Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical BoyhoodLong before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and bestselling writer, 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, the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings 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. |
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acid alkali metals alkaline earth metals atomic weights Auntie barium beautiful became blue bomb Braefield brilliant bulbs burned carbon century chemical chemist chemistry chlorine color compounds copper crystals Curies cuttlefish Davy discovered discovery earth electric electrons elements emitted energy experiments father feeling felt filaments fire flame fluorescent garden glass glow gold heat Humphry Davy hydrogen imagined iron knew later Lavoisier light London looked loved magnetic Mapesbury melting Mendeleev ment mercury minerals mother never osmium oxide oxygen parents particles perhaps periodic table phlogiston phosphorus physical pitchblende platinum polonium potassium properties radioactive radium rare-earth rays salts scheelite seemed sense showed silver smell sodium solution sometimes sort Stephen Wiltshire substance sulfide sulfur tantalum tellurium thorium thought tiny tion told took tube Uncle Abe Uncle Dave Uncle Tungsten uranium valency vanadium wire wondered X-rays yellow zinc