Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

By Oliver Sacks

From the distinguished neurologist who is also one of the most remarkable storytellers of our time—a riveting memoir of his youth and his love affair with science, as unexpected and fascinating as his celebrated case histories.

“A rare gem…. Fresh, joyous, wistful, generous, and tough-minded.” —The New York Times Book Review

Long before Oliver Sacks became the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals—also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, Sacks chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.

In Uncle Tungsten we meet Sacks’ extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother (who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection) and his father, a family doctor who imbues in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his “Uncle Tungsten,” whose factory produces tungsten-filament lightbulbs. We follow the young Oliver as he is exiled at the age of six to a grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and later watch as he sets about passionately reliving the exploits of his chemical heroes—in his own home laboratory. Uncle Tungsten is a crystalline view of a brilliant young mind springing to life, a story of growing up which is by turns elegiac, comic, and wistful, full of the electrifying joy of discovery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Release date: Dec 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9780804172158

Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks (Londres, 1933-Nueva York, 2015) fue profesor de Neurología Clínica en el Albert Einstein College de Nueva York. En Anagrama se han publicado sus obras fundamentales: los ensayos Migraña, Despertares, Con una sola pierna, El hombre que confundió a su mujer con un sombrero, Veo una voz, Un antropólogo en Marte, La isla de los ciegos al color, El tío Tungsteno, Diario de Oaxaca, Musicofilia, Los ojos de la mente, Alucinaciones, El río de la conciencia y Todo en su sitio, y los volúmenes de memorias En movimiento y Gratitud, y Cartas, la selección de su correspondencia. 

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Cover for Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Author, Oliver Sacks

Acclaim for Oliver Sacks’s

UNCLE TUNGSTEN

"Good prose is often described as glowing: luminous, numinous, glimmering, shimmering, incandescent, radiant. Sacks’s writing is all that, and sometimes, no matter how closely you read it, you can’t figure out what makes it so precisely, unsparingly light. Apart from its stylistic wattage, Uncle Tungsten is about light of many sorts … above all, about the light of the human mind, the capacity of human beings to discern pattern and organization amid nature’s seeming caprice."

—The New York Times Book Review

A bittersweet memoir … [of] a mind and life as fascinating as any that Sacks has ever profiled.

—Business Week

"The great charm of [this book] is its sanity and intelligence, its unashamed love of knowledge.… Uncle Tungsten is intellectually entrancing and utterly winning."

—The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

A fascinating and revelatory intellectual portrait.

—The Boston Globe

Sacks’s vivid description delights the imagination.… An enjoyable and very human story.

—The New York Review of Books

Oliver Sacks weaves together the unlikely duo of chemistry and his boyhood experiences with grace, ease and just the right comedic touch.

—Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe

BOOKS BY OLIVER SACKS

Letters

Everything in Its Place

The River of Consciousness

Gratitude

On the Move

The Mind’s Eye

Musicophilia

Oaxaca Journal

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

The Island of the Colorblind

An Anthropologist on Mars

Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

A Leg to Stand On

Awakenings

Migraine

Book Title, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Author, Oliver Sacks, Imprint, Vintage

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2002

Copyright © 2001 by Oliver Sacks

Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Please note that no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

Published by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2001.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Sacks, Oliver W.

Uncle Tungsten : memories of a chemical boyhood /

Oliver Sacks.—1st ed.

p. cm.

1. Sacks, Oliver W. 2. Neurologist—England—Biography.

I. Title.

RC339.52.S23 A3 2001

616.8’092—dc21

{B} 2001033738

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780375704048

Ebook ISBN 9780804172158

Cover design by Cardon Webb

Cover illustration from The Atlas of Human Anatomy and Surgery © 2008 TASCHEN Gmbh, www.taschen.com

penguinrandomhouse.com

vintagebooks.com

The authorized representative in the EU for product safety and compliance is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68, Ireland, https://eu-contact.penguin.ie.

rh_3.1_153484175_c0_r5

CONTENTS

Dedication

1. Uncle Tungsten

2. 37

3. Exile

4. An Ideal Metal

5. Light for the Masses

6. The Land of Stibnite

7. Chemical Recreations

8. Stinks and Bangs

9. Housecalls

10. A Chemical Language

11. Humphry Davy: A Poet-Chemist

12. Images

13. Mr. Dalton’s Round Bits of Wood

14. Lines of Force

15. Home Life

16. Mendeleev’s Garden

17. A Pocket Spectroscope

18. Cold Fire

19. Ma

20. Penetrating Rays

21. Madame Curie’s Element

22. Cannery Row

23. The World Set Free

24. Brilliant Light

25. The End of the Affair

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Index

The Periodic Table of the Elements

Illustration Credits

About the Author

Illustrations

_153484175_

for Roald

1

UNCLE TUNGSTEN

Many of my childhood memories are of metals: these seemed to exert a power on me from the start. They stood out, conspicuous against the heterogeneousness of the world, by their shining, gleaming quality, their silveriness, their smoothness and weight. They seemed cool to the touch, and they rang when they were struck.

I loved the yellowness, the heaviness, of gold. My mother would take the wedding ring from her finger and let me handle it for a while, as she told me of its inviolacy, how it never tarnished. Feel how heavy it is, she would add. It’s even heavier than lead. I knew what lead was, for I had handled the heavy, soft piping the plumber had left one year. Gold was soft, too, my mother told me, so it was usually combined with another metal to make it harder.

It was the same with copper—people mixed it with tin to produce bronze. Bronze!—the very word was like a trumpet to me, for battle was the brave clash of bronze upon bronze, bronze spears on bronze shields, the great shield of Achilles. Or you could alloy copper with zinc, my mother said, to produce brass. All of us—my mother, my brothers, and I—had our own brass menorahs for Hanukkah. (My father had a silver one.)

