The Poisoner's Handbook
dblum | July 9, 2010I started Speakeasy Science in late January on my author website. I'd finished my book on the invention of modern forensic toxicology in 1920s New York City - The Poisoner's Handbook - but I'd developed an addiction to writing about chemistry and culture.
It was my first heady experience of working solely for myself. I've been a staff journalist at five newspapers, a freelance writer for a list of newspapers, magazines and websites, and a book author. I've worked with brilliant editors and indifferent ones, publishers who were generous, publishers who were penny counters.
My blog, right down…
dblum | June 11, 2010I was sorry to see the deadline pass on The Poisoner's Handbook audio book giveaway because I received so many smart and thoughtful ideas for writing about chemistry in our culture. And I found it really difficult to pick just five winners - so first I'd like to say thanks to everyone who wrote in for the contest.
If I selected your idea for a free audiobook of The Poisoner's Handbook, you will have received a direct e-mail from me by now.
As a writer I'm drawn to specific ideas, one in which I can clearly see the story. So expect to see future posts based on these excellent suggestions:…
dblum | June 10, 2010I'm having a Tony Hayward moment - the oil spill is disrupting my plans. I wonder if I can interest a television network in letting me talk about how much I want my life back.
Okay, had to get that out of my system. Sorry. Kind of a cheap shot.
Because I really just want to apologize for running late on The Poisoner's Handbook Giveaway announcement. There are 31 terrific entries and I had planned to notify winners yesterday.
Then I went chasing the question of oil plume semantics instead. Still would like to write more on that subject. But first, getting my life back. I'll be sending out…
dblum | June 3, 2010 The second post I wrote for this blog was partly to explain the title:
"Why Speakeasy Science? Well, first because I just wrote a book, The Poisoner's Handbook, which is set in Jazz-Age New York, which was home to some 30,000 speakeasies. Also I like the historical feel of the name. I've always been interested in the intersection of science and culture and I find moments in history, where those two forces pull at each other, to be wonderfully illuminating. Speakeasy itself appeals to my sense of word play - I like the idea of speaking easily about science. And finally - some science…
dblum | April 28, 2010One evening, in the early summer of 2008, a Colorado sheriff's deputy named Jonathan Allen came home to find that his wife had made him a "special" dinner. Waiting on the table was his favorite spicy spaghetti dish and a big leafy bowl of salad.
As he told investigators later, the salad was surprisingly bitter. But his wife told him it was a "spring mix" and he assumed it contained another of those trendy herbs that people use to liven up their greens. At least, he thought that way until he ended up in the hospital suffering from severe stomach cramps and a wildly speeding heart.
After his…
dblum | April 24, 2010The chemical symbol for the metallic element gold is Au, taken from the Latin word aurum meaning 'shining dawn'. In the Periodic Table of Elements it occupies a companionable neighborhood of other metals, tucked neatly between platinum (Pt) and mercury (Hg).
But as origin of its chemical symbol indicates, we've long found difficult to be prosaic about an element that possesses such a sunlit beauty. People have been creating ornaments of gold for more than 5,000 years; whole myths have been created about it, such as the ancient Greek tale of King Midas, who loved gold so much that he persuaded…
dblum | April 23, 2010In 16th century France, there lived a king with a beautiful and somewhat mysterious mistress. Diane de Poitiers was almost 20 years older than Henri II but she looked like one of his contemporaries. She had skin of a near porcelain white and auburn hair as fine as silk thread.
Famed for her intellect as well as her beauty, Diane was not only the king's lover but one of his closest political advisors. He even encouraged her to sign some of his official correspondence HenriDiane. After Henri died in 1559, his angry and resentful widow banished Diane from the court. She died at the age of 66…
dblum | April 21, 2010In an earlier post, I wrote about the possible copper poisoning of the great British poet and artist William Blake. The very simple lesson inherent in that story is that a strong dose of metals on a regular basis is generally bad for a person's health.
But one could argue that this is too simple a lesson. That not all metals are equally dangerous. In support of that caveat, in today's post, I'm featuring a short excerpt from my book, The Poisoner's Handbook, which concerns a human circus exhibit and a steady diet of silver nitrate:
In the chilly January of 1924, scientists at the New York…
dblum | April 17, 2010Last week, the U.S. Army announced that its excavation old chemical munitions dump - unfortunately located in one of Washington D.C.'s more elegant neighborhoods - had turned up remnants of two of the ugliest weapons developed in World War I.
By which I mean compounds used in the production of mustard gas and the arsenic-laced blistering agent Lewisite. In fact - this is my favorite part - the glassware used in Lewisite production started smoking as workers exposed it, halting the excavation for safety reasons.
The 1920s nickname for Lewisite, by the way, was "dew of death." But despite the…
dblum | April 16, 2010In the forensic laboratories of the 1920s, a chemist checking for poison could make a beaker glow with the brilliance of a gemstone. Color tests, as they were called, derived from the fact that many toxic materials turn a specific hue if exposed to the right mixture of heat, cold, acid and base. The results can be eerily beautiful: the gorgeous blue of cyanide, the crimson of carbon monoxide as it saturates blood, the peacocking green of arsenic.  A journalist, watching some tests, once compared the lab at the New York City medical examinerâs office to the glitter of Aladdinâs cave.
