Free Seven Elements That Have Changed the World by John Browne Page A

work out. But what most drew me to it was its little-known use as a whitening agent in almost everything that is white. I learnt of this through business with Quebec Iron and Titanium in Canada. It surprised me then, and continues to astound me now.
    Traversing the remainder of this line, I passed a number of familiar metals: iron, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc. All of them are so important but, I wondered, which one actually changed the world. I stuck with my choice of iron and left copper behind; electrical engineering will have its fair share with silicon.
    I passed silver, the element of photography, and then in the line below reached gold. Its universal allure led to its use in coins, the basis of currencies for centuries and the foundation of international trade. Gold became a great motivator for global expansion and imperial ambition. But the same attraction has led many to commits acts of immense cruelty. It continues to captivate us today.
    Finally, I reached the bottom of the periodic table, six elements in tow. Here I came to uranium, whose nucleus, having accumulated so many protons and neutrons on the journey down the periodic table, is very unstable. That characteristic defined the post-war era on a day in 1945 in a city in Japan, and for that reason it is the seventh element.
    Time and again, while writing this book, I have revisited the periodic table, questioning this choice of seven elements and questioning the choice of the number seven. Iron, carbon, gold, silver, uranium, titanium, silicon; each time, these seven elements have stood out as having most powerfully changed the course of human history. These seven elements have shaped the vast complexities of our social, economic and cultural existence. These seven elements hold a grip on our emotions – and our history – like no others.
    I cannot think of an eighth.

The Essence of Everything
    T HE ELEMENTS ARE THE source of all human prosperity and a great deal of human suffering. In numerous ways, I have seen both. Over the course of my forty-five years in business, including twelve as the leader of BP, I saw the very best and the very worst that the elements can do for humanity.
    As a child, when I asked my father to tell me a story, improbably he really did begin with ‘once upon a time …’. That is where the story of the elements begins. If you pointed a very powerful radio telescope out into the sky, you would detect a stream of low-energy radiation coming from every direction. This radiation has been travelling undisturbed through space ever since the first elements were formed some fourteen billion years ago. It is the remnant, or echo, of the Big Bang that gave birth to the Universe.
    At first, the Universe was nothing more than a fluid of pure energy. As it expanded and so cooled, particles, which are the basic building blocks of matter – protons, neutrons and electrons – appeared from the fluid. The Universe kept cooling and allowed the particles to fuse together to become helium and deuterium (a heavy form of hydrogen). This process of nuclear fusion would later give birth to all the other elements inside the stars.
    I would ask my father to tell me stories about science, but he would not because he did not like the subject. To keep me quiet, he gave me a book of Christmas lectures by the physicist Sir William Bragg, originally delivered at the Royal Institution in 1923. In Concerning theNature of Things , Bragg describes how atoms of different elements could join to form the vast complexity of the world around us. 1 At some stage, they had then combined to create life itself with its astounding ability to shape our chaotic world. I was amazed that, at a fundamental level, our own lives and even our thoughts are simply the result of these atomic interactions. In the early twentieth century, Bragg and his son Lawrence were pioneers in the field of x-ray crystallography. They used x-rays to look at matter in unprecedented detail. 2 With