Hydrogen

"The fact [is] that I, a chemist, engaged here in writing my stories about chemistry, have lived a different season." For Primo Levi that "different season" was a place called Auschwitz. An assimilated Italian Jew, Levi quit his job at a pharmaceutical factory, joined a band of anti-fascist partisans, was betrayed and captured. At Auschwitz, he was skilled prisoner 17451Z forced to work in a chemical lab adjacent to the Nazi death camp. In 1947 he began writing a series of autobiographical works, including If This Is a Man and The Truce (Penguin Modern Classics, 1979), which intermingled stories of his captivity with metaphysical reflections. His most recent work is The Periodic Table (Schocken Books, 1984), first published as II sistema periodico (Einaudi Editore SpA, 1975), in which Levi reflects on how 21 elements have figured in his life. In this excerpt from the book, Levi describes an early experiment with hydrogen. Levi was found dead April 11, 1987 in Rome, an apparent suicide. He was 67years old. It was January. Enrico came to call for me right after dinner: his brother had gone up into the mountains and had left him the keys to the laboratory. I dressed in a flash and joined him on the street. During the walk I learned that his brother had not really left him the keys: this was simply a compendious formulation, a euphemism, the sort of thing you said to someone ready to understand. His brother, contrary to his habit, had not hidden the keys, nor had he taken them with him; what's more, he had forgotten to repeat to Enrico the pro hibition against appropriating these same keys, and the punishment threatened should Enrico disobey. To put it bluntly, there were the keys, after months of waiting-, Enrico and I were determined not to pass up the opportunity. We were sixteen, and I was fascinated with Enrico. He was not very active, and his scholastic output was pretty meager, but he had virtues that distinguished him from all the other members of the class, and he did things that nobody else did. He possessed a calm, stubborn courage, a precocious capacity to sense his own future and to give it weight and shape. He turned his back (but without contempt) on our interminable discussions, now Platonic, now Darwinian, later still Bergsonian; he was not vulgar, he did not boast of his virile attributes or his skill at sports, he never lied. He knew his limitations, but we never heard him say (as we all told each other, with the idea of currying comfort, or blowing off steam): "You know, I really think I'm an idiot." He had a slow, foot-slogging imagination: he lived on dreams like all of us, but his dreams were sensible; they were obtuse, possible, contiguous to reality, not romantic, not cosmic. He did not experience my tormented oscillation between the heaven (of a scholastic or sports success, a new friend ship, a rudimentary and fleeting love) and the hell (of a failing grade, a remorse, a brutal revelation of an inferiority which each time seemed eternal, definitive). His goals were always attainable. He dreamed of promotion and studied with patience things that did not interest him. He wanted a microscope and sold his racing bike to get it. He wanted to be a pole vaulter and went to the gym every evening for a year without making a fuss about it, breaking any bones, or tearing any ligament, until he reached the mark of 3.5 meters he had set himseIf, and then stopped. Later he wanted a certain woman and he got her, he wanted the money to live quietly and obtained it after ten years of boring, prosaic work. We had no doubts: we would be chemists, but our expectations and hopes were quite different. Enrico asked chemistry, quite reasonably, for the tools to earn his living and have a secure life. I asked for something entirely different; for me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I was fed up with books, which I still continued to gulp down with indiscreet voracity, and searched for another key to the highest truths: there must be a key, and I was certain that, owing to some monstrous conspiracy to my detriment and the world's, I would not get it in school. In school they loaded me with tons of notions which I diligently digested, but which did not warm the blood in my veins. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: "I will understand this, too, I will understand everything, but not the way they want me to. [will find a shortcut, I will make a lock-pick, [will push open the doors." It was enervating, nauseating, to listen to lectures on the problem of being and knowing, when everything around us was a my tery pressing to be revealed: the old wood of the benches, the sun's sphere beyond the windowpanes and the roofs, the vain flight of the pappus down in the June air. Would all the philosophers and all the armies of the world be able to construct this little fly? No, nor even understand it: this was a shame and an abomination, another road must be found. We would be chemists, Enrico and I. We would dredge the bowels of the mystery with our strength, our talent: we would grab Proteus by the throat, cut short his inconclusive metamorphoses from Plato to Augustine, from Augustine to Thomas, from Thomas to Hegel, from Hegel to Croce. We would force him to speak. This being our program, we could not afford to waste any opportunities. Enrico's brother, a mysterious and choleric person age, about whom Enrico did not like to talk, was a chemistry student, and he had in stalled a laboratory at the rear of a court yard, in a curious, narrow, twisting alleyway which branched off Piazza della Crocetta and stood out in the obsessive Turinese geometry like a rudimentary organ trapped in the evolved structure of a mammalian. The laboratory was also rudimentary: not in the sense of an atavistic vestige but in that of extreme poverty. There was a tiled work bench, very few glass receptacles, about twenty flasks with reagents, much dust and cobwebs, little light, and great cold. On our way we had discussed what we were going to do now that we had "gained access to the laboratory," but our ideas were confused. It seemed to us an embarras de richesses, and it was instead a different embarrassment. deeper and more essential: an embarrassment tied to an ancient atrophy of ours, of our family, of our caste. What were we able to do with our hands? Nothing, or al most nothing. The women, yes—our mothers and grandmothers had lively, agile hands, they knew how to sew and cook, some even played the piano, painted with watercolors, embroidered, braided hair. But we, and our fathers? Our hands were at once coarse and weak, regressive, insensitive: the least trained part of our bodies. Having gone through the first fundamental experiences of play, they had learned to write, and that was all. They knew the convulsive grip around the branches of a tree, which we loved to climb out of a natural desire and also (Enrico and I) out of a groping homage and return to the origins of the species; but they were unfamiliar with the solemn, balanced weight of the hammer, the concentrated power of a blade, too cautiously forbidden us, the wise texture of wood, the similar and diverse pliability of iron, lead and copper. If man is a maker, we were not men: we knew this and suffered from it. The glass in the laboratory enchanted and intimidated us. Glass for us was that which one must not touch because it breaks, and yet, at a more intimate contact, revealed it self to be a substance different from all others, sui generis, full of mystery and caprice. It is similar in this to water, which also has no kindred forms: but water is bound to man, indeed to life, by a long-lasting familiarity, by a relationship of multifarious necessity, due to which its uniqueness is hid den beneath the crust of habit. Glass, how ever, is the work of man and has a more recent history. It was our first victim, or, better, our first adversary. In the Crocetta laboratory there was the usual lab glass, in various diameters and long and short sections, all covered with dust: we lit the Bunsen burner and set to work. To bend the tube was easy. All you had to do was hold the section of tube steady over the flame: after a certain time the flame turned yellow and simultaneously the glass became weakly luminous. At this point the tube could be bent: the curve obtained was far from perfect, but in substance something took place, you could create a new, arbitrary shape; a potentiality became act. Wasn't this what Aristotle meant? Now, a tube of copper or lead. can also be bent, but we soon found out that the red-hot tube of glass possessed a unique virtue: when it had become pliable, you could, by quickly pulling on the two cold ends, pull it into very thin filaments, indeed unimaginably thin, so thin that it was drawn upwards by the cur rent of hot air that rose from the flame. Thin and flexible, like silk. So then silk and cotton too, if obtainable in a massive form, could be as inflexible as glass? Enrico told me that in his grandfather's town the fishermen take silkworms, when they are already big and ready to form the pupa and, blind and clumsy, try to crawl upon the branches; they grab them, break them in two with their lingers, and pulling on the two stumps ob Lain a thread of silk, thick and coarse, which they then use a fishing line. This fact, which I had no hesitation in believing, seemed to me both abominable and fascinating: abominable because of the cruel manner )f that death, and the futile use of a natural portent; fascinating because of the straight forward and audacious act of ingenuity it presupposed on the part of its mythical inventor. The glass tube could also be