I knew copper, the shiny rose color of the great copper cauldron in our kitchen—it was taken down only once a year, when the quinces and crab apples were ripe in the garden and my mother would stew them to make jelly.

I knew zinc: the dull, slightly bluish birdbath in the garden was made of zinc; and tin, from the heavy tinfoil in which sandwiches were wrapped for a picnic. My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special cry. It’s due to deformation of the crystal structure, she said, forgetting that I was five, and could not understand her—and yet her words fascinated me, made me want to know more.

There was an enormous cast-iron lawn roller out in the garden—it weighed five hundred pounds, my father said. We, as children, could hardly budge it, but he was immensely strong and could lift it off the ground. It was always slightly rusty, and this bothered me, for the rust flaked off, leaving little cavities and scabs, and I was afraid the whole roller might corrode and fall apart one day, reduced to a mass of red dust and flakes. I needed to think of metals as stable, like gold—able to stave off the losses and ravages of time.

I would sometimes beg my mother to take out her engagement ring and show me the diamond in it. It flashed like nothing I had ever seen, almost as if it gave out more light than it took in. She would show me how easily it scratched glass, and then tell me to put it to my lips. It was strangely, startlingly cold; metals felt cool to the touch, but the diamond was icy. That was because it conducted heat so well, she said—better than any metal—so it drew the body heat away from one’s lips when they touched it. This was a feeling I was never to forget. Another time, she showed me how if one touched a diamond to a cube of ice, it would draw heat from one’s hand into the ice and cut straight through it as if it were butter. My mother told me that diamond was a special form of carbon, like the coal we used in every room in winter. I was puzzled by this—how could black, flaky, opaque coal be the same as the hard, transparent gemstone in her ring?

I loved light, especially the lighting of the shabbas candles on Friday nights, when my mother would murmur a prayer as she lit them. I was not allowed to touch them once they were lit—they were sacred, I was told, their flames were holy, not to be fiddled with. I was mesmerized by the little cone of blue flame at the candle’s center—why was it blue? Our house had coal fires, and I would often gaze into the heart of a fire, watching it go from a dim red glow to orange, to yellow, and then I would blow on it with the bellows until it glowed almost white-hot. If it got hot enough, I wondered, would it blaze blue, be blue-hot?

Did the sun and stars burn in the same way? Why did they never go out? What were they made of? I was reassured when I learned that the core of the earth consisted of a great ball of iron—this sounded solid, something one could depend on. And I was pleased when I was told that we ourselves were made of the very same elements as composed the sun and stars, that some of my atoms might once have been in a distant star. But it frightened me too, made me feel that my atoms were only on loan and might fly apart at any time, fly away like the fine talcum powder I saw in the bathroom.

I badgered my parents constantly with questions. Where did color come from? Why did my mother use the platinum loop that hung above the stove to cause the gas burner to catch fire? What happened to the sugar when one stirred it into the tea? Where did it go? Why did water bubble when it boiled? (I liked to watch water set to boil on the stove, to see it quivering with heat before it burst into bubbles.)

My mother showed me other wonders. She had a necklace of polished yellow pieces of amber, and she showed me how, when she rubbed them, tiny pieces of paper would fly up and stick to them. Or she would put the electrified amber against my ear, and I would hear and feel a tiny snap, a spark.

My two older brothers Marcus and David, nine and ten years older than I, were fond of magnets and enjoyed demonstrating these to me, drawing the magnet beneath a piece of paper on which were strewn powdery iron filings. I never tired of the remarkable patterns that rayed out from the poles of the magnet. Those are lines of force, Marcus explained to me—but I was none the wiser.

Then there was the crystal radio my brother Michael gave me, which I played with in bed, jiggling the wire on the crystal until I got a station loud and clear. And the luminous clocks—the house was full of them, because my uncle Abe had been a pioneer in the development of luminous paints. These, too, like my crystal radio, I would take under the bedclothes at night, into my private, secret vault, and they would light up my cavern of sheets with an eerie, greenish light.

All these things—the rubbed amber, the magnets, the crystal radio, the clock dials with their tireless coruscations—gave me a sense of invisible rays and forces, a sense that beneath the familiar, visible world of colors and appearances there lay a dark, hidden world of mysterious laws and phenomena.

Whenever we had a fuse, my father would climb up to the porcelain fusebox high on the kitchen wall, identify the fused fuse, now reduced to a melted blob, and replace it with a new fuse of an odd, soft wire. It was difficult to imagine that a metal could melt—could a fuse really be made from the same material as a lawn roller or a tin can?

The fuses were made of a special alloy, my father told me, a combination of tin and lead and other metals. All of these had relatively low melting points, but the melting point of their alloy was lower still. How could this be so, I wondered? What was the secret of this new metal’s strangely low melting point?

For that matter, what was electricity, and how did it flow? Was it a sort of fluid like heat, which could also be conducted? Why did it flow through the metal but not the porcelain? This, too, called for explanation.

My questions were endless, and touched on everything, though they tended to circle around, again and again, to my obsession, the metals. Why were they shiny? Why smooth? Why cool? Why hard? Why heavy? Why did they bend, not break? Why did they ring? Why could two soft metals like zinc and copper, or tin and copper, combine to produce a harder metal? What gave gold its goldness, and why did it never tarnish? My mother was patient, for the most part, and tried to explain, but eventually, when I exhausted her patience, she would say, That’s all I can tell you—you’ll have to quiz Uncle Dave to learn more.

We had called him Uncle Tungsten for as long as I could remember, because he manufactured lightbulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire. His firm was called Tungstalite, and I often visited him in the old factory in Farringdon and watched him at work, in a wing collar, with his shirtsleeves rolled up. The heavy, dark tungsten powder would be pressed, hammered, sintered at red heat, then drawn into finer and finer wire for the filaments. Uncle’s hands were seamed with the black powder, beyond the power of any washing to get out (he would have to have the whole thickness of epidermis removed, and even this, one suspected, would not have been enough). After thirty years of working with tungsten, I imagined, the heavy element was in his lungs and bones, in every vessel and viscus, every tissue of his body. I thought of this as a wonder, not a curse—his body invigorated and fortified by the mighty element, given a strength and enduringness almost more than human.

