Uncle Tungsten

The author of such bestsellers as Awakenings (1973) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), British neurologist Oliver Sacks gained widespread recognition for his writings about brain disorders and their curious presentations. His first passion, however, was for chemistry, not biology. Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, published in 2001, is Sacks’ remembrance of his boyhood in England during the 1940s. More than simply a memoir, Sacks’ book pivots between recollections of his own freewheeling adventures in chemistry and accounts of those who inspired him: the pioneers in the field of chemistry and his remarkable family, including his Uncle Dave, the titular “Uncle Tungsten.”

In the opening pages of Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks notes, “I was encouraged from the start to interrogate, to investigate.” The youngest of four brothers, Oliver was born in London in 1933 to upper-class Jewish parents. Both his father and mother were physicians, the latter distinguishing herself as the one of the first female surgeons in England. From an early age, Oliver expressed curiosity about the make-up of materials, especially metals. His mother happily indulged his inquisitiveness, as typified by her response when Oliver, fascinated with her wedding ring, would ask to see it. Surrendering the sparkling ring for him to study, she then coached him on the properties of gold and diamond.

Oliver’s extended family was large – his mother, Elsie, was one of 18 children – and it had a high concentration of scientists and physicians. Elsie’s brothers Dave and Abe Landau were the directors of the Tungstalite Company, which produced incandescent lightbulbs containing tungsten filaments. Uncle Dave was affectionately referred to as Uncle Tungsten because of his devotion to the element. During Oliver’s visits to the Tungstalite factory, Dave schooled his nephew on various metals “with little experiments,” but he was always most zealous when talking about tungsten. Sacks writes that his uncle would thrust a bar at him, commanding, “Feel it Oliver! […] Nothing in the world feels like sintered tungsten!”



In 1939, six-year-old Oliver and his 11-year-old brother, Michael, were evacuated from London to the Midlands to escape the German bombs falling on the city. For the next four years, the two brothers lived at a nightmarish boarding school, where the “unhinged” headmaster routinely beat them and they nearly starved on a diet of turnips and beets.

The boys returned home in 1943, after the bombing raids ended, but the cruelty they’d endured while away left its mark. Michael’s mental state suffered, and he eventually developed schizophrenia. The abusive boarding-school experiences left Oliver withdrawn and afflicted with a sense of uncertainty.

Sacks explains that at age 10 he became preoccupied with chemistry because it offered a refuge of law and order “in a chaotic world.” Uncle Dave, immersed in this refuge himself, fostered Oliver’s interest by bringing chemistry alive in his factory’s laboratory. As he told Oliver about “the discovery and isolation of new metals” during the 18th century, Uncle Dave cooked up experiments to demonstrate the properties of platinum or aluminum. Enthralled by the “stinks and bangs” this produced, Oliver dug into the foundations of chemistry by reading biographies of its pioneers and 19th-century popularizations of its principles. Sacks comments that one of his favorite books, Chemical Recreations, had a “practical, and above all playful style; chemistry was fun.”



Wishing to participate in the fun himself, young Oliver set up a laboratory at home. He purchased an astonishing variety of potentially dangerous chemicals at a nearby store and began producing his own explosions and noxious odors. His parents responded with tolerance but required him to move his experiments to a room off the garden, where he could quickly discard hazardous conflagrations, and to install a ventilation hood. In his own lab, Oliver learned about “coloring elements” and atomic weight, valency and oxidation states, exothermic reactions, esters and what he dubbed “stinkogens.”

Sacks writes that, as a boy, he wanted to reproduce the groundbreaking experiments that led to the discovery and understanding of “all those wonderful elements.” In this manner, he “would enter chemistry […] in much the same way as the first practitioners did […].”

And so, within the context of his youthful chemical investigations, Sacks proceeds to trace the development and history of chemistry. In the 1600s, chemistry emerged “as a true science […] with the work of Robert Boyle.” Boyle discovered that a combination of iron filings and acid produces hydrogen, and he articulated “the first modern definition of an element.” A hundred years later, Antoine Lavoisier refined Boyle’s definition and modernized the language of chemistry itself by providing every element and compound with a name indicative of its “composition and chemical character.”



Humphrey Davy, born in 1778, was one of young Oliver’s chemist heroes, as he identified with Davy’s “wonderful adventurousness and sometimes dangerous impulsiveness.” Among his many achievements, Davy was the first to isolate metallic potassium and sodium by means of electric current. Sacks writes, “one of my greatest delights was to repeat Davy’s original experiments in my own lab […].” He also repeated Davy’s flirtation with danger, “for the potassium caught fire instantly, […] and as a frenzied molten blob rushed round and round […].”

While Uncle (Dave) Tungsten gets top billing in Sacks’ book, Uncle Abe, the co-director of Tungstalite, influenced Oliver as well. Considered “the physicist” uncle, Abe taught Oliver about James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory, inspiring the boy to experiment with electricity and magnetism himself. These experiments ground Sacks’ discussion of the important contributions to chemistry made by Alessandro Volta and Michael Faraday. With Uncle Abe’s guidance, Oliver also learned about radioactivity and Marie Curie’s work with radium.

Another influential family member introduced Oliver to photography, to which he applied his understanding of chemical coloring. This resulted in bizarrely-hued photographs that he proudly shared with his parents.



Visiting a science museum at age 12, Oliver saw a huge, three-dimensional version of the periodic table of elements, formulated by Dmitri Mendeleev. It enchanted him with its “formal beauty” and “superarching principle uniting and relating all the elements.” Despite the rapture he experienced while studying this display, Oliver abandoned chemistry in his teenage years, electing to pursue a career in the biological sciences instead.

Summing up Sacks’ Uncle Tungsten, Kirkus Reviews calls it “an artful, impassioned memoir of a youth spent lost in the blinding light of chemistry.” Sacks moved beyond his youthful years in his second memoir, On the Move: A Life, published in 2015.