From an Agatha Christie plot to a squib by George Bernard Shaw, the stories are fascinating. It's a pity there isn't space to tell some of them properly
We are all chemists: our digestive systems are enzyme-powered energy conversion retorts, everything that grows in the garden is a sophisticated chemical plant engaged in urgent solar-driven synthesis, and when we plunge a spade into the manure, we invest our effort in assorted carbonates and nitrates that can be refined into high explosives. Every day we get our hands dirty with unconscious chemical industry, and then we wash them with a chemical invention called soap.
The book in your hands is so much air, sunlight and water converted first by photosynthesis into leaf and wood which is then pulped and rolled back into another kind of leaf; the words on it are outlined in a mix of iron salts, tannins and water, and the chances are (Lars Öhrström has a lot of fun with literary connections) the book is about chemistry anyway.
August Strindberg was – to get any potential exasperation out of the way quickly – the last alchemist in Paris, except that he probably wasn't. The manic-depressive writer of Miss Julie did try to synthesise gold in a hotel near the Jardin du Luxembourg, and convinced himself that the glittering iron oxides and hydroxides he made – now preserved in two libraries in Sweden – were the real thing.
"Was Strindberg really the last alchemist in Paris? Probably not. As a part of the esoteric and the occult, alchemy is still thriving in a subculture of its own … ,"Öhrström reflects. But my real dissatisfaction with the Strindberg chapter is not the teasing title. It isn't at all clear for those new to the story what it was that Strindberg actually did, and why he did what he did, and how he could have misled himself so completely.
This is a characteristic of The Last Alchemist in Paris: it is crowded with curious tales that tend to leave you a little more curious than the author intended. So crowded that some of the stories don't get told properly.
That's the complaint out of the way. It's a cliché to describe science books as detective stories: Öhrström has a talent for seeing detective stories as texts for science sermons.
So Agatha Christie's 1920 debut novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles becomes an occasion for a cheerful lecture on bromine and why it has such sinister consequences when added, as sodium bromide, to a medicinal bottle of strychnine hydrochloride tonic (yes, people were once prescribed strychnine as a nervous stimulant). Peter Hoeg's 1992 bestseller Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow becomes part of a discussion on the aluminium ore bauxite (named for the village Les Baux-de-Provence, where it was first discovered in 1822) and cryolite, or sodium hexafluoroaluminate, mined only in one settlement in southern Greenland and vital in the production of aluminium. Precious Ramotswe of Alexander McCall Smith's No 1 Ladies Detective Agency pops up twice, in discussions of uranium, and in the parallels between diamond and zircon.
None of these tales is simply told. The story of bromine also involves Herbert Dow of Dow Chemicals in Michigan, Queen Victoria's obstetrician, Jean-Martin Charcot of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris and the long history of bromide as a tranquilliser. The bauxite chapter invokes Napoleon III, the Hall-Heroult process, a 2007 ecological thriller by "Swedish physicist and venture capitalist" Lennart Ramberg called Kyoto and the Butterflies, a wartime nautical escapade by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and "why a B17 Flying Fortress ended up in a bog in western Sweden on 24 July 1943".
Mrs Ramotswe shares her first appearance with Sir Seretse Khama and his English wife Ruth Williams, the Manhattan Project, Jan Smuts and the architect of apartheid D F Malan, and the chapter ends with Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier. In the second, we also meet a freak wave, a capsized ship, a dramatic rescue, Admiral Hyman Rickover, the first nuclear submarine and what happened at Fukushima.
Just enjoy the disorder. Chemistry is a messy business. Öhrström is a Swede who has knocked around a bit (including in Botswana). He writes in English, and very well indeed, to remind us that physical chemistry is everywhere and can explain almost every material thing.
The upside of those all-too-brief cameo appearances in unexpected circumstances is that you learn a lot of very pleasing things: that, for instance, George Bernard Shaw was so struck by the Balfour Declaration and the role of Chaim Weizmann in fabricating an important component of cordite for the Royal Navy that he wrote an extremely short, three-act squib called Arthur and the Acetone.
You learn that in 18th century Sweden, a small army of professional "petermen" scraped up the manure from stables and barns to make potassium nitrate or saltpetre for military gunpowder, and that peterman is still English criminal slang for a safecracker. You learn an impressive amount about the physical basis for the behaviour of the elements, and you are reminded that the chemist's trade – while the starting point for all the wealth and less directly all the confused, warring history of the last three centuries – is ultimately a tale of curiosity.
To the chemist, matter is structure, a puzzle you can take to pieces and reassemble. As Öhrström writes:
"To me, this is one of the charms of chemistry: it can be mathematically complex, but also as simple as a child's tinker-toy set, relying on simple things like differences in size. From time to time we take our own tinker-toy sets out of the drawer, but more often than not these days we use a computer. And just like a little child that might be fascinated by the shape, colour, and texture of a set of balls, a chemist needs to poke and touch atoms and molecules to find out what their properties are."