Whenever I visited the factory, he would take me around the machines, or have his foreman do so. (The foreman was a short, muscular man, a Popeye with enormous forearms, a palpable testament to the benefits of working with tungsten.) I never tired of the ingenious machines, always beautifully clean and sleek and oiled, or the furnace where the black powder was compacted from a powdery incoherence into dense, hard bars with a grey sheen.

During my visits to the factory, and sometimes at home, Uncle Dave would teach me about metals with little experiments. I knew that mercury, that strange liquid metal, was incredibly heavy and dense. Even lead floated on it, as my uncle showed me by floating a lead bullet in a bowl of quicksilver. But then he pulled out a small grey bar from his pocket, and to my amazement, this sank immediately to the bottom. That, he said, was his metal, tungsten.

Uncle loved the density of the tungsten he made, and its refractoriness, its great chemical stability. He loved to handle it—the wire, the powder, but the massy little bars and ingots most of all. He caressed them, balanced them (tenderly, it seemed to me) in his hands. Feel it, Oliver, he would say, thrusting a bar at me. Nothing in the world feels like sintered tungsten. He would tap the little bars and they would emit a deep clink. The sound of tungsten, Uncle Dave would say, nothing like it. I did not know whether this was true, but I never questioned it.

As the youngest of almost the youngest (I was the last of four, and my mother the sixteenth of eighteen), I was born almost a hundred years after my maternal grandfather and never knew him. He was born Mordechai Fredkin, in 1837, in a small village in Russia. As a youth he managed to avoid being impressed into the Cossack army and fled Russia using the passport of a dead man named Landau; he was just sixteen. As Marcus Landau, he made his way to Paris and then Frankfurt, where he married (his wife was sixteen too). Two years later, in 1855, now with the first of their children, they moved to England.

My mother’s father was, by all accounts, a man drawn equally to the spiritual and the physical. He was by profession a boot and shoe manufacturer, a shochet (a kosher slaughterer), and later a grocer—but he was also a Hebrew scholar, a mystic, an amateur mathematician, and an inventor. He had a wide-ranging mind: he published a newspaper, the Jewish Standard, in his basement, from 1888 to 1891; he was interested in the new science of aeronautics and corresponded with the Wright brothers, who paid him a visit when they came to London in the early 1900s (some of my uncles could still remember this). He had a passion, my aunts and uncles told me, for intricate arithmetical calculations, which he would do in his head while lying in the bath. But he was drawn above all to the invention of lamps—safety lamps for mines, carriage lamps, streetlamps—and he patented many of these in the 1870s.

A polymath and autodidact himself, Grandfather was passionately keen on education—and, most especially, a scientific education—for all his children, for his nine daughters no less than his nine sons. Whether it was this or the sharing of his own passionate enthusiasms, seven of his sons were eventually drawn to mathematics and the physical sciences, as he was. His daughters, by contrast, were by and large drawn to the human sciences—to biology, to medicine, to education and sociology. Two of them founded schools. Two others were teachers. My mother was at first torn between the physical and the human sciences: she was particularly attracted to chemistry as a girl (her older brother Mick had just begun a career as a chemist), but later became an anatomist and surgeon. She never lost her love of, her feeling for, the physical sciences, nor the desire to go beneath the surfaces of things, to explain. Thus the thousand and one questions I asked as a child were seldom met by impatient or peremptory answers, but careful ones which enthralled me (though they were often above my head). I was encouraged from the start to interrogate, to investigate.

Given all my aunts and uncles (and a couple more on my father’s side), my cousins numbered almost a hundred; and since the family, for the most part, was centered in London (though there were far-flung American, Continental, and South African branches), we would all meet frequently, tribally, on family occasions. This sense of extended family was one I knew and enjoyed as far back as memory goes, and it went with a sense that it was our business, the family business, to ask questions, to be scientific, just as we were Jewish or English. I was among the youngest of the cousins—I had cousins in South Africa who were forty-five years my senior—and some of these cousins were already practicing scientists or mathematicians; others, only a little older than myself, were already in love with science. One cousin was a young physics teacher; three were reading chemistry at university; and one, a precocious fifteen-year-old, was showing great mathematical promise. All of us, I could not help imagining, had a bit of the old man in us.

2

(illustration credit 1)

37

I grew up just before the Second World War in a huge, rambling Edwardian house in northwest London. Being a corner house, at the junction of Mapesbury and Exeter Roads, number 37 Mapesbury Road faced onto both, and was larger than its neighbors. The house was basically square, almost cubical, but with a front porch that jutted out, V-shaped at the top, like the entry to a church. There were bow windows that also protruded on each side, with recesses in between, and thus the roof had a most complex shape, resembling, to my eyes, nothing so much as a giant crystal. The house was built of red brick of a peculiarly soft, dusky color. I imagined this, after I learned some geology, as being old red sandstone from the Devonian age, a thought encouraged by the fact that all the roads around us—Exeter, Teignmouth, Dartmouth, Dawlish—themselves had Devonian names.

There were double front doors, with a little vestibule between them, and these led onto a hall, and thence to a passage that led back toward the kitchen; the hall and the passage had a floor of tesselated colored stones. To the right of the hall, as one entered, the staircase curved upward, its heavy bannister polished smooth by my brothers sliding down it.

