland, gradually lost their hair and wits. Eventually, I realized how poisonous mercury is. That explained why Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills purged the bowels so well: the body will rid itself of any poison, mercury included. And as toxic as swallowing mercury is, its fumes are worse. They fray the “wires” in the central nervous system and burn holes in the brain, much as advanced Alzheimer’s disease does.

(Thanks to Elatia Harris for bringing Sam Kean's book to my attention)