Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

You might have been a precocious child in your day, but you probably weren't as precocious as Oliver Sacks, whose interest in -- and talent for -- science seems to have manifested itself shortly after he learned to talk. This book is two things: a personal history of an obsession with all things metallic and chemical and a clever, informative, and superbly well-written account of the history of science as told through one British child's home-brewed education. These are both unlikely subjects, so I doubt that "Uncle Tungsten" will be to everyone's taste, but scientific near-illiterates -- like myself -- may find this highly personalized guided tour around the history of science and the periodic table rather charming. Young Sacks's own show more scientific explorations seem to have closely followed the development of scientific thought itself: to hear him tell it, he raised himself on Victorian-era scientific texts. Whether this was the result of coincidence or some subtle manipulations by his family, many of whose members were also deeply invested in the sciences, is never quite clear. But it, in any event, it makes for a good read. Sacks is particularly good at explaining how each successive refinement of atomic theory or the periodic table transformed our view of the universe. I knew a bit about the evolution of the atomic model, but Sacks explains very clearly why each advance was so shocking and so important to the scientists of that day. While it's obvious that he relishes remembering his happy, active childhood, he also wants us to see the big picture.

It's perhaps inevitable that "Uncle Tungsten" would have something of a nostalgic air, and I found this pretty agreeable. Sacks lovingly describes his parents, aunts, and uncles and fondly recounts their own scientific interests and contributions. Surprisingly, Unlikely as it may seem, Uncle Tungsten wasn't the author's only relative who had a lifelong obsession with a metal or compound. This book reads like a tribute to his large and loving family, whose guiding values seem to have been education and curiosity. It's also an elegy for a lost boyhood community, one in which science brought together and provided a sort of safe haven for all manner of misfits and odd ducks, kids who could be expected to be bullied mercilessly in most boarding-school environments. As a child, Sacks was as much a collector as an experimenter, building up a large collection of all sorts of scientific materials. He laments that most of the houses that sold these raw materials for scientific play have since disappeared. It's sometimes a bit alarming to read about Sack's adventures with potentially explosive chemicals, conducted mostly while he was still in short pants, but it made me question what we've lost now that, these days, of nerdy kids often get into computer games, or programming, or less explicitly physical kinds of intellectual play. "Uncle Tungsten" isn't quite what I expected, and it's an odd amalgam of personal and scientific history, but I'm still glad I picked it up. show less

Summary: A memoir of Sacks boyhood and his explorations of chemistry encouraged by an uncle who used tungsten to manufacture incandescent bulbs.

I’ve enjoyed several of Oliver Sacks books recounting various neurological conditions and the workings of the human brain. I had not been aware of this book until receiving it as a gift. Sacks employs his gifts in telling the story of his childhood, and particularly his fascination with chemistry. In some ways, it came with the territory. His parents were both doctors, who saw patients at their home or permitted Oliver to come on house calls his father would make.

From childhood, Sacks was fascinated with metals and other substances, their color, their weight, how they responded to heating, to show more being combined with other chemicals. This fascination was fed by by his “Uncle Tungsten” a.k.a Uncle Dave. He was called Uncle Tungsten not only because he made incandescent lamps using tungsten wire, but because he was truly enamored of tungsten, thinking it quite a wonderful metal. He shared this wonder with young Oliver, as well as showing him other metals including aluminum and what happened when you applied mercury to its surface.

Eventually Uncle Tungsten showed him how to set up his own lab bench with the apparatus he needed and how to use it safely. Inevitably there were “stinks and bangs” including an episode with a cuttlefish that made a dwelling uninhabitable for a time. The story is one of curious, self-directed learning that studied spectra, chemical reactions, and families of elements. His discovery of the periodic table, Mendeleev’s Garden, helped make sense of why certain elements were similar in character to others, and even helped predict the character of elements yet to be discovered.