Certain rooms in the house had a magical or sacred quality, perhaps my parents’ surgery (both of them were physicians) above all, with its bottles of medicine, its balance for weighing out powders, the racks of test tubes and beakers, the spirit lamp, and the examining table. There were all sorts of medicines, lotions, and elixirs in a large cabinet—it looked like an old-fashioned chemist’s shop in miniature—there was a microscope, and bottles of reagents for testing patients’ urine, like the bright blue Fehling’s solution, which turned yellow when there was sugar in the urine.

It was from this special room, where patients were admitted, but not (unless the door was left unlocked) my childish self, that I sometimes saw a glow of violet light coming out under the door and smelled a strange, seaside smell, which I later learned was ozone—this was the old ultraviolet lamp at work. I was not too sure, as a child, what doctors did, and glimpses of catheters and bougies in their kidney dishes, retractors and speculums, rubber gloves, catgut thread and forceps—all this, I think, rather frightened me, though it fascinated me too. Once, when the door was left accidentally open, I saw a patient with her legs up in stirrups (in what I later learned was the lithotomy position). My mother’s obstetric bag and anesthetic bag were always ready to be grabbed in an emergency, and I knew when they would be needed, for I would hear comments like, She’s half-a-crown dilated—comments which by their unintelligibility and mysteriousness (were they a sort of code?) stimulated my imagination in all sorts of ways.

Another sacred room was the library, which, in the evenings at least, was especially my father’s domain. One section of the library wall was covered with his Hebrew books, but there were books on every subject—my mother’s books (she was fond of novels and biographies), my brothers’ books, and books inherited from grandparents. One bookcase was entirely devoted to plays—my parents, who had met as fellow enthusiasts in a medical students’ Ibsen society, still went to the theater every Thursday.

The library was not only for reading; on weekends, the books that were out on the reading table would be put to one side to make room for games of various sorts. While my three older brothers might be playing an intense game of cards or chess, I would play a simple game, Ludo, with Auntie Birdie, my mother’s older sister, who lived with us—in my early years, she was more a play companion than my brothers were. Extreme passions developed over Monopoly, and even before I learned to play it, the prices and colors of the properties became engraved on my mind. (To this day I see the Old Kent Road and Whitechapel as cheap, mauve properties, the pale blue Angel and Euston Road next to them as scarcely any better. By contrast, the West End is clothed for me in rich, costly colors: Fleet Street scarlet, Piccadilly yellow, the green of Bond Street, and the dark, Bentley-colored blue of Park Lane and Mayfair.) Sometimes we would all join in a game of Ping-Pong, or some woodworking, using the big library table. But after a weekend of frivolities, the games would be returned to the huge drawer under one of the bookcases, and the room restored to its quiet for my father’s evening reading.

There was another drawer on the other side of the bookcase, a fake drawer which, for some reason, did not open, and I frequently had a fixed dream about this drawer. Like any child, I loved coins—their glitter, their weights, their different shapes and sizes—from the bright copper farthings and halfpennies and pennies to the varied silver coins (especially the tiny silver threepenny bits—one was always concealed in the suet pudding at Christmas) to the heavy gold sovereign my father wore on his watch chain. And I had read in my children’s encyclopedia about doubloons and rubles, coins with holes in them, and pieces of eight, which I imagined to be perfect octagons. In my dream the false drawer would open to me, displaying a glittering treasure of copper and silver and gold mixed together, coins of a hundred countries and ages, including, to my delight, octagonal pieces of eight.

I especially liked crawling into the triangular cupboard under the stairs, where the special plates and cutlery for Passover were kept. The cupboard itself was shallower than the stairs, and it seemed to me that its back wall, when tapped, sounded hollow; it must have concealed, I felt, a further space behind it, a secret passageway, perhaps. I felt snug in here, in my secret hideaway—no one besides me was small enough to fit in.

Most beautiful and mysterious in my eyes was the front door, with its stained glass panels of many shapes and colors. I would place my eye behind the crimson glass and see a whole world red-stained (but with the red roofs of the houses opposite strangely pale, and clouds startlingly distinct against a blue sky now almost black). It was a completely different experience with the green glass, and the deep violet blue. Most intriguing was the yellowish green glass, for this seemed to shimmer, sometimes yellow and sometimes green, depending on where I stood and how the sun hit it.

A forbidden area was the attic, which was gigantic, since it covered the entire area of the house, and stretched up to the peaked, crystalline eaves of the roof. I was once taken up to see the attic, and then dreamed of it repeatedly, perhaps because it was forbidden after Marcus climbed up once by himself and fell through the skylight, gashing his thigh (though once, in a storytelling mood, he told me that the scar had been inflicted by a wild boar, like the scar on Odysseus’ thigh).

We had meals in the breakfast room next to the kitchen; the dining room, with its long table, was reserved for shabbas meals, festivals, and special occasions. There was a similar distinction between the lounge and the drawing room—the lounge, with its sofa and dilapidated, comfy chairs, was for general use; the drawing room, with its elegant, uncomfortable Chinese chairs and lacquered cabinets, was for large family gatherings. Aunts, uncles, and cousins in the neighborhood would walk over on Saturday afternoons, and a special silver tea service would be pulled out and small crustless sandwiches of smoked salmon and cod’s roe served in the drawing room—such dainties were not served at any other time. The chandeliers in the drawing room, originally gasoliers, had been converted to electric light sometime in the 1920s (but there were still odd gas jets and fittings all over the house so that, in a pinch, we could go back to gas lighting). The drawing room also contained a huge grand piano, covered with family photos, but I preferred the soft tones of the upright piano in the lounge.

Though the house was full of music and books, it was virtually empty of paintings, engravings, or artwork of any sort; and similarly, while my parents went to theaters and concerts frequently, they never, as far as I can remember, visited an art gallery. Our synagogue had stained glass windows depicting biblical scenes, which I often gazed at in the more excruciating parts of the service. There had been, apparently, a dispute over whether such pictures were appropriate, given the interdiction of graven images, and I wondered whether this was a reason we had no art in the house. But it was rather, I soon realized, that my parents were completely indifferent to the decor of the house or its furnishings. Indeed, I later learned that when they had bought the place, in 1930, they had given my father’s older sister Lina their checkbook, carte blanche, saying, Do what you want, get what you want.

