Sam Kean’s stories have appeared  in The New York Times Magazine, Air & Space, Mental Floss, Slate, and New Scientist, and he won the American National Association of Science Writers’ runner-up award for best writer under 30. Sam’s debut book, The Disappearing Spoon, is a non-fiction book which follows every element on the periodic table, and explains the role that each one played in history, politics, finance, mythology, war, the arts, medicine, and the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them. We ask Sam Kean about his passion for the periodic table & writing…

Q. How did your love affair with science develop?
Sam Kean: With mercury. I had a hard time in third grade – I came down with strep throat about a dozen times – and I was clumsy and talked a lot. So when my mother put a mercury thermometer under my tongue, it frequently ended up broken on the ground and the mercury spilled out. I thought it was the most fascinating substance I’d ever seen.

Q. Why did you choose the periodic table as a focus for the book?
Sam: I knew there were great stories out there about elements we never got to talk about in chemistry class. The book really just gathered all these stories into one place, to show that the periodic table extends so much farther than most people realise.

Q. So why did tellurium lead to the most bizarre gold rush in history?
Sam: Tellurium is the only element that bonds chemically with gold, and the mineral they form looks sort of gold-like, but not quite. It’s a little too yellow, more fool’s gold. So when miners in Western Australia unknowingly found rocks of the tellurium-gold mineral during one of the maddest gold rushes in history (in the very late 1800s), they threw them away, thinking they were worthless. Some even crushed the rocks and used them as the base for cement to make their homes, or fill in potholes in the street. But word eventually got around that the cement powder actually did have gold in it, which led to people tearing out the potholes and cannibalising their own homes. I call it the fool’s fool’s gold rush.

Q. Why did you choose the title The Disappearing Spoon?
Sam: The title comes from the story of one element, gallium. It sits below aluminium on the periodic table and looks a lot like it – if you had a hunk of each metal in front of you, you probably couldn’t tell them apart. Except that gallium has one unusual property: it melts at temperatures just above room temperature. It will even soften in the palm of your hand. So it’s sort of a classic nerdy science prank to make a spoon out of gallium and serve it to somebody with coffee or tea, then watch them recoil as the Earl Grey ‘eats’ their utensil. It really captures the spirit of the book – stories that look at science a little cockeyed.

Q. In addition to being a scientist and writer, you also have a master’s degree in library science. Why did you choose that particular subject?
Sam: I love libraries and spent some of my happiest childhood hours there. The master’s degree improved my research skills for the book, and I think I would have been content whiling away the time in a library if I hadn’t pursued writing.

Q. Why did you leave the lab and begin to write a book?
Sam: Scientific work is beautiful when it succeeds but hair-pulling the rest of the time. I just didn’t have the temperament for it. Writing about science lets me keep learning about fascinating things without the frustration of equipment breaking all the time.

Q. Tell us about your latest projects.
Sam: I’m working on a book about genetics. It’s all the funny, peculiar, and scary stories buried in the human genome.

Q. How can we make science more appealing to the next generation  of students?
Sam: Stories can help, definitely. They are simply how the mind works. We remember information better if it’s woven into stories and you can actually learn a lot more science than you’d expect by learning about the strange and wonderful events in science history.

The Disappearing Spoon is published in hardback by Doubleday, priced £20.