Theodore Gray’s The Elements serves to remind us that chemical elements are not just interesting but also beautiful. When the guest stirs the hot tea, the spoon will seem to be eaten away by it. The book’s title refers to a practical joke: Chemists have been known to serve guests tea and supply them with a spoon fashioned from gallium, which looks like aluminum but melts at about 85.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Döbereiner’s studies of strontium, which led him to group elements into columns like those later used in the first periodic tables, were encouraged by Goethe that Wilhelm Röntgen thought he had gone insane when he first discovered x rays and that the talented chemist Maria Goeppert-Mayer struggled for legitimacy for her entire career-but was nevertheless billed as a “mother” rather than a scientist when she won the Nobel Prize. He describes the brilliance-and shortsightedness-of Dmitri Mendeleev the rise of the semiconductor industry the connection of wars to the discovery of new elements the widespread cadmium poisoning that took place in 20th-century Japan and the practice in colonial America of putting a silver coin in a milk jug to prevent the milk from spoiling. The story of how we came to discover and understand the elements touches on topics that range from the hot centers of stars to human folly. But as Sam Kean details in The Disappearing Spoon, behind those lettered boxes lies a sordid past. Few of us would ever associate the periodic table of the elements with high intrigue.

The invisible spoon