Lina’s choices—fairly conventional, except for the chinoiserie in the drawing room—were neither approved nor contested; my parents accepted them without really noticing or caring. My friend Jonathan Miller, visiting the house for the first time—this was soon after the war—said it seemed like a rented house to him, there was so little evidence of personal taste or decision. I was as indifferent as my parents to the decor of the house, though I was angered and bewildered by Jonathan’s comment. For, to me, 37 was full of mysteries and wonders—the stage, the mythic background, on which my life was lived.

There were coal fires in almost every room, including a porcelain coal stove, flanked by fish tiles, in the bathroom. The fire in the lounge had large copper coal scuttles to either side, bellows, and fire irons, including a slightly bent poker of steel (my eldest brother, Marcus, who was very strong, had managed to bend it, when it was almost white-hot). If an aunt or two visited, we would all gather in the lounge, and they would hitch up their skirts and stand with their backs to the fire. All of them, like my mother, were heavy smokers, and after warming themselves by the fire, they would sit on the sofa and smoke, lobbing their wet fag ends into the fire. They were, by and large, terrible shots, and the damp butts would hit the brick wall surrounding the fireplace and adhere there, disgustingly, until they finally burned away.

I have only fragmentary, brief memories of my youngest years, the years before the war, but I remember being frightened, as a child, by observing that many of my aunts and uncles had coal black tongues—would my own, I wondered, turn black when I grew up? I was greatly relieved when Auntie Len, divining my fears, told me that her tongue was not really black, that its blackness came from chewing charcoal biscuits, and that they all ate these because they had gas.

Of my Auntie Dora (who died when I was very young), I remember nothing except for the color orange—whether this was the color of her complexion or hair, or of her clothes, or whether it was the reflected color of the firelight, I have no idea. All that remains is a warm, nostalgic feeling and a peculiar fondness for orange.

My bedroom, since I was the youngest, was a tiny room connected with my parents’ bedroom, and I remember that its ceiling was festooned with strange, calcareous concretions. Michael had had this room before I was born, and had been fond of flicking gelatinous spoonsful of sago—the sliminess of which he disliked—onto the ceiling, where it would adhere with a wet smack. As the sago dried, nothing but a chalky mound would remain.

There were several rooms which belonged to nobody and had no clear function; these were used to house extras of all kinds—books, games, toys, magazines, waterproofs, sports equipment. In one small room there was nothing but a Singer sewing machine with a treadle (which my mother had bought on

Reviews for Uncle Tungsten

[theampersand · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

You might have been a precocious child in your day, but you probably weren't as precocious as Oliver Sacks, whose interest in -- and talent for -- science seems to have manifested itself at a ridiculously young age. This book is two things: a personal history of an obsession with all things metallic and chemical and a clever, informative, and superbly well-written account of the history of science as told through one British child's home-brewed education. These are both unlikely subjects, so I doubt that "Uncle Tungsten" will be to everyone's taste, but scientific near-illiterates -- like myself -- may find this highly personalized guided tour around the history of science and the periodic table rather charming. Young Sacks's own scientific explorations seem to have closely followed the development of scientific thought itself: to hear him tell it, he raised himself on Victorian-era scientific texts. Whether this was the result of coincidence or some subtle manipulations by his family, many of whose members were also deeply invested in the sciences, is never quite clear. But it, in any event, it makes for a good read. Sacks is particularly good at explaining how each successive refinement of atomic theory or the periodic table transformed our view of the universe. I knew a bit about the evolution of the atomic model, but Sacks explains very clearly why each advance was so shocking and so important to the scientists of that day. While it's obvious that he relishes remembering his happy, active childhood, he also wants us to see the big picture.

It's perhaps inevitable that "Uncle Tungsten" would have something of a nostalgic air, and I found this pretty agreeable. Sacks lovingly describes his parents, aunts, and uncles and fondly recounts their own scientific interests and contributions. Surprisingly, Unlikely as it may seem, Uncle Tungsten wasn't the author's only relative who had a lifelong obsession with a metal or compound. This book reads like a tribute to his large and loving family, whose guiding values seem to have been education and curiosity. It's also an elegy for a lost boyhood community, one in which science brought together and provided a sort of safe haven all manner of misfits and odd ducks, kids who could be expected to be bullied mercilessly in most boarding-school environments. As a child, Sacks was as much a collector as an experimenter, building up a large collection of all sorts of scientific materials. He laments that most of the houses that sold these raw materials for scientific play have since disappeared. It's sometimes a bit alarming to read about Sack's adventures with potentially explosive chemicals, conducted mostly while he was still in short pants, but it made me question what we've lost now that, these days, of nerdy kids often get into computer games, or programming, or less explicitly physical kinds of intellectual play. "Uncle Tungsten" isn't quite what I expected, and it's an odd cross-pollination of personal and scientific history, but I'm still glad I picked it up.

