Seven Elements That Have Changed the World (2 page)

But carbon is not my only focus. Of the ninety-eight naturally occurring chemical elements on the periodic table, there are six others that have most powerfully changed the course of human history: iron, gold, silver, uranium, titanium and silicon. This book traces the story of how they have
enabled progress as well as destruction, of the power they give humans to do good and evil, and of their capacity to shape our future.

For the greater part of our existence, we lived more like lower-order animals than humans, spending our days on the most basic of activities, searching for food, water and shelter. In that existence, there was no choice: everything was done to survive. About 50,000 years ago, humanity took a ‘Great Leap Forward’ with a wave of behavioural innovations that included the start of complex language, the first cave art, the origins of religious ritual and the beginnings of barter trade.
⁸
The timing and the origins of these changes are disputed, but there is little doubt that it was intimately connected to our use of the elements; new ways of carving limestone, creating iron pigments, and controlling wood fires. The creative use of the elements made our survival less burdensome and gave humanity the tools to lay the foundations of civilisation. Beyond this, they have continued to give us the means to do great things, to give us more freedom and to give us more choices in the conduct of our daily lives.

Human progress can be measured by our ability to harness greater amounts of energy and so transform the world far beyond what would be achievable by human strength alone. No energy source has been more potent than carbon, in the form of wood, coal, oil and natural gas. Coal enabled industrial revolutions in Europe and the US, as it gave us the ability to expand our productivity; an amount of coal equal to the weight of an average man can do the same work as that man working for a hundred days. We have used carbon to accomplish extraordinary feats in our endeavours, whether in travel, trade, art, engineering or communication.

Carbon, too, has unlocked the potential of the other elements: with its energy, we have smelted iron, mined gold and enriched uranium. It is the creative force that underpins all others. Carbon’s most powerful alliance is with iron. We need only to look around, at the railways, the factories and the skyscrapers, to see how the wealth of industry and the fabric of society are built from iron.

In the most specialist applications, for which iron is too weak or heavy,
futuristic titanium metal has been used to accomplish triumphs of air and sea exploration. But far more pervasive than titanium’s use as a metal in supersonic aircraft and deep-diving submarines is its use as bright white titanium dioxide. In that form, titanium is everywhere around us, feeding our obsession with purity, cleanliness and façade. Milk is no purer and shirts are no cleaner as a result of the titanium dioxide that whitens them. It is their whiteness that satisfies some urge within us.

However ubiquitous, we do not normally notice titanium’s presence in our regular lives. The same is true of silver in its use in photography. The impact of photography is so significant since it has enabled us to see the world in a way that we would not have otherwise been able to do. It has shown us the vivid reality of the Second World War, the Vietnam War and the Rwandan genocide. It has impacted the way we think about each other, by putting a human face to our leaders, our neighbours and our enemies. Perhaps most powerfully of all, silver has changed the way we think about ourselves. It records our memories, our histories and our relationships not as words or thoughts, but as lasting images.

Silver is much better known, along with gold, as a store of value and medium of trade. Ever since the first coins were minted over two millennia ago, possibly in the ancient city of Sardis, merchants have relied on the standards established by these rare and precious metals for international commerce. Gold and silver have enabled the movement of people and materials and the cross-fertilisation of ideas. They have not only helped to spread the economic benefits of the Earth’s elements across the world but have also stimulated human progress.

Silicon is the final element of the story, and perhaps the most transformative of all. It was first used to make objects of beauty in the form of glass beads, vases and mirrors. Later it became a common, utilitarian building material, draped around the outside of skyscrapers, satisfying the human desire for light. But silicon’s greatest impact has been in the last half-century as the inner workings of computers. In this ‘Silicon Age’, we calculate and communicate effortlessly, with instant access to the sum of human knowledge. Silicon’s impact on society is perhaps greatest when placed in the hands of the ordinary citizen. As the heart of modern communication, silicon has supported political revolutions in the Arab Spring
and broken down the geographical barriers that have restrained our social interactions for millennia.

The elements have created progress, innovation and prosperity, but they have also wreaked great destruction on people and nature. Carbon’s destructive force is felt through the indirect consequences of its extraction and consumption. During the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, the air became thick with smoke and thousands died in mine collapses and explosions. As industrial revolutions followed around the world, the consequences were similar. Only in the last two decades have we come to realise carbon’s most insidious effect. Burning hydrocarbons has released billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, trapping the energy of the sun and potentially changing the world’s climate.

Often the destructive forces of the elements are unleashed by deliberate human action. The strength of iron has made it not only the beneficial tool of peaceful industry, but also the brutally efficient and bloody weapon of war, in swords, guns, ships and tanks. Iron has also been the subject of conflict: for almost a century, the great powers of Europe went to war to obtain control of the vast iron ore and coke reserves of the Ruhr and Alsace Lorraine.

Throughout my career I have seen how oil, the ‘black gold’, has driven men’s passions, desires and greed. The world has become very dependent on oil and therefore anxious about securing reliable supplies of it. Oil confers powers on leaders who control it but is sometimes more of a curse than a benefit to the countries that produce it.

But in the history of the elements, humanity has committed the greatest acts of cruelty in its quest for ownership of gold. Over half a millennium, this precious metal has inspired intense greed, madness and violence, driving people to plunder, kill and enslave.

