Uncle Tungsten: Memories Of A Chemical Boyhood (2001) (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
Dalton’s Round Bits of Wood Experimenting in my lab brought home to me that chemical mixtures were completely unlike chemical compounds. One could mix salt and sugar, say, in any proportion. One could mix salt and water – the salt would dissolve, but then one could evaporate it and recover the salt unchanged. Or one could take a brass alloy and recover its copper and zinc unchanged. When one of my dental fillings came out, I was able to distill off its mercury, unchanged. All of these – solutions, alloys, amalgams – were mixtures. Mixtures, basically, had the properties of their ingredients (plus one or two ‘special’ qualities perhaps – the relative hardness of brass, for example, or the lowered freezing point of salt water). But compounds had utterly new properties of their own. It was tacitly accepted by most chemists in the eighteenth century that compounds had fixed compositions and the elements in them would combine in precise, invariable proportions – practical chemistry could hardly have proceeded otherwise.
What do You think about Uncle Tungsten: Memories Of A Chemical Boyhood (2001) (2001)?