[timbazzett · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This could have been a fascinating memoir, but UNCLE TUNGSTEN: MEMORIES OF A CHEMICAL BOYHOOD suffers from too much science nd not enough memoir. Oliver Sacks grew up in the years before and during the Second World War, a very comfortable Jewish childhood in London, where both his parents were doctors, his father a GP and his mother a surgeon. The youngest of three sons, his world was abruptly changed when he was sent away to a harsh boarding school for his own protection during the war years and the blitz. Small and shy, during these difficult years he found refuge in the study of science, the elements,and chemistry. His Uncle Dave (aka Uncle Tungsten) owned a profitable light bulb factory and was a self-taught scientist himself and encouraged young Oliver's interest. These parts of the story were very interesting. Unfortunately they took a back seat to long chapters about chemistry, minerals, experiments, scientific oddities and discoveries, etc. Science stuff. Which I skimmed over mostly. Finally I gave it up. Sacks is a fine writer though, and I still hope to read that last memoir he wrote just before his death. This one is best suited to readers of more scientific bent than I. Not my cuppa tea.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

[helenliz_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is an unusual sort of memoir. Sacks' family was extensive and largely of a technical turn of mind. Both parents were doctors, his aunts and uncles included a lightbulb manufacturer and a biologist. And so he becomes interested in chemistry almost as a result of being surrounded by it. Uncle Dave, the lightbulb manufacturer, had samples of all sorts of filament materials and so he introduces the young Oliver to metals, their origins, their ores and their properties. From here is a brief step to general chemistry. His parents let him set up a chemistry lab in a spare room on the back of the house and from this report its a wonder that any of them made it out alive!
There is quite a lot of the history of science in here, the move from alchemy to chemistry, the development of the periodic table, the discoveries of different elements and the structure of the atom. There is a lot less about Sacks' childhood. It is almost mentioned in passing along side the shifting interest in all things chemical. He describes his school being evacuated during the first art of the war and the dreadful experience he had there, but it barely makes more than a paragraph. His brother's response to the school and the impact on him mental health is hardly more than a couple of lines. Which makes for an odd read, if I'm honest. It's not a memoir of childhood, more a memoir of an interest in chemistry. As a scientist myself, I knew (or once knew) most of the technical detail in here. In which case, for me, it was more a refresher and reminder of what makes science so enthralling. I'm not sure what the non-technical reader would make of it.

[aevaughn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed listening to Sacks's story throughout the memoir including his reminiscing of bits of chemical/physics history. His last chapter discussing his transition away from Chemistry into Medicine was the most striking. I found it disconcerting that formal study of a subject would make someone with such a love for a discipline to lose interest. Although, I took heart in knowing that more than that went into the equation. In particular, his parent's desire for him to study medicine and the quantum chemistry portion of chemistry being so troubling for him.

[steve38 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A typically slow paced, simply written but involving book from Mr Sachs. About his fascination with chemistry as a child. Inspired by his uncles and his parents he had a privileged childhood but one not without its traumas with evacuation from London during the war. We learn about his childhood but it's also a lesson in chemistry and its history. If you never understood the periodic table this book will explain it for you.

[osdolai · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Oliver Sacks' first autobiography is a frustrating read. He uses every trick in the book to hide from the limelight and instead of a memoir delivers a very comprehensive History of Chemistry with a few personal anecdotes interjected far and between.
Sacks was a remarkable chronicler of the mind and lived a very eventful childhood in a bygone era. In LP Hartley's apt turn of phrase, 'the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'. We want to find out more about that country, but Sacks leaves us high and dry. What was it like to live in England through the war, with food rationed, and national mobilization underway? He mentions people and events in a detached way, almost as a historian, certainly not as a highly gifted child who was actually there growing up in those cataclysmic times.
Lastly, Sacks literary style is severely lacking in the flow department. He frequently interrupts the narrative to walk us with excruciating detail through technical explanations of the chemical properties of an element or an experiment he conducted in his basement. Feels like his editor gave him a free pass to ramble at ease.
The bottom line is, this concave book has a more limited appeal than expected, given what we know of the author. Instead of reflections on his childhood, we are treated to a master lecture on chemistry and physics. His omissions tell us more about him than his narrative. Unless you have a particular penchant for the hard sciences, you may find yourself frustrated in this read.

[jbd1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There's a "Radiolab" episode in which Oliver Sacks talks about his interest in samples of chemical elements; this is basically a longer and even more wonderful version of that, in which he ties in family history, personal memoir, and the history of chemistry (and a bit of physics too). A delight to read.

[mbmackay · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Autobiography of his 'chemical childhood'. Fascinating stuff, but left me feeling slightly inadequate - why was I goofing off as a 10 year old when Sacks at that age was reading Curie's bio & replicating her chemistry?
Read June 2006

[sgerbic · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Bits of this book were terrific. All the parts about his boyhood, life at school and WWII were terrific. But I'm only giving this book 2 stars because the rest of the book were unreadable by someone like me who has no interest in chemicals, rocks or science. I'm sorry to say that it was wasted on me. I've enjoyed many others of Sack's books, even though they were highly technical, this one felt as if Sack's were writing it for his own enjoyment, and he might just have done that. More power to him.

[stevesmits · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I enjoy Oliver Sack's works. For one who is such an accomplished scientific figure in the medical world, his prose writing is so good. "Uncle Tungsten", published first in 2001, is his memoir of his life and times in pre and immediately post war England. Sack's family were Jews who had immigrated to England around the turn of the 20th century. His parents were physicians and his uncles (he came from quite a large family) were scientists and entrepeneurs. Uncle "Tungsten" owned and ran a factory that produced light bulbs and he was deeply knowledgeable about heavy metals that could be used as filaments in these early bulbs. In addition to Uncle Tungsten, Sacks's family members were brainy and colorful characters who are quite fun to read about.

Through Uncle (Dave) "Tungsten", Sacks's intellectual curiosity in chemistry was aroused. (Mathematics was also an obsession.) At an early age, he acquired all manner of chemicals and set up his own laboratory where he conducted experiments to understand better the chemical properties of various elements and compounds. One amazing aspect of the story is how easy it was for Sacks to acquire chemicals that are quite dangerous and how tolerant his parents were of the goings-on in his lab in an attached shed. One cannot imagine such liberality or forbearance today.

