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A Short
History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson Rating: •••• (Highly Recommended) |
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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Connections Bill Bryson’s new book, A Short History of
Nearly Everything, tackles astronomy, geology, biology, chemistry, physics
and lots of other fields of study, with a novice’s skill for the basic
question, and a good writer’s skill with providing answers that lead to more
questions. Bryson writes with a breeze and wit that makes readers feel like
his companion on a journey of learning, trying to make connections from one
thing to another. His curiosity and ours blend together. Here’s an excerpt from some of the chemistry
chapters, the beginning of Chapter 10, “Getting the Lead Out” (pp. 149-52): In the late 1940s, a graduate student at the University of Chicago named Clair Patterson (who was, first name notwithstanding, an Iowa farm boy by origin) was using a new method of lead isotope measurement to try to get a definitive age for the Earth at last Unfortunately all his samples came up contaminated-usually wildly so. Most contained something like two hundred times the levels of lead that would normally be expected to occur. Many years would pass before Patterson realized that the reason for this lay with a regrettable Ohio inventor named Thomas Midgley, Jr. Midgley was an engineer by training, and the world would no doubt have been a safer place if he had stayed so. Instead, he developed an interest in the industrial applications of chemistry. In 1921, while working for the General Motors Research Corporation in Dayton, Ohio, he investigated a compound called tetraethyl lead (also known, confusingly, as lead tetraethyl), and discovered that it significantly reduced the juddering condition known as engine knock. Even though lead was widely known to be dangerous,
by the early years of the twentieth centniy it could be found in all manner
of consumer products. Food came in cans sealed with lead solder. Water was
often stored
in lead-lined tanks. It was sprayed onto fruit as a pesticide in the form of
lead arsenate. It even came as part of the packaging of toothpaste tubes.
Hardly a product existed that didn't bring a little lead into consumers'
lives. However, nothing gave it a greater and more lasting intimacy than its
addition to gasoline. Lead is a neurotoxin. Get too much of it and you
can irreparably damage the brain and central nervous system. Among the many symptoms
associated with overexposure are blindness, insomnia, kidney failure, hearing
loss, cancer, palsies, and convulsions. In its most acute form it produces
abrupt and terrifying hallucinations, disturbing to victims and onlookers
alike, which generally then give way to coma and death. You really don't want
to get too much lead into your system. On the other hand, lead was easy to extract and
work, and almost embarrassingly profitable to produce industrially-and
tetraethyl lead did indubitably stop engines from knocking. So in 1923 three
of America's largest corporations. General Motors, Du Font, and Standard Oil
of New Jersey, formed a joint enterprise called the Ethyl Gasoline
Corporation (later shortened to simply Ethyl Corporation) with a view to making
as much tetraethyl lead as the world was willing to buy, and that proved to
be a very great deal They called their additive "ethyl" because it
sounded friendlier and less toxic than “lead” and introduced it for
public consumption (in more ways than most people realized) on February 1,
1923. Almost
at once production workers began to exhibit the staggered gait and confused
faculties that mark the recently poisoned. Also almost at once, the Ethyl
Corporation embarked on a policy of calm but unyielding denial that would
serve it well for decades. As Sharon Bertsch McGrayne notes in her absorbing
history of industrial chemistry, Prometheans in the Lab,
when employees at one plant developed irreversible delusions, a spokesman
blandly informed reporters: "These men probably went insane because they
worked too hard." Altogether at least fifteen workers died in the early
days of production of leaded gasoline, and untold numbers of others became
ill, often violently so; the exact numbers arc unknown because the company
nearly always managed to hush up news of embarrassing leakages, spills, and
poisonings. At times, however, suppressing the news became impossible, most
notably in 1924 when in a matter of days five production workers died and
thirty-five more were turned into permanent staggering wrecks at a single
ill-ventilated facility. As rumors circulated about the dangers of the new
product, ethyl’s ebullient inventor, Thomas Midgley, decided to hold a
demonstration for reporters to allay their concerns. As he chatted away about
the company’s commitment to safety, he poured tetraethyl lead over his hands,
then held a beaker of it to his nose for sixty seconds, claiming all the
while that he could repeat the procedure daily without harm. In fact, Midgley
knew only too well the perils of lead poisoning: he had himself been made
seriously ill from overexposure a few months earlier and now, except when
reassuring journalists, never went near the stuff if he could help it. Buoyed
by the success of leaded gasoline, Midgley now turned to another
technological problem of the age. Refrigerators in the 1920s were often
appallingly risky because they used dangerous gases that sometimes leaked.
One leak from a refrigerator at a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929 killed
more than a hundred people. Midgley set out to create a gas that was stable,
nonflammable, noncorrosive, and safe to breathe. With an instinct for the
regrettable that was almost uncanny, he invented chlorofluorocarbons, orCFCs. Seldom has an industrial product been more swiftly
or unfortunately embraced. CFCs went into production in the early 1930s and
found a thousand applications in everything from car air conditioners to
deodorant sprays before it was noticed, half a centmy later, that they were
devouring the ozone in the stratosphere. As you will be aware, this was not a
good thing. Ozone is a form of oxygen in which each molecule
bears three atoms of oxygen instead of two. It is a bit of a chemical oddity
in that at ground level it is a pollutant, while way up in the stratosphere
it is beneficial, since it soaks up dangerous ultraviolet radiation.
Beneficial ozone is not terribly abundant, however. If it were distributed
evenly throughout the stratosphere, it would form a layer just one eighth of
an inch or so thick. That is why it is so easily disturbed, and why such
disturbances don't take long to become critical. Chlorofluorocarbons are also not very abundant-they
constitute only about one part per billion of the atmosphere as a whole-but
they are extravagantly destructive. One pound of CPCs can capture and
annihilate seventy thousand pounds of atmospheric ozone. CFCs also hang
around for a long time-about a century on average-wreaking havoc all the
while. They are also great heat sponges. A single CFC molecule is about ten
thousand times more efficient at exacerbating greenhouse effects than a
molecule of carbon dioxide-and carbon dioxide is of course no slouch itself
as a greenhouse gas. In short, chlorofluorocarbons may ultimately prove to be
just about the worst invention of the twentieth century. Midgley never knew this because he died long before
anyone realized how destructive CPCs were. His death was itself memorably
unusual After becoming crippled with polio, Midgley invented a contraption
involving a series of motorized pulleys that automatically raised or turned
him in bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the cords as the machine went
into action and was strangled. Bryson has a way of presenting facts and
information that grabs a reader’s interest and holds it. His quirky
reflections make reading A Short
History even more enjoyable. Steve Hopkins, July 25, 2003 |
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ă 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the August 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/A
Short History of Nearly Everything.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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