Perhaps the most fascinating chapters were those on “cold” light–fluorescent and phosphorescent elements–and that on X-rays and how they were produced. Here it was Uncle Abe who exposed him to things like radium, at a time when people were only beginning to understand the detrimental effects of radiation on the human body. He speaks of viewing a grain of radium through a spinthariscope and the “shooting stars” he saw through the eyepiece. One wonders if there was any connection between these youthful explorations and the ocular melanoma that resulted in Sacks death.

Sacks did not take up a career in chemistry, obviously. But in this memoir we see the curiosity that fueled his neurological research, his quest to understand how things worked. What a wonderful thing that there were adults in his life who nurtured that curiosity while allowing him the space to pursue self-directed learning. He was a “researcher” long before he became a researcher. And this led to the wonder beyond laws and equations and tables to memorize, the wonder of color, of order, of chemical reactions, and so much more. For Sacks, science became a matter of wonder and wondering.

In our own era of mistrust of science, one wonders if we’ve missed something in science education. What if, instead of mistrust of “authorities” we worked to foster curiosity and wonder? What if, instead of making pronouncements, we worked to foster curiosity? What if instead of endless encouragements of vaccines and masks, we invited curiosity about how COVID is so cussedly good at infecting its human hosts and what happens in the body when it does?

I don’t know if that would change any of our discussions, but I do wonder if a healthy dose of curiosity and wonder, like that which characterized Oliver Sacks “chemical boyhood,” might do us all a bit of good. show less

One of my favorite science biographies. Sacks weaves a tremendous amount of chemical history into his bio and takes some effort if you don't have a science background but I believe it's worth the effort. He grew up in a different time. Chemistry kits now are somewhat boring because many of the really interesting chemicals have been removed over the years due to well-founded worries about toxicities. Sacks grew up when you could still go and buy chemicals that had dual use as something useful and as a poison. OK, the poisons were/are useful but that's not the point!

I used to assign it over 10 years ago to my General Chemistry I students as required reading and while they appreciated the information, they found it a difficult read over show more 4-6 weeks of time. The footnotes sometimes span more than one page you can't simply ship through this book without taking time to look up some information. I don't mean to suggest that that detracts from the book but it does make it a potentially challenging read for many people.

It's worth it.

As an aside, it was students' reactions to this book that resulted in a still-running joke in our department. Part of the assignment was for students to write a few paragraphs about the book and a couple of students in each class would complain about the "plot" and that they didn't like my choice of "novels". Hmm. show less

Wonderfully engaging memoir. Sacks’s conveys with deceptive simplicity and clarity the wonders of chemistry and the excitement (and the history of the last couple of centuries, no mean feat to do this so clearly and concisely!) of scientific discovery, as well as his joyous inquisitiveness as a child and his excitement at discovering this world of science. At the same time, it’s sad to read about the abuse and isolation he and his brother endured at the school they were sent to during WW2.
Typical of his generous, positive view is that even these sad times (like his brother’s eventual mental illness, and his parents’ unawareness of his own suffering at the horrible school and their inexplicably thoughtless, even insensitive, show more behavior, and his own anxieties and isolation) never sound regretful or self-centeredly whiny, though he describes them forthrightly. He’s generous and direct and loving in his description of his passions, as well as his depiction of his enormously engaging, supportive and remarkable family. It’s refreshing to read a personal account that is not tortured or blaming. show less

This is an unusual sort of memoir. Sacks' family was extensive and largely of a technical turn of mind. Both parents were doctors, his aunts and uncles included a lightbulb manufacturer and a biologist. And so he becomes interested in chemistry almost as a result of being surrounded by it. Uncle Dave, the lightbulb manufacturer, had samples of all sorts of filament materials and so he introduces the young Oliver to metals, their origins, their ores and their properties. From here is a brief step to general chemistry. His parents let him set up a chemistry lab in a spare room on the back of the house and from this report its a wonder that any of them made it out alive!
There is quite a lot of the history of science in here, the move from show more alchemy to chemistry, the development of the periodic table, the discoveries of different elements and the structure of the atom. There is a lot less about Sacks' childhood. It is almost mentioned in passing along side the shifting interest in all things chemical. He describes his school being evacuated during the first art of the war and the dreadful experience he had there, but it barely makes more than a paragraph. His brother's response to the school and the impact on him mental health is hardly more than a couple of lines. Which makes for an odd read, if I'm honest. It's not a memoir of childhood, more a memoir of an interest in chemistry. As a scientist myself, I knew (or once knew) most of the technical detail in here. In which case, for me, it was more a refresher and reminder of what makes science so enthralling. I'm not sure what the non-technical reader would make of it. show less