In many ways, Sacks's memoir gives the history of chemistry advances in the 19th and 20th century. He describes the breakthrough work of many of the icons of early chemistry -- Boyle, Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, Mendeleev and others. His burning impulse to understand how the physical world was constructed and interacted is plain to see and marked him as an unusual young person of great intellectual potential.

What's perhaps even more compelling in Sacks's story is his depiction of life before and during the war. Sacks, born in 1933, was shipped off to boarding schools away from London during the Blitz and his memories (many were not happy ones) give a fascinating view of life during this time. His family was closely connected to the Jewish community in London and his stories about this culture are interesting and evocative; he says that this tight knit society ceased to be after the war.

His path through the world of chemistry progresses through increasing levels of complexity. Some of his descriptions of chemical laws and processes are above my understanding; they made me aware of how much about chemistry I have forgotten, or, more likely, never knew. When he reached atomic realms of the periodic table of elements and structure of atomic entities, I was quite lost. Notwithstanding, it's worth slogging through the esoteric parts of the book, if for nothing more than to gain an appreciation of this young man's remarkable intellectual focus and his passion for knowledge.

[wweisser-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A curious mix of wartime memoir and scientific history; intersperses the story of the author's childhood with an overview of the development of chemistry. A very quick and fun read.

[lxydis-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wonderfully engaging memoir. Sacks’s conveys with deceptive simplicity and clarity the wonders of chemistry and the excitement (and the history of the last couple of centuries, no mean feat to do this so clearly and concisely!) of scientific discovery, as well as his joyous inquisitiveness as a child and his excitement at discovering this world of science. At the same time, it’s sad to read about the abuse and isolation he and his brother endured at the school they were sent to during WW2.
Typical of his generous, positive view is that even these sad times (like his brother’s eventual mental illness, and his parents’ unawareness of his own suffering at the horrible school and their inexplicably thoughtless, even insensitive, behavior, and his own anxieties and isolation) never sound regretful or self-centeredly whiny, though he describes them forthrightly. He’s generous and direct and loving in his description of his passions, as well as his depiction of his enormously engaging, supportive and remarkable family. It’s refreshing to read a personal account that is not tortured or blaming.

[amaraduende · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book took a while to digest - it's full of chemistry and nostalgia and scientific history... really enjoyable. Took me like a week to read though!

[hcubic · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was finally impelled to read "Uncle Tungsten", which had been recommended by innumerable chemist friends, because of the opportunity to meet the author at the ACS meeting in New York last month. Oliver Sacks is a few years older than I am, but his "Memoir of a Chemical Boyhood" brought back my own memories of youthful chemistry experiments and fascination with the power of science. Sacks writes about wartime London, while I grew up on the US West coast, but it is remarkable how many interests, books and experiences we shared. I hope I am not the last chemist to discover this wonderful book, which describes a boyhood in science experiences that is unimaginable to a child today. Sacks is also author of "Awakenings", "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat", and "The Island of the Colorblind".

[pferdina · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sacks writes about his boyhood in 1940s London and also about the lives of the scientists that shaped his interest in chemistry and physics. Sketches on radioactivity, the discovery of the periodic law, metals, electricity, and atomic structure are included as well as stories about Humphrey Davy, Marie and Pierre Curie, and several others. My only complaint about this book is that it moves very slowly and all of the events in the author's life take place when he was very young (before 13 years of age, for the most part).

[dele2451 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A funny tale of one inquisitive Jewish boy's adventurous--and often dangerous--experiments in the world of chemistry and the many mentors who inspired him on his journey. Informative, entertaining, and well-written...his passion for his topic resonates throughout the entire book. A definite recommend.

[snash_44 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In some ways the book seemed schizophrenic in that it was a memoir but also a biography of a family, and a history of chemists and chemistry. The memoir was frightening, cruel at times. The family biography was enchanting. The history of chemists and chemistry was infused with boundless enthusiasm but would still be inaccessible to anyone with less that college chemistry. I have a chemistry degree so I quite enjoyed the book despite its divided focus.

[markkeeffe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Really good insight into what t was like growing up in a large well-off Jewish family in London around the time of the second world war. His enthusiasm for chemistry and botany, and for learning in general, is contagious and delightful. His memory for detail and the influencing characters is amazing. Some of the chemical terms and descriptions re hard to understand which got a bit boring towards the end of the book. Also it seemed to end rather abruptly. But these small criticisms are dwarfed by an otherwise delightful read.

[gibbon_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The book contains more about tungsten than it does about his uncle, and might have been better if the proportions had been reversed. Anyone without the elements of a scientific education may find it hard and consequently boring to follow, being structured as it is round the history of chemistry and the discovery and classification of the elements. It is interesting to compare it with the anecdotes of Richard Feynman concerning his upbringing. Feynman was older and from a less privileged family, so he felt the impact of the Great Depression more as he was growing up. But it is clear that both men felt the same compulsive need to discover for themselves how things worked, and the same joy when they realised what they had understood - in Sacks' case, with the help of his talented uncles, in Feynman's, by talks with his father, and for both of them, by the freedom to experiment. It was unfortunate for Sacks that his boarding schools were a bad influence on him, and that his parents didn't realise it, being preoccupied with their own careers.

[lovell_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a book that holds the attention for its woonderful fresh insights into the world of chemistry, as well as a description of the author's family and life in an extended medical scientifically literate Jewish family in London during the war years. I give it to my year 11 chem students (a chapter at a time) as it has a beguiling introduction to the importance of chemistry in our lives.

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After reading this book, I'm still not sure if it was intended as a memoire, or as a brief history of chemistry. The author gives us glimpses of his family life, especially the role his mother and uncles played in encouraging his love of chemistry. He spends a lot more time talking about chemistry and scientific discoveries, which was less interesting to me.

I found the book rather sad at the end. All the love of chemistry that permeated Oliver Sacks' life was repressed when he reading adolescence as it was expected he would become a doctor. Which he did -- and where he has made a large difference to many lives. But what would have happened had he followed his heart?

