The Disappearing Spoon: Chapter 12: Political Elements Summary & Analysis

Humans are flawed beings and thus the periodic table, which is a human invention, is necessarily flawed as well. As the reader has witnessed thus far, the periodic table may strive to be scientifically pure and objective but in reality is endowed with all the social problems, influences, and biases that surround its creation. When Marie Skłodowska—one of the most important Poles to ever live—was born in Warsaw in 1867, the Polish city was technically part of tsarist Russia. Educational opportunities for women were limited; after being tutored by her father, Skłodowska moved to Paris to study for her PhD at the Sorbonne. It was here that she fell in love with her future husband, Pierre Curie.

Marie and Pierre Curie had “perhaps the most fruitful collaboration in science history” thus far when they worked together in the 1890s. Studying uranium, Marie concluded that the radioactivity of an atom was unaffected by whatever electron bonds it may have. This vastly simplified—and enhanced—knowledge of radioactivity. She and Pierre were jointly awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics as a result. Like many 20th-century scientists, Marie was a refugee whose career was obstructed by imperial politics. Shortly after her Nobel Prize win, Marie noticed that the waste produced during the process of purifying uranium was 300 times more radioactive than the uranium itself. She immediately set to work researching what could explain this and ended up discovering two whole new elements. She won a second Nobel (in Chemistry this time) in 1911.

Marie named one of the elements polonium, after her “nonexistent” home country. It was the first time an element had been named for political reasons in this manner. Pierre was tragically killed in a street carriage accident in 1906. Shortly after, Marie was rejected from the French Academy of Sciences due to her gender and the suspicion that she was Jewish (she wasn’t). Not long after that, a newspaper published correspondence between Marie and her colleague, with whom she was having an affair. Fortunately for her (though not the world), World War I soon distracted the public from anything as trivial as her personal life. Polonium did not go down in history as a very important element. Ultimately, both Marie and her daughter, Irène, died of leukemia provoked by radiation exposure from their scientific research.

In 1910, a Hungarian aristocrat named György Hevesy began studying radioactivity in Manchester, England, under Ernest Rutherford. Frustrated with his inability to separate radium-D, Hevesy changed tactics and decided to inject a small amount into a living creature to see if the radioactive and nonradioactive lead that together constitute radium-D. He first tested it on dead tissue—in fact using the unappetizing meat that his landlady served him for dinner. He succeeded in detecting radiation in the meat, a discovery that triggered an upward turning point in his career. In 1920, he moved to Copenhagen to study with the quantum physicist Niels Bohr. This was at a time when the disciplines of chemistry and physics were moving further and further apart.

At the time, element 72 was yet to be discovered. According to legend, Bohr developed a mathematical proof that 72 was not a rare earth based on quantum mechanics. Working alongside a physicist and based on Bohr’s calculation, Hevenesy found 72 on his first try. The team named it hafnium, after the Latin name for Copenhagen. Despite this success, chemists tended to remain suspicious of quantum mechanics. Bohr won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics; around this time, people began to spread rumors that he had prophetic abilities. However, these beliefs were strongly influenced by legends that didn’t quite match up to reality. The calculation that Bohr made, which led to the immediate discovery of element 72, was actually built off the research of three chemists who’d come before him.  

The legend surrounding Bohr was mostly a testament to people’s enthusiasm about quantum mechanics. Hevesy was nominated for the 1924 Nobel Prize but—in part due to the way he straddled both physics and chemistry—he did not win. He moved to Germany and he was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel without winning, eventually returning to Copenhagen in the 1930s due to his Jewish ancestry. However, Nazi soldiers then arrived in Copenhagen in 1940 and destroyed Hevesy’s office searching for Nobel Prize medals he was keeping for two German winners, one of whom was Jewish and both of whom were persecuted by the Nazis. However, the soldiers didn’t find them, as Hevesy had already dissolved them in hydrochloric acids. Hevesy managed to successfully flee Copenhagen, returning after the end of the war. 

Lise Meitner was a German scientist who worked with a collaborator named Otto Hahn. Together, they proposed renaming the recently-discovered element brevium to protactinium. The Polish chemist who discovered the element, Kazimierz Fajans, narrowly lost out on the 1924 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for reasons that were never fully clarified. In any case, Meitner and Hahn were successfully in lobbying for the name to be changed to protactinium, and sometimes they are given credit for discovering the element itself. Meitner and Hahn had an extremely close (though platonic) bond. Despite the sexism of the time, Hahn recognized Meitner’s extraordinary talent.

The two made a good team, with Hahn focusing on the chemistry side of their work and Meitner on the physics. However, for the protactinium experiments Meinter ended up doing all the work, as Hahn was focused on the development of gas warfare. Yet Meitner still shared the credit with him equally. After the war, when the Nazis began a crackdown on Jewish scientists, Hahn—a gentile—resigned from his professorship in protest. Meitner’s parents, however, were Jewish converts to Protestantism. Yet she attempted to ignore the escalating threat posed by the Nazi regime, instead focusing on her work.

Meanwhile, scientists around the world were fixated on the question of whether, as Irène Joliot-Curie argued, the newly discovered transuranic elements could behave like lanthanum, which was a rare earth on the other side of the periodic table. In 1938, a colleague attempted to turn Meitner in to the authorities, and she fled to Sweden. She and Hahn continued their collaboration via letters and would meet secretly in Copenhagen. During one meeting, Hahn explained that he’d repeated Joliot-Curie’s experiments and found that the new elements weren’t like lanthanum—they appeared to be lanthanum (and barium). Whereas Hahn was bewildered, Meitner realized that Fermi hadn’t discovered new elements as everyone believed—he had discovered nuclear fission.

Hahn and Meitner knew that publishing this finding under Meitner’s name would be politically dangerous and Meitner thus agreed to have it be published in Hahn’s name only. After the war ended, the Nobel committee knew they wanted to award the Physics prize to work on nuclear fission. They were unsure whether Meitner or Hahn deserved it; there was certainly an extent to which they knew the pair had conducted research together, however one member argued that Hahn clearly deserved all the credit as Meitner hadn’t done anything significant in the past few years. (Of course, this was because she was a refugee hiding from the Nazis.) When Hahn was awarded the Prize, he didn’t mention the truth about his debt to Meitner. Meitner never won a Nobel, but in 1997 the element “hahnium” was renamed dubnium, while another new element was christened meitnerium.