cover image Seven Elements That Changed the World: An Adventure of Ingenuity and Discovery

Seven Elements That Changed the World: An Adventure of Ingenuity and Discovery

John Browne. Pegasus (Norton, dist.), $27.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-60598-540-4

Retiring after 12 years as CEO of British Petroleum, Browne took up writing, and the result is an admirable popular science account of how iron, carbon, gold, silver, uranium, titanium, and silicon affect our lives. Beginning with iron, “the backbone of all industry,” he delivers a description of each element, its history, and its uses today. Carbon provides fuel (in the forms of coal, oil, natural gas), stimulates wars to obtain it, and is a component of the carbon dioxide that is warming our globe. Moreover, adding carbon to iron produces steel, which is far stronger. Lighter and more corrosion-resistant than steel, titanium has been touted as a miracle metal but remains too expensive for large-scale use. Gold and silver, being precious metals, seem obvious, but like oil today, their value has been the source of conflict and innovation for millennia. And centuries before the modern microchip, silicon provided an altogether different, but no less important, technological marvel: glass. An expert on carbon (i.e., oil), Browne relies on the public library for much information but mixes in his travels and anecdotes from an impressive career to produce a lively, educational examination of civilization’s building blocks. (Feb.)