David Cerruti’s Reviews > Uncle Tungsten > Status Update

Toward the end of 1997, Ronald Hoffmann . . . sent me an intriguing parcel. It contained . . . a little bar of a very dense, greyish metal, which fell onto the floor as I opened the package. I recognized it at once by its feel and its sound.
The clonk served as a sort of Proustian mnemonic, and instantly brought Uncle Tungsten to mind. . . . and it is to Ronald, therefore, that I dedicate this book.

There was also Uncle Abe, my physics uncle, who had started me on spectroscopy. He was regarded as the most brilliant of his father’s eighteen children.
But he was also perfectly capable of turning his mind to practical and commercial ends too. He played a part in developing Marmite, the widely used vitamin-rich yeast extract developed early in the century (my mother adored this; I hated it).

Exploring this took me away from my lab, took me to a new book that immediately became my bible, the CRC Handbook of Physics and Chemistry, a thick, almost cubical book of nearly three thousand pages, containing tables of every imaginable physical and chemical property, many of which, obsessively, I learned by heart.
[DC comment: I still have the 40th edition, 1958-1959]

When I was fourteen or fifteen . . . the Yom Kippur service ended in an unforgettable way, for Schechter, who always put great effort into the blowing of the shofar – he would go red in the face with exertion – produced a long, seemingly endless note of unearthly beauty, and then dropped dead before us on the bema, the raised platform where he would sing. I had the feeling that God had killed Schechter.

Sodium was much cheaper. I obtained a good-sized lump of it – about three pounds – and made an excursion with my two closest friends, Eric and Jonathan. I pulled the sodium out of its oil with tongs and flung it into the water beneath. It took fire instantly and sped around with a huge sheet of yellow flame above it. We all exulted – this was chemistry with a vengeance!

When the Elements was finally published – in 1789, just three months before the French Revolution – it took the scientific world by storm.
By 1791 Lavoisier could say, ‘all young chemists adopt the theory and from that I conclude that the revolution in chemistry has come to pass.’
Three years later Lavoisier’s life was ended, at the height of his powers, on the guillotine.

Pop was a calm, unflappable driver when he went on his housecalls . . . but before the war there was a very different side to him. He also had a motorcycle, a Scott Flying Squirrel, with a two-stroke, 600 cc, watercooled engine, and a high-pitched exhaust like a scream. It developed nearly thirty horsepower, and was much more akin, he liked to say, to a flying horse.

Now I seemed intimidated, timid, did not start fights or conversations, withdrew, kept my distance. I did indeed keep a distance, in almost all ways, from the school. For I was fearful of more bullying or beating.
[Years later, Sacks would set a powerlifting record in California, with a 600 pound squat lift.]

In early September 1939, war broke out. My parents were greatly worried about the consequences of separating a little boy – I was just six – from his family and sending him to a makeshift boarding school in the Midlands, but they felt they had no choice. The headmaster . . . was vicious and sadistic. Once, when he had broken a cane on my eight-year-old bottom, he roared, ‘Damn you, Sacks!'