*Tim Radford's* geographical reflection, The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things, is published by Fourth Estate Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 hour ago.
We are all chemists: our digestive systems are enzyme-powered energy conversion retorts, everything that grows in the garden is a sophisticated chemical plant engaged in urgent solar-driven synthesis, and when we plunge a spade into the manure, we invest our effort in assorted carbonates and nitrates that can be refined into high explosives. Every day we get our hands dirty with unconscious chemical industry, and then we wash them with a chemical invention called soap.
The book in your hands is so much air, sunlight and water converted first by photosynthesis into leaf and wood which is then pulped and rolled back into another kind of leaf; the words on it are outlined in a mix of iron salts, tannins and water, and the chances are (Lars Öhrström has a lot of fun with literary connections) the book is about chemistry anyway.
August Strindberg was – to get any potential exasperation out of the way quickly – the last alchemist in Paris, except that he probably wasn't. The manic-depressive writer of Miss Julie did try to synthesise gold in a hotel near the Jardin du Luxembourg, and convinced himself that the glittering iron oxides and hydroxides he made – now preserved in two libraries in Sweden – were the real thing.
"Was Strindberg really the last alchemist in Paris? Probably not. As a part of the esoteric and the occult, alchemy is still thriving in a subculture of its own … ,"Öhrström reflects. But my real dissatisfaction with the Strindberg chapter is not the teasing title. It isn't at all clear for those new to the story what it was that Strindberg actually did, and why he did what he did, and how he could have misled himself so completely.
This is a characteristic of The Last Alchemist in Paris: it is crowded with curious tales that tend to leave you a little more curious than the author intended. So crowded that some of the stories don't get told properly.
That's the complaint out of the way. It's a cliché to describe science books as detective stories: Öhrström has a talent for seeing detective stories as texts for science sermons.
So Agatha Christie's 1920 debut novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles becomes an occasion for a cheerful lecture on bromine and why it has such sinister consequences when added, as sodium bromide, to a medicinal bottle of strychnine hydrochloride tonic (yes, people were once prescribed strychnine as a nervous stimulant). Peter Hoeg's 1992 bestseller Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow becomes part of a discussion on the aluminium ore bauxite (named for the village Les Baux-de-Provence, where it was first discovered in 1822) and cryolite, or sodium hexafluoroaluminate, mined only in one settlement in southern Greenland and vital in the production of aluminium. Precious Ramotswe of Alexander McCall Smith's No 1 Ladies Detective Agency pops up twice, in discussions of uranium, and in the parallels between diamond and zircon.
None of these tales is simply told. The story of bromine also involves Herbert Dow of Dow Chemicals in Michigan, Queen Victoria's obstetrician, Jean-Martin Charcot of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris and the long history of bromide as a tranquilliser. The bauxite chapter invokes Napoleon III, the Hall-Heroult process, a 2007 ecological thriller by "Swedish physicist and venture capitalist" Lennart Ramberg called Kyoto and the Butterflies, a wartime nautical escapade by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and "why a B17 Flying Fortress ended up in a bog in western Sweden on 24 July 1943".
Mrs Ramotswe shares her first appearance with Sir Seretse Khama and his English wife Ruth Williams, the Manhattan Project, Jan Smuts and the architect of apartheid D F Malan, and the chapter ends with Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier. In the second, we also meet a freak wave, a capsized ship, a dramatic rescue, Admiral Hyman Rickover, the first nuclear submarine and what happened at Fukushima.
Just enjoy the disorder. Chemistry is a messy business. Öhrström is a Swede who has knocked around a bit (including in Botswana). He writes in English, and very well indeed, to remind us that physical chemistry is everywhere and can explain almost every material thing.
The upside of those all-too-brief cameo appearances in unexpected circumstances is that you learn a lot of very pleasing things: that, for instance, George Bernard Shaw was so struck by the Balfour Declaration and the role of Chaim Weizmann in fabricating an important component of cordite for the Royal Navy that he wrote an extremely short, three-act squib called Arthur and the Acetone.
You learn that in 18th century Sweden, a small army of professional "petermen" scraped up the manure from stables and barns to make potassium nitrate or saltpetre for military gunpowder, and that peterman is still English criminal slang for a safecracker. You learn an impressive amount about the physical basis for the behaviour of the elements, and you are reminded that the chemist's trade – while the starting point for all the wealth and less directly all the confused, warring history of the last three centuries – is ultimately a tale of curiosity.
To the chemist, matter is structure, a puzzle you can take to pieces and reassemble. As Öhrström writes:
"To me, this is one of the charms of chemistry: it can be mathematically complex, but also as simple as a child's tinker-toy set, relying on simple things like differences in size. From time to time we take our own tinker-toy sets out of the drawer, but more often than not these days we use a computer. And just like a little child that might be fascinated by the shape, colour, and texture of a set of balls, a chemist needs to poke and touch atoms and molecules to find out what their properties are."
*Tim Radford's* geographical reflection, The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things, is published by Fourth Estate Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 hour ago.