The seven chemical wonders

Sep 12, 2013 7 comments

Seven Elements That Have Changed the World
John Browne
2013 Weidenfeld and Nicolson £20.00hb 304pp

Top of the table

Picking the seven chemical elements that have done most to change the world sounds like a fantastic
science parlour game. And with 80 stable and 38 (so far) unstable elements in the periodic table to select
from, the choice might appear far from straightforward. Not so for John Browne, former chief executive of oil
giant BP, who seems to have lost little sleep in selecting his top seven elements – the historical, social,
scientific and economic significance of which he describes in Seven Elements That Have Changed the
World.
Three elements seemed obvious to Browne from the outset: carbon, iron and silver. Carbon, of course, has
powered industry through oil and coal, while iron is the ultimate building material. Silver's influence is
perhaps more subtle: it makes Browne's list because it made photography possible. As for the remaining four
elements, Browne picked these by digging out his old school copy of the periodic table, scanning the list and
plumping for gold, uranium, titanium and silicon. Gold, he explains, has underpinned trade and motivated
colonial expansion. Uranium led to nuclear energy and the Cold War, while silicon's uses have stretched
from glass mirrors and lenses to transistors and solar cells. Titanium is, for me, an odd choice, and I'll come
back to that later, but Browne has no such qualms: "Time and again, while writing this book," he explains,
"these seven elements stood out as having most powerfully changed the course of human history."
Browne devotes a chapter to each element but it is his discussion of silicon that is by far the strongest and
most interesting part of the book. He begins by looking at the glass-making prowess of the Venetians, who in
the 17th century were so desperate to protect their trade that they threatened to kill any glassblowers who
took their skills elsewhere. Glass windows were such a convenient form of taxation on wealthy homeowners
that a window tax remained in place in Britain until 1845 – and is, Browne claims, the origin of the term
"daylight robbery". The removal of that tax led to a boom in the British glass industry, and the 1851 Great
Exhibition at London's Crystal Palace, which was built from 3300 iron columns and 300,000 panes of glass,
showed just how versatile this material could be.
Of course, silicon also underpins more recent wonders, and Browne does a fine job at detailing its use in
solar cells and transistor-based integrated circuits, infusing his descriptions with some interesting personal
perspectives. As a fresh-faced employee at BP in 1970, for example, Browne was one of the first people in
the oil industry to use computers to model the location of petroleum reserves in the Alaskan oilfields. Today,
drilling for oil without computers is unimaginable, but back then computer-aided drilling was a much harder
exercise, with computers literally crashing when their spinning disks ground to a halt. As the author points
out, computers have advanced so much since then that a modern smartphone has more computing power
than the whole of NASA did in the late 1960s.
The inclusion of titanium is, for me, the weakest of Browne's choices. Discovered in 1791, it only rose to
fame after the Second World War when a commercial process to extract titanium from its ore was developed.
Dubbed a wonder material on account of being extremely strong, light but resistant to corrosion, titanium was
used by the Americans in the Cold War to make the famous Blackbird spy plane, while the Soviet Union
even manufactured a submarine built entirely from this non-magnetic material.
Yet, as Browne rather forlornly admits, titanium as a metal never lived up to its potential. It is 10 times more
expensive to make than steel, and production of titanium today is barely one-thousandth of the level of its
rival, being restricted to specialist areas such as limb implants, tennis rackets and oil rigs. Yes, titanium – in
the form of nanoparticles of titanium dioxide – is also a key ingredient in sun cream and is used as a
whitening agent in foods, paint and toothpaste, but as Browne himself writes, "today titanium has a limited
role".
Perhaps for this reason, Browne devotes just 12 pages to this element, followed by silver (19 pages),
uranium (25), iron (28), gold (30), silicon (33) and carbon (56). The chapter on carbon strays too much into
the economics of the oil industry for my taste, while those on gold and silver are well researched but
occasionally read, dare I say, like Wikipedia entries. As for uranium, Browne covers all the bases – from
Hiroshima and the arms race to Chernobyl and Fukushima – without saying anything stunningly new.
Although the book is as much about economics and history as it is about science, when Browne does get
into the physics and chemistry of the seven elements, he has a real knack for clear scientific descriptions.
That is perhaps not surprising: Browne did, after all, study physics at the University of Cambridge in the
1960s. It is therefore disappointing that so much science is booted into the extensive 43 pages of footnotes
at the end of the book. In fact I found myself constantly flicking back and forth between the main text and the
footnotes (of which there are almost 500). Where did this trend for vast numbers of footnotes come from?
And do we really need to flip to the end to learn nothing more than "viscosity is the friction between
molecules in a liquid"?
Selecting seven elements about which to write a book is unlikely to have been the toughest choice Browne
has ever faced in his long career. In fact, the ability to make clear decisions – and stick by them – is probably
a pre-requisite for being top dog at one of the world's biggest energy firms for a dozen years. Still, I felt
Browne could have done more to justify his choices – why do, say, copper, zinc or technetium not make the
cut? What about aluminium, hydrogen or germanium?
Anyone keen, as I was, to find out more about Browne himself through this book will have slim pickings,
although he does reveal a life-long passion for photography, including a set of Leica cameras, and –
bizarrely – a collection of more than 100 toy glass elephants. In the end, though, I was won over by Browne's
enthusiasm and I was sorry when the book finished, leaving me wanting to read more. It would be hard to
imagine many business leaders writing a book as interesting, accessible and well researched as this one.