blown up; but this was much more difficult. You could close one end of a small tube: then blowing hard from the other end a bubble formed, very beautiful to look at and almost perfectly spherical but with absurdly thin walls. Even the slightest puff of breath in excess and the walls took on the iridescence of a soap bubble, and this was a certain sign of death: the bubble burst with a sharp little snap and its fragments were scattered over the floor with the tenuous rustle of eggshells. In some sense it was a just punishment; glass is glass, and it should not be expected to simulate the behavior of soapy water. If one forced the terms a bit, one could even see an Aesopian lesson in the event. After an hour's struggle with the glass, we were tired and humiliated. We both had in-flamed, dry eyes from looking too long at the red-hot glass, frozen feet, and fingers covered with burns. Besides, working with glass is not chemistry: we were in the laboratory with another goal. Our goal was to see with our eyes, to provoke with our hands, at least one of the phenomena which were described so offhandedly in our chemistry textbook. One could, for example, prepare nitrous oxide, which in Sestini and Funaro was still described with the not very proper and unserious term of laughing gas. Would it really be productive of laughter? Nitrous oxide is prepared by cautiously heating ammonium nitrate. The latter did not exist in the lab; instead there was ammonia and nitric acid. We mixed them, unable to make any preliminary calculations until we had a neutral litmus reaction, as a result of which the mixture heated up greatly and emitted an abundance of white smoke; then we decided to bring It to a boil to eliminate the water. In a short time the lab was filled with a choking fog, which was not at all laughable; we broke off our attempt, luckily for us, because we did not know what can happen when this explosive salt is heated less than cautiously. It was neither simple nor very amusing. I looked around and saw in a corner an ordinary dry battery. Here is something we could do: the electrolysis of water. It was an experiment with a guaranteed result, which I had already executed several times at home. Enrico would not be disappointed. I put some water in a beaker, dissolved a pinch of salt in it, turned two empty jam jars upside down in the beaker; then found two rubber-coated copper wires, attached them to the battery's poles, and fitted the wire ends into the jam jars. A minuscule procession of air bubbles rose from the wire ends: indeed, observing them closely you could see that from the cathode about twice as much gas was being liberated as from the anode. I wrote the well-known equation on the black board, and explained to Enrico that what was written there was actually taking place. Enrico didn't seem convinced, but by now it was dark and we were half frozen; we washed our hands, bought some slices of chestnut pudding and went home, leaving the electrolysis to continue on its own. The next day we still had access. In pliant obsequiousness to theory, the cathode jar was almost full of gas; the anode jar was half full: I brought this to Enrico's attention, giving myself as much importance as I could, and trying to awaken the suspicion that, I won't say electrolysis, but its application as the confirmation of the law of definite proportions, was my invention, the fruit of patient experiments conducted secretly in my room. But Enrico was in a bad mood and doubted everything. "Who says that it's actually hydrogen and oxygen?" he said to me rudely. "And what if there's chlorine? Didn't you put in salt?" The objection struck me as insulting:. How did Enrico dare to doubt my statement? I was the theoretician, only I: he, although the proprietor of the lab (to a certain degree, and then only at second hand), indeed, precisely because he was in a position to boast of other qualities, should have abstained from criticism. "Now we shall see," I said: I care fully lifted the cathode jar and, holding it with its open end down, lit a match and brought it close. There was an explosion, small but sharp and angry, the jar burst into splinters (luckily, I was holding it level with my chest and not higher), and there remained in my hand, as a sarcastic symbol, the glass ring of the bottom. We left, discussing what had occurred. My legs were shaking a bit; I experienced retrospective fear and at the same time a kind of foolish pride, at having confirmed a hypothesis and having unleashed a force of nature. It was indeed hydrogen, therefore: the same element that burns in the sun and stars, and from whose condensation the universes are formed in eternal silence. English translation Copyright © 1984 by Schocken Books Inc. Reprinted by permission.

Hydrogen

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of