This painting, The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus by Joseph Wright of Derby, was finished in 1795. A picture of this painting is included in Emsley’s book, while the actual painting currently resides at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Photo credit: http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0706/fig3.jpg
Like many of the things necessary for human life, it is really hard to get people excited about phosphorus. It provides the backbone of DNA and is essential in fertilizer (artificial or organic), but most people, even if they know that, probably don’t care. Similarly, it’s hard to get people interested in the perils of phosphorus, despite the fact that they are increasingly relevant in the modern world. When too much phosphorus gets into a body of water, it causes algae to grow rabidly, in a process called eutrophication, exhausting all the oxygen and making them “green and smelly, devoid of fish, unfit as sources of drinking water and unimaginable as places of recreation.”
That common apathy is why it’s so refreshing to read a book about phosphorus containing scheming alchemists, labor unions, spontaneously combusting countesses, smoke bombs, and firestorms. The 13th Element: the Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus by John Emsley details the history of phosphorus since it was first isolated in 1669 to the present in chapters organized by themes.
The history of phosphorus was dramatic from the very beginning. The element, the 13th to be isolated, was first discovered by an alchemist named Hennig Brandt, who was doing experiments by heating residues from his urine at the time. The sample he was heating burst into flames. At the time, “phosphorus” was just a generic term for a substance that gave off light, and like the philosopher’s stone, new “phosphoruses” were in demand. This new substance was a better “phosphorus” than many others since it did not have to absorb sunlight in order to glow. The discovery could have made Brandt a very rich man if he hadn’t hidden his manufacturing method. Instead, Brandt teased another alchemist, Johann Kunckel by acting like he would give him the method, and then sold the method to someone else. However Kunckel used Brandt’s hints to develop his own method and as a result, he is often mistakenly credited with the discovery.
Phosphorus was quickly adopted for a number of uses, some of them valid, all of them potentially disastrous. The fact that phosphorus glowed was taken as proof-positive of its medicinal value, and “despite the fact that it is one of the most toxic of the chemical elements – and never cured anyone of anything” doctors prescribed phosphorus for some ailments as late as 1923.
Perhaps more disastrous were the times when phosphorus worked. Phosphorus had been used in matches as early as 1791, but in the 1800’s phosphorus-containing matches took off. These matches were as effective as they were unsafe. The lucifer, a strike-anywhere match, was so volatile that Archduchess Matilda of Austria one caused one to ignite just by accidentally stepping on it. She caught fire and died shortly after. In response to these types of accidents, people developed safety matches, the kind that could only be struck on the box. However, these matches were slow to catch on since lucifers were still seen as more convenient. Accidents continued.
Even for the people who made them, matches could cause horrible health problems. In the 19th century, factory workers exposed to phosphorus fumes sometimes developed phosphorus necrosis or “phossy jaw” a condition where the gums would rot and pieces of the jaw would break off. In bad cases, the jawbone would have to be surgically removed. To highlight the dangers of phosphorus, Salvation Army Colonel James Barker would lead tours of match making factory, which ended with a visit to a family who made lucifer matches. When Barker turned out the lights, the family would glow in the dark.
Sometimes the damage was more deliberate. Another chapter treats the use of phosphorus as a murder weapon, particularly as an ingredient in rat poison. One near-miss story involves a wife poisoning her husband’s soup with rat poison. He discovered the poison in time to avoid death, because he happened to walk through a darkened hallway with the food and noticed it glowed in the dark. In less fortunate cases, a coroner could detect phosphorus poisoning in a corpse simply by turning off the lights.
Emsley also explains the role phosphorus had in numerous weapons of war, from smoke bombs, to the incendiary bombs that caused the Hamburg firestorm. (Hamburg, ironically, was the same city in which phosphorus was originally discovered). Emsley also discusses organo-phosphates (OPs) and their use in nerve gases, poisons that act by preventing the nervous system from re-using messenger chemicals. At the end of the Second World War, the Nazis had amassed enough tabun, a phosphorus-based nerve gas, to kill 12 trillion people. That’s more than 1,700 times the current world population. This particular part of phosphorus’s legacy has endured. Much of the research once directed at developing weapons like tabun and sarin directly led to milder compounds used widely today as insecticides in agriculture, and this connection to nerve gas perhaps undeservedly frightens people to this day.
The 13th Element is not uniformly exciting. Emsley’s focus is chemistry, and sometimes he takes a break from the action to indulge in long descriptions of chemical processes. But those moments of calm are the price paid for an informative and mostly very engrossing book. This is the closest phosphorus will ever get to being beach-reading, and for that reason Emsley deserves respect.