He…
dblum | April 12, 2010Recently, at events for my book, I sometimes find myself describing the gas carbon monoxide as a favorite poison. "It's just so efficient," I'll joke. "And I like things that work."
In an academic sense, I do respectfully admire carbon monoxide's simplicity (a carbon atom + an oxygen atom) and the way such basic chemical addition creates something so deadly. But in light of last week's mining disaster in West Virginia (the subject of two previous posts on this blog), I want to acknowledge that poisonous efficiency is mostly a formula for tragedy.
If you followed the news reports on the fiery…
dblum | April 2, 2010A few days ago, I wrote about the lessons I'd learned while a young journalist in North Georgia on how to safely drink illegal alcohol (Moonshine Days). Probably because I had moonshine on my mind, I ended sharing stories about it with family and friends during a recent visit to the state.
Just to let you know, my father, a retired entomologist from the University of Georgia, swears that he has disposed of the moonshine stock they once kept in the basement. Even though it tasted great. Really.
But beyond trading drinking experiences, the most interesting conversation I had was with old friend…
dblum | March 30, 2010A couple days ago, I wrote a post (Tyger, Tyger, Copper, Copper) about the theory that the late, great British poet William Blake (1757-1827) and been killed by copper poisoning due to years of acid-etching copper plates as a print maker.
One chemist promptly wrote to raise the possibility that it might instead have been acid poisoning. Blake used nitric acid to etch his plates and exposure to that corrosive compound, he pointed out, turns the skin yellow. One symptom of Blake's final illness was his deeply yellowed skin.
Nitric acid - sometimes called engraver's acid - has a long and…
dblum | March 27, 2010My first job out of college, I was a police reporter for a small newspaper in North Georgia, situated in rolling foothills of the southern Appalachian mountains. Moonshine country, in fact.
I was hardly a month on the job when agents at the local office of the federal government's Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) offered to let me accompany them on a raid to break up a still. From which I learned that those back-mountain stills tend to be pretty grubby looking.
I got a better education in moonshine - or white liquor as most folks called it - from local firefighters. I hung out at the fire…
dblum | March 25, 2010Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake, the brilliant British poet, published "The Tyger" in 1794 and it's always been one of my favorite poems. I studied him during a brief period when I thought I might want to be a poet, a career plan undone by the fact that I hated it when others actually read my poetry.
Blake, obviously, didn't have that problem. But he had plenty of others. He struggled for recognition during his lifetime. He was plagued by chronic illness and also by apparent hallucinations. He…
dblum | March 17, 2010I find it ironic - okay, I find it slightly hilarious - that the house plant which results in the most calls to poison control centers is called the Peace Lily.
Next on the list is Pokeweed - which people have a bad habit of mistaking for other edible wild plants - followed by two holiday favorites, poinsettias and holly plants.
As the Peace Lily is popular at Easter, one could conclude that holiday plants are particularly dangerous. But there's actually a more interesting - if less amusing - background to such risks.
Most of the calls, of course, aren't funny at all. They concern curious…
dblum | March 15, 2010Let me begin with a confession: until I researched and wrote a book about poisons, The Poisoner's Handbook, I never paid too much attention to National Poison Prevention Week.
Like most of us, I was just too comfortable with our chemical culture, the toxic compounds that we use daily to clean our sinks and counters, polish our furniture and our fingernails, keep our cars running. We depend on these compounds and we live with them daily, never fully considering that we've turned ourselves into guinea pigs, test cases for chemical exposure.
They worried about this more acutely in the 1920s and…
dblum | March 13, 2010When I was eight years old, my sister and I discovered that a small tree in our Louisiana backyard was dropping some thickly shelled nuts into the grass. We loved eating fallen nuts; an enormous pecan tree carpeted the front yard with them every summer. But these were different - rounder and fatter.
Curious, we smashed a few on a brick, opening up some fleshy pale kernels inside. "Almonds!" I proposed hopefully. We sat down under the tree and prepared a feast. I don't fully remember what they tasted like. Slightly bitter, a little like a fresh leaf, a blade of grass. We were always tasting…
dblum | March 10, 2010After I wrote my last blog post on mercury, readers wrote to ask about the old-time antiseptic Mercurochrome which - as you might imagine - was named for the poisonous traces of mercury mixed into it.
One man wondered about childhood toxic exposure. Another noted that her mother still liked to tell the story of when she was a little girl and dumped Mercurochrome "all over her beautiful white bedspread." Â I had to laugh (my mother likes to tell the story of how I colored all over her white bedspread). But if you know Mercurochrome, you know that it would have made an incandescently brilliant…
dblum | March 9, 2010Elemental mercury is a slippery substance.
In the earth's crust, it anchors itself by bonding with other elements, creating materials like the rough coppery rock cinnabar, a crystalline combination of mercury and sulfur. Once cinnabar, or other metallic ores, are mined and crushed, mercury can be easily extracted. Then the warmer above-ground temperatures, the decrease in pressure, cause pure mercury to become a very odd liquid metal.
Unlike a drop of water, a drop of mercury touched by a finger does not wet the skin. Instead, it breaks into smaller drops, tiny glittering balls that…