One element stands above all others in its destructive power. Uranium is the element which defined the post-war era. It is tied to one of the darkest moments in human history: the detonation of an atomic bomb over Hiroshima. From that dark moment came the great hope that we could
use uranium’s extraordinary energy for creation rather than destruction. But the great hope of cheap and abundant nuclear-generated electricity has been dogged by dread and fear. Uranium continues to command power on the global stage as we struggle to control the spread of nuclear weapons. By unlocking its power, we have created the potential for our own destruction.

So great is the influence of these elements that they have taken on personalities of their own: uranium, the powerful and the fearful; gold, the alluring and hypnotic; and iron, the strong and dependable. But, in a sense, their story is nothing more than the story of seven arrangements of protons, neutrons and electrons, the pattern which gives each element its character. It is tempting to think of these characteristics as inevitable or even uncontrollable. But each element’s character is determined by the choices we make. We are in control of our own destiny, and the elements are merely the tools for our progress or our destruction. We are not slaves of the elements; we are their masters.

And so this book is not about the elements
per se.
Rather, it is about how people have harnessed the intrinsic powers of the elements to shape our cultural, economic and social existence, and in doing so have transformed our world. I have seen much of this transformation first-hand, and so this story of seven elements also contains a personal element. It takes you on a journey of my adventures with oil barons in Russia, merchants in Venice, tribesmen in Colombia and computer wizards in Silicon Valley. And along the way, we explore the stories of remarkable times and remarkable individuals – Pizarro, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Curie – and their deep connection with the elements. They changed the course of history. They demonstrated the elements’ latent potential to inspire and equip good men to do good and evil men to do evil. Whether we continue to use these elements for common human progress and prosperity, or for individual greed and iniquity, is up to us.

The American physicist Richard Feynman summed it up through a Buddhist proverb: ‘To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.’
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P
LOUGHING WITH EASE INTO
her opponent’s wooden frame, the ironclad Confederate State Ship
Virginia
marked a turning point in naval history. ‘The crash below the water was distinctly heard,’ recalled the flag officer of the opposing USS
Cumberland
, ‘she commenced sinking, gallantly firing her guns as long as they were above water.’
¹
But her fire simply bounced off the
Virginia’s
impenetrable iron hull.

During the American Civil War in March 1862, the CSS
Virginia
attacked the Federal ships at Hampton Roads in Virginia. The sinking of USS
Cumberland
led to the loss of about a third of its crew in what an officer on her deck described as ‘a scene of carnage unparalleled in the water’.
²
The
Virginia
had been rebuilt from a sunken wooden-framed ship, the USS
Merrimack
, with makeshift equipment and poor engines. She had one great advantage: her two-inch-thick armoured plate which her opponent’s wooden ships were unable to break. The Union forces panicked; if the
Virginia
could overcome the Union blockade at Hampton Roads, she could steam up the Potomac and shell Washington. That evening President Lincoln ‘went repeatedly to the window and looked down the Potomac – the view being uninterrupted for forty miles – to see if the
Merrimack
was not coming to Washington’.
³

Fortuitously, the Union forces had been developing their own ironclad, the
Monitor
, with an even thicker plate of eleven inches. Hearing of the advance of the
Virginia
, the ship set sail for Hampton Roads. The next day the first ever clash between ironclads took place. A lithograph depicting the conflict, made by the prolific printmaking firm of Currier & Ives,
hangs in my office.
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I bought the print a long time ago because I liked the battle scene, not realising its significance. In the foreground the smaller and lighter
Monitor
darts towards the
Virginia
, both ships with guns blazing, smoke and steam billowing from their decks.
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‘No battle that was ever fought, caused as great a sensation throughout the civilized world,’ wrote eyewitness naval officer William Harwar Parker.
⁶

It was an arduous fight: the ships engaged for more than four hours at close range. At first the
Virginia
fired exploding shells and the
Monitor
flung back solid shot, but both simply bounced off the iron hulls ‘with no more effect, apparently, than so many pebbles stones thrown by a child’.
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Soon they resorted to ramming tactics, but, by mid-afternoon, with no fatalities, the two vessels disengaged. The ships suffered only dents, and the crews, sealed in isolation behind thick iron walls, were virtually unhurt.
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Sitting down to eat after the battle, the crew of the USS
Monitor
were all in high spirits. ‘Well gentlemen,’ said Assistant Secretary Gustavus Fox, coming on board later to commend the crew, ‘you don’t look as though you were just through one of the greatest naval conflicts on record.’
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Iron had embodied masculine strength and aggression long before the Battle of Hampton Roads. Its strength is one of the reasons why life is possible on this planet. Most of the Earth’s core is made of iron. As the solid inner core spins, and conversion currents surge through the liquid outer core, a magnetic field is produced around the Earth. This keeps at bay the solar wind, an ionising radiation harmful to life. The first human uses of iron are difficult to trace due to the ease with which the metal corrodes, meaning that ancient iron objects are much rarer than those made of more durable metals such as gold and silver.
¹⁰
However, iron objects begin to appear after approximately 3500
BC
in the form of jewellery, domestic implements and, most importantly, weapons. Iron went on to be used as a bloody tool of ancient war in the form of iron swords, shields and spears.