[tadad_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a memoir of the author's early boyhood when he was fascinated by chemistry. I was expecting the majority of the book to be about the many intelligent and probably interesting members of the Sacks' family, most notably his Uncle Dave (Uncle Tungsten). However, the personal glimpses were few and lacked much depth. Instead, this was primarily a quick recapitulation of the history of chemical thought. For this, I was just the wrong audience.

When told that Henry Cavendish discovered hydrogen, that Mendeleev devised the periodic table, etc., instead of a quickening of interest, my response was continuously, "Yes, I know."

If you didn't take (or have largely forgotten) high school chemistry, and have some interest in science, then this book will provide you with a recounting of chemical thought from earliest times up through Niels Bohr's quantum theories about electrons. It's well-written and very accessible. If you do remember your high school chemistry, the book will probably disappoint a bit.

[jnselko · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A perfectly marvelous memoir- my daughter ( a Chemical Engineer) has read it three times!

[mjmorrison1971 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A childhood memoir & journey throught the history of Chemistry. For me, a very interesting read but how much of what he did as a child can we do now? - Not much

[triptropic · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A bit like being back in chemistry class. Sometimes fun, sometimes as dull as ditch water. Enough with the thalium already!

[xtien_9 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Sacks' autobiography with a central role for chemistry, science in general, and two uncles who are running the family business: a factory for light bulbs (hence the title: "Uncle Tungsten"). Every kid deserves a youth in which nobody gets angry at you when you try to set the house on fire.

[goluban_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An amazing look into the mind of a child who would become a great scientist.

His early fascination with chemistry was based on his attraction to the physical properties of materials he saw as solid, permanent in contrast to the chaotic and unreliable social world of WWII.

This early interest was encouraged and nourished by a large nurturing family of equally extraordinary, intellectually curious people.

It is a vivid example of the interplay of nature and nurture.

[clothingoptional · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An ancient magic draws all little boys to fire. They sit and stare at smoldering campfires, delighting when flames stir with the breeze. Sometimes, they stand in reverent silence before a book of matches or a cigarette lighter, but more often they are overcome with an irresistible urge to spark and burn.

We know a little boy like this. At the tender age of five, enamored with fire, the boy believed he could make a rocket. He took a four foot length of copper pipe into his backyard, and rammed it into the earth beneath the cavernous shade of a decrepit willow. Into this vessel, he poured a fair amount of gasoline, some measure of other dangerous chemicals, and added a good dose of industrial petroleum jelly. One can readily guess the attitude of his mother when he went inside the house to ask where the family kept the matches.

Despite this early setback, the boy went on with his experiments, such as they were. He was limited by his lack of chemical guidance, and by a stock of materials that consisted of whatever he could scrounge from the garage or the basement. He never did anything important and never learned much of anything except what would and what would not readily burned. This was the extent of his explorations.

As he proceeded through science classes in school, he found he had a great aptitude for chemistry. He easily grasped the principles of organic chemistry when other classmates struggled. The entire concept of a chemical bond seemed so obvious to him as to be second nature. Yet, there was something amiss with our young man's process into the world of science. While he loved to learn the laws and the measure of things, the way certain elements combined while others would not, and how one might tear apart these materials with surprising ease, he sensed a gap in his knowledge. He was learning only the data and theory, but nothing of the process. He had no understanding whatsoever of how all of this knowledge came to be, even less how he seemed to know without knowing all that his teachers would tell.

It wasn't until much later in life, when the boy had left the field of chemistry behind and turned his interests elsewhere, that he discovered what he was missing all those years ago. What he was missing was history. In history, he found the stories of men and women, driven to light fires in the darkness, probing their way through a murky world of an evolving field of thought. There, he found context.

Without context, one is highly unlikely to discover anything new, unless entirely by accident and then it is doubtful that one would recognize the new phenomenon when it was found. In the study of history, one will find examples of just this sort of miraculous tinkering. One will also discover how, with just a slight change in this method or another, a crackpot suddenly becomes a genius.

Unlike the boy in our story, Dr. Oliver Sacks had the benefit of growing up in a scientific family. He had aunts and uncles and parents who were practicing doctors and scientists. All of these sources turned the young Oliver on to the history of science, a history which our boy was so sadly ignorant. Through young Oliver's eyes, we recognized how basic knowledge and the ready availability of materials, combined with practical experience to drive a boy to experiment. However, it was the exposure to history, Dr. Sacks's love of the lives of the scientists who had come before him, that enabled the boy to move from mere mimicry to mastery.

Or at least this is what we're led to believe.

Dr. Sacks does such a wonderful job of introducing history only when the reader {and the boy who is his memory} is prepared to receive it, that we wonder if reality matches the perfect and structured way his education seemed to present itself. Still, even if the truth is a picture of fits and starts, we hardly mind. The book was a pleasure to read, and ought to be required reading for all students of science. Not only will they come away with a better understanding of the facts, but context both the history and a connection with the author's experience will fuel their curiosity.

As we read, we kept finding ourselves referring to the periodic table of elements included in the book. We mused on the possibility of setting up a lab of our own, playing at the experiments. When we caught ourselves in the midst of seriously considering the construction of a Leyden jar, we laughed and wondered how we could feel like such little children again, caught up in the love of science so that we might do such things if only because they could be done.

We are greatly indebted to Dr. Sacks for writing this book, and sharing his personal {and often painful} history. The boy who built the rocket in his backyard would have recognized young Oliver's retreat into the solitary. Perhaps, if he'd had the same advantages, he too might have discovered some comfort in the shelter of science. For us, it was rejuvenating to muse again not just how a fire burns, but why.

[brewergirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating book. The author's passion about science and chemistry in particular was very compelling. I love it when an author can get me interested in something I don't normally care for.