Free Seven Elements That Have Changed the World by John Browne

‘The human quest for knowledge and insight has led to extraordinary progress. It has transformed the lives we lead and the world we live in. But that onward march has also thrown us huge challenges about how we treat each other and the planet on which we live. This book forces us to confront these realities and does it in a unique and fascinating way. It weaves science and humanity together in a way that gives us new insight. This is an expertly crafted book by a unique thinker and talented engineer and businessman.’
    – Tony Blair
    ‘The progress and prosperity that humanity has achieved’, writes John Browne, ‘is driven by people – scientists, business people and politicians The author has the rare distinction of having wide and deep experience of all three fields, and this is what makes Seven Elements such a fascinating and enjoyable book. Part popular science, part history, part memoir, these pages are infused with insight, shaped by the experience of a FTSE 100 Chief Executive and lifted by the innate optimism of a scientist.’
    – Brian Cox
    ‘ Seven Elements is a boon for those, like me, who gave up science much too soon in our teens. John Browne has found a fascinating way of helping us break through the crust of our ignorance. The scientific literate too will relish his personal mix of historical knowledge and technical prowess with his gift for making the complicated understandable.’
    – Peter Hennessy
    ‘John Browne uses seven elements, building blocks of the physical world, to explore a multitude of worlds beyond. From the rise of civilizations, to some of today’s most important challenges and opportunities, to the frontiers of research, he weaves together science, history, politics and personal experience. Browne tells a lively story that enables us to see the essential elements of modern life in a new, original and highly engaging way.’
    – Daniel Yergin , Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Quest : Energy , Security and the Making of the Modern World and The Prize

To QNN

PREFACE
WHY SEVEN?
    T HE NUMBER SEVEN HAS always held a central place in myth, music and literature. The world was created in seven days; there are seven notes in the diatonic scale; and, according to Shakespeare, there are seven ages of man. In conceiving this book, I was also drawn to the number seven and so I asked myself: which of the seven chemical elements help us best to understand our world and how it came to be? I also thought about which have had the greatest influence on my life and which I have experienced most directly.
    Carbon, which in combination with hydrogen forms the bulk of crude oil, was obvious. So too was iron, the backbone of all industry since the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution (and without which no oil could be extracted). Silver came next to my mind as the element that made possible photography, one of my lifelong passions. Looking for further inspiration, I found in my library my school copy of the periodic table, which organises the elements according to their chemical properties. As I scanned the chequerboard, from left to right, I passed along the elements, each containing one more proton in its nucleus than the last. 1
    First is hydrogen, vitally important in combination with so many other elements to form the structures of life and, as a result, fossil fuels. 2 But in its own right, hydrogen did not seem world-changing. Passing further along, I came to silicon, sitting directly below carbon as both elements contain four electrons in their outermost shell. I thought back to my time on the board of Intel, the pioneers of the silicon microchip. Their ubiquitous nature in our day-to-day lives – in making possible our digital world –made silicon another obvious choice for inclusion.
    Appearing in its world-changing form at the same time as silicon in the 1940s was titanium, the next element I stopped at. Once it was going to be the miracle element, a dream that did not quite