I enjoy Oliver Sack's works. For one who is such an accomplished scientific figure in the medical world, his prose writing is so good. "Uncle Tungsten", published first in 2001, is his memoir of his life and times in pre and immediately post war England. Sack's family were Jews who had immigrated to England around the turn of the 20th century. His parents were physicians and his uncles (he came from quite a large family) were scientists and entrepeneurs. Uncle "Tungsten" owned and ran a factory that produced light bulbs and he was deeply knowledgeable about heavy metals that could be used as filaments in these early bulbs. In addition to Uncle Tungsten, Sacks's family members were brainy and colorful characters who are quite fun to read show more about.

Through Uncle (Dave) "Tungsten", Sacks's intellectual curiosity in chemistry was aroused. (Mathematics was also an obsession.) At an early age, he acquired all manner of chemicals and set up his own laboratory where he conducted experiments to understand better the chemical properties of various elements and compounds. One amazing aspect of the story is how easy it was for Sacks to acquire chemicals that are quite dangerous and how tolerant his parents were of the goings-on in his lab in an attached shed. One cannot imagine such liberality or forbearance today.

In many ways, Sacks's memoir gives the history of chemistry advances in the 19th and 20th century. He describes the breakthrough work of many of the icons of early chemistry -- Boyle, Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, Mendeleev and others. His burning impulse to understand how the physical world was constructed and interacted is plain to see and marked him as an unusual young person of great intellectual potential.

What's perhaps even more compelling in Sacks's story is his depiction of life before and during the war. Sacks, born in 1933, was shipped off to boarding schools away from London during the Blitz and his memories (many were not happy ones) give a fascinating view of life during this time. His family was closely connected to the Jewish community in London and his stories about this culture are interesting and evocative; he says that this tight knit society ceased to be after the war.

His path through the world of chemistry progresses through increasing levels of complexity. Some of his descriptions of chemical laws and processes are above my understanding; they made me aware of how much about chemistry I have forgotten, or, more likely, never knew. When he reached atomic realms of the periodic table of elements and structure of atomic entities, I was quite lost. Notwithstanding, it's worth slogging through the esoteric parts of the book, if for nothing more than to gain an appreciation of this young man's remarkable intellectual focus and his passion for knowledge. show less

Memory is Precious: I loved reading this book for multiple reasons, but I will restrict myself to mentioning two. The first is that it is a well constructed story with excellent writing---a combination I cannot resist. The narrative moves at a pace to engage and captivate the reader without making the story just a rush to get to the next page. Writing that is thoughtful makes sure that the reader will savor and think about the events presented. This is worth a read merely to have the understanding of one more perspective presented well.

But there is more to the book that makes me give this an enthusiastic five stars. As a chemist I was delighted to read a book that gave insight into this space of history of the chemistry profession. show more The history is two-fold: first it is a history of childhood enthusiasm for science and second it is a history of chemistry in the middle of the 1900s. many a child is enthusiastic about something. For all those children who loved science but never had the means to explore this book will bring sadness at what they lost for not being given such freedom and support. But the book also brings joy at reading that someone, somewhere had the chance to be the brilliant child you always thought you were. Today we highly restrict certain chemicals and also have an emphasis on safety in working with all chemicals. Sacks presents a time period when chemistry and science in general was done with little concern for safety. Instead of glossing over things Sacks presents information and experiments without deluding the reading into thinking it was perfectly safe.

This book is an excellent exploration of multiple themes that are well worth thinking about. I challenge anyone to read it and not find something in it that doesn't provoke some thoughts about what you are doing now with what you are enthusiastic about or what you loved childhood and now have lost as an adult. show less