The Egyptian (logo)

In the Members’ Lounge, there is a framed cover of the SCI Jubilee Edition of the Journal. Prominent on this cover is a design which was the SCI logo for many years, but is now disused. It can still be seen on the President’s and Chairmen’s Jewels and a few of the older Awards. It also features on the Chairman’s Jewel of the (now defunct) Birmingham Section which is also displayed in the Members’ Lounge. The flame of the Egyptian’s torch on this is a synthetic ruby. But what is it, and where did it come from?

The following is a paraphrase of a notice in the Jewish Guardian of 6 February 1931:

Mr Hyman Segal, aged 16.5 years, won a prize of £10 which was offered by the SCI for the most suitable design for an imprint in connection with the Society’s Jubilee Year. It was the first competition in which he had ever submitted a design and he won it in competition with artists from all over the Country.

Mr. Segal’s drawing embodies an Egyptian figure (for the ancient cradle of chemistry) holding a primitive brand. Chimneys in the background symbolise the growth of modern industry.

Similar notices appeared in The Star on 23 and 30 January 1931 and also in the Evening News on 5 March 1931. The latter included photographs of the artist and of his design. The £10 prize would have been about two weeks’ wages for a skilled artisan at the time – handy for a lad of 16.5!

An Apprentice Bookbinder?

Towards the end of the 18th Century, the son of a London blacksmith was apprenticed to a bookbinder. The young man had an enquiring mind and was further blessed by having a benevolent master who allowed him to broaden his knowledge by attending educational events, including what we would now call ‘works visits’.

During his apprenticeship, part of his duties included binding copies of Jane Marcet’s Conversations in Chemistry. Naturally, he looked within and was allowed to read a copy, which he found inspiring.

On completing his apprenticeship, he went to work for another bookbinder, who was not so liberal-minded as his old master. They did not get on well and the journeyman, still inspired by Mrs Marcet’s book, sought and eventually obtained employment in the laboratory of the Royal Institution. This employment suited him well and, besides keeping the place clean and preparing apparatus, he was soon assisting at the lectures given in the lecture theatre by Sir Humphrey Davy and working in collaboration with him. The invention of the Davy Safety Lamp for miners (for example) was probably a joint effort. The young man even stood in for Sir Humphrey on occasion and lectured in his place, showing great aptitude at this as well as at laboratory practice.

When Sir Humphrey went on to other work, his ex-assistant took over the lecturing duties to such good effect that he became famous -and still is! There is a picture of him, lecturing before a gathering of great people, in SCI London Headquarters at the foot of the stairs to the Garden Room, near the lecture theatre.

In case you haven’t guessed by now, he was Michael Faraday. SCI also has a copy of Mrs. Marcet’s book, though it is a later edition and would not have been bound by Michael Faraday

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Old time is a-flying; the atoms are dying;
Come, list to their parting oration:-
‘We’ll soon disappear to a heavenly sphere
‘On account of our disintegration,

‘Our action’s spontaneous in atoms uranious
‘Or radious, actinious, or thorious;
‘While for others the gleam of a heaven-sent beam
‘Must encourage our efforts laborious.

‘For many a day we’ve been slipping away
‘While the savants still dozed in their slumbers;
‘Till at last came a man with gold-leaf and tin can,
‘And detected our infinite numbers.’

So the atoms, in turn, we now clearly discern,
Fly to bits with the utmost facility;
They wend on their way, and in splitting, display
An absolute lack of stability.

‘Tis clear they should halt on the grave of old Dalton
On the way to celestial spheres;
And a few thousand million- let’s say a quadrillion-
Should bedew it with reverent tears.

There’s nothing facetious in the way that Lucretius
Imagined the chaos to quiver;
And electrons to blunder, together, asunder, In building up atoms for ever.

Composed by Professor Sir William Ramsay and recited by him at the
UCL Department of Chemistry Lab. Dinner in 1902.

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Pars Quinta – Chemistry as a Literary Formula

Most chemists think of their science as being divided mainly into only one more part than ancient Gaul: physical, inorganic, organic, and analytical chemistry.

But we should expect a fifth part in keeping with other important fifths - the fifth digit on hand and foot, the quintessence, Beethoven's Fifth, a fifth of Scotch, and even the ‘fifth column’ (happily gone). And there is a fifth part in chemistry, although it is too obscure to rate a chair on the faculty or a course in the curriculum of even the largest university. It is literary chemistry.

Strangely, and this may be the reason for its neglect by the Chemical Establishment, its practitioners are not chemists at all. They formulate only images.

Some chemists refer to the entire written record of chemistry as ‘the chemical literature.’ But this is highly euphemistic if we consider the almost illiterate quality of much of it. It could supply enough dangling participles alone to fill the horrible example sections of dozens of grammar books.

The pars quinta, however, is truly literary and is of ancient origin. It goes back to the time when there were only four elements instead of almost 104. But at least these four were dependable. None had lives of only a few seconds. One of them was elegantly described by the 17th century Spanish stylist, Luis de Gongora.

The ‘running silver’ metaphor in the second line of the first verse illustrates the perceptiveness of a good literary chemist. Laboratory chemists didn't realise that silver was an element like water until later. But it leads to the confusion of water with another element, quicksilver. In one of the triumphs of science, inorganic chemists eliminated this confusion by transmuting quicksilver into mercury. It is still nostalgically called quicksilver in the financial pages, but there its price prevents any confusion with water .

The literary chemistry of organic compounds is the most interesting in terms of their pharmacological properties. The pre-eminent example is Thomas De Quincey's The Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Its only flaw is that opium is such a mixture. Which component was responsible for which hallucination? We can forgive De Quincey for this because opium had not been well analysed in 1820. But if I were writing today, we would have to insist on separate confessions for each of its 20 odd alkaloid with possibly some footnotes on differences between optical isomers, to establish a better chemical-chimerical correlation.

About three decades after the Confessions, Heinrich Heine, with a show of German precision wrote of the effect of one of the purified opium alkaloids - an effect with little comfort for or suffering from a fatal sickness. In the last half of the poem he shows his preference for one of the two ‘brothers,’ morphine's sleep and death:

A century after the Confessions, Catherine Pozzi, the Marie Curie of literary chemistry, added another pure alkaloid poem:

What a pleasant way to prevent seasickness !

Sometimes laboratory operations becomes literary operations. The Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, uses the dizzying metaphor in La Rebelion de las Masas, ‘...in the Dutch countryside, where destiny had centrifuged me.’ He used another chemical operation in an observation of philosophic as well as literary interest to chemists: ‘One who discovers a new scientific truth first has to triturate almost all that he has learned and he arrives at that new truth with hands bloody from having cut off innumerable commonplaces.’ Other chemical procedures remain to be utilised. Why not, ‘After the third cocktail the alcohol refluxing in my brain dissolved my senses.’ Or, ‘Racial groups were chromatographed into districts of the city on a substrate of prejudice.’

Chemical kinetics is useful in describing interactions among people as well as among molecules, as Ortega y Gasset shows in: ‘Europe is not a thing but an equilibrium.’

And phase changes were used by Robert Herrick to create some of literary chemistry's most memorable lines:

Julia’s clothes not only melted themselves, they melted Herrick too. And they melt, or at least soften, anyone who reads about them three centuries later, beyond explanation of any phase rule.

These are only a few samples of literary chemistry. The definitive monograph remains to be crystallised. But they show its great breadth in time and place and suggest that it be given a position of honour alongside the other four parts of chemistry.