A Short History of Nearly Everything

Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. (Location 98)

In the early seventeenth century Bermuda was well known among ships’ captains for being hard to locate. The problem was that the ocean was big, Bermuda small and the navigational tools for dealing with this disparity hopelessly inadequate. (Location 928)

this he guessed the Earth’s age to be somewhere between 75,000 and 168,000 years old. This was of course a wild underestimate; but it was a radical notion nonetheless, and Buffon found himself threatened with excommunication for expressing it. (Location 1433)

the animals without size or vigour, their constitutions weakened by the “noxious vapours” that rose from its rotting swamps and sunless forests. In such an environment even the native Indians lacked virility. “They have no beard or body hair,” Buffon sagely confided, “and no ardour for the female.” Their reproductive organs were “small and feeble.” (Location 1517)

Were the world just and Swedish-speaking, Scheele would have enjoyed universal acclaim. As it is, the plaudits have tended to go to more celebrated chemists, mostly from the English-speaking world. (Location 1885)

Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious élan vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life. No-one knew where this ethereal essence lay, but two things seemed probable: that you could enliven it with a jolt of electricity (a notion Mary Shelley exploited to full effect in her novel Frankenstein); and that it existed in some substances but not others, which is why we ended up with two branches of chemistry: organic (for those substances that were thought to have it) and inorganic (for those that did not). (Location 1894)

A hundred years after his death, a statue of Lavoisier was erected in Paris and much admired until someone pointed out that it looked nothing like him. Under questioning, the sculptor admitted that he had used the head of the mathematician and philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet—apparently he had a spare—in the hope that no-one would notice or, having noticed, would care. In the second regard he was correct. The statue of Lavoisier-cum-Condorcet was allowed to remain in place for another half-century until the Second World War, when, one morning, it was taken away and melted down for scrap. (Location 1943)

The Industrial Revolution was driven in large part by developments in chemistry and yet as an organized science chemistry barely existed for decades. (Location 2005)

For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their products, and at least until the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in the Finger Lakes region of New York (and doubtless others as well) featured with pride the therapeutic effects of its “Radio-active mineral springs.” It wasn’t banned in consumer products until 1938. By this time it was much too late for Mme Curie, who died of leukaemia in 1934. (Location 2133)

Einstein and his wife, Mileva, photographed in Bern during his annus mirabilis of 1905. In that year, Einstein published three papers that revolutionized physics. In the same year he was turned down for two teaching jobs. (Location 2311)