Essay Questions

What does the author forward as the absolutely unsurprising motivation behind the variation in spelling and pronunciation of aluminum by Americans and the British?

Anyone even remotely familiar with British television will instantly recognize the idiosyncratic divergence between how the British pronounce this element as “aluminium” with that extra insert vowel sound and the American pronunciation of “aluminum” as a four-syllable word. An American might well suppose that this is simply one of those quirks of the English language in which either a sound exists without a corresponding letter or a letter exists without a corresponding sound.

However, unlike “colour” and “color” which sound exactly the same but are spelled different according to country, the British pronunciation does correspond to its proper spelling there; the extra letter actually is found in the proper British spelling of “aluminium” and, in fact, that it is how it was originally spelled and pronounced in America, tool. Although the details of the story are too complicated to flesh out here, the upshot behind this change goes straight to the heart of the story behind the story of almost everything in America: “aluminum” without the extra “i” is the result of a marketing and advertising strategy seeking to create a connection in the mind of consumers between the low-rent foil and the high-class allure of platinum.

What is the unusual connection between the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the periodic table?

The author writes shares how his interests in the periodic table began at an early age with a compulsive interest in mercury. This fascination led to discovering one of the great unknown facts about the legends of American history: among the many supplies Lewis and Clark took with them across the continent were enormous pills containing a mercury-based laxative. This decision was based on the prescient prediction that the diet along the way was very likely to produce a host of digestive problems. That foresight proved more valuable than they expected. Archaeologists have since been able to track the progress of the expedition in part by searching for higher than normal deposits of mercury in the soil used by the expedition as a latrine.

True or false: a man with blue skin twice ran—and twice lost—for the U.S. Senate in Montana?

The answer, of course, is true. The cause of the blue-hued skin was a condition known as argyria which results from exposure of the body to the chemical compounds of the element silver. It is phenomenon which the medical community has known about since at least around the turn of the 20th century. Twice-failed Libertarian candidate for one of Montana’s Senate seats Stan Jones was a Y2K conspiracy theorist adopter and survivalist who—fearing the madness associated with massive global-scale corruption of main servers across the world—became convinced there would be a long-term shortage of access to antibiotics and so went to work making his own substitute. This process involved the use of silver wire and 9-volt batteries which actually corrupted the end product he drank religious for several years due to evidence it was successfully treating his psoriasis. What he didn’t realize was that at the same time, the exposure to silver chemical compounds was also slowly turning his skin blue to the point that by the time he made his run for the Senate, his skin was actually a very dark shade of purplish-blue.