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particular heroes, had been nearly asphyxiated by nitrous oxide, poisoned himself with nitrogen peroxide, and severely inflamed his lungs with hydrofluoric acid. Davy also experimented with the first “high” explosive, nitrogen trichloride, which had cost many people fingers and eyes. He discovered several new ways of making the combination of nitrogen and chlorine, and caused a violent explosion on one occasion while he was visiting a friend. Davy himself was partially blinded, and did not recover fully for another four months. (We were not told what damage was done to his friend’s house.)
    The Discovery of the Elements
devoted an entire section to “The Fluorine Martyrs.” Although elemental chlorine had been isolated from hydrochloric acid in the 1770s, its far more active cousin, fluorine, was not so easily obtained. All the early experimenters, I read, “suffered the frightful torture of hydrofluoric acid poisoning,” and at least two of them died in the process. Fluorine was only isolated in 1886, after almost a century of dangerous trying.
    I was fascinated by reading this history, and immediately, recklessly, wanted to obtain fluorine for myself. Hydrofluoric acid was easy to get: Uncle Tungsten used vast quantities of it to “pearl” his lightbulbs, and I had seen great carboys of it in his factory in Hoxton. But when I told my parents the story of the fluorine martyrs, they forbade me to experiment with it in the house. (I compromised by keeping a small gutta-percha bottle of hydrofluoric acid in my lab, but my own fear of it was such that I never actually opened the bottle.)
    It was really only later, when I thought about it, that I became astonished at the nonchalant way in which Griffin (and my other books) proposed the use of intensely poisonous substances. I had not the least difficulty getting potassium cyanide from the chemist’s, the pharmacy, down the road—it was normally used for collecting insects in a killing bottle—but I could rather easily have killed myself with the stuff. I gathered, over a couple of years, a variety of chemicals that could have poisoned or blown up the entire street, but I was careful—or lucky. 3
    If my nose was stimulated in the lab by certain smells—the pungent, irritating smell of ammonia or sulfur dioxide, the odious smell of hydrogen sulfide—it was much more pleasantly stimulated by the garden outdoors and the kitchen, with its food smells, and its essences and spices, inside. What gave coffee its aroma? What were the essential substances in cloves, apples, roses? What gave onions and garlic and radishes their pungent smell? What, for that matter, gave rubber its peculiar odor? I especially liked the smell of hot rubber, which seemed to me to have a slightly human smell (both rubber and people, I learned later, contain odoriferous isoprene). Why did butter and milk acquire sour smells if they “went off,” as they tended to do in hot weather? What gave “turps,” oil of turpentine, its lovely, piney smell? Besides all these “natural” smells, there were the smells of the alcohol and acetone that my father used in the surgery, and of the chloroform and ether in my mother’s obstetric bag. There was the gentle, pleasant, medical smell of iodoform, used to disinfect cuts, and the harsh smell of carbolic acid, used to disinfect lavatories (it carried a skull and crossbones on its label).
    Scents could be distilled, it seemed, from all parts of a plant—leaves, petals, roots, bark. I tried to extract some fragrances by steam distillation, gathering rose petals and magnolia blossoms and grass cuttings from the garden and boiling them with water. Their essential oils would be volatilized in the steam and settle on top of the distillate as it cooled (the heavy, brownish essential oil of onions or garlic, though, would sink to the bottom). Alternatively one could use fat—butter fat,