Seven Elements That Have Changed the World (7 page)

The Festa del Redentore celebrates the end of the plague that swept through Venice between 1576 and 1577, taking 51,000 Venetian lives, including that of Titian, the great Renaissance painter. Later that year, as the plague subsided, the foundation stone of Il Redentore, the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, was laid on the island of Giudecca as an act of thanks. A floating bridge was created out of barges between Giudecca and the main island to allow the Doge, the leader of the Republic of Venice, to walk in procession to the church. That tradition is continued to this day, without, of course, the Doge.

Venice grew out of virtually nothing, from a marshy, malarial wasteland to become, by the thirteen century, the prosperous and most recognised commercial centre of the Western world. Few other cities have made more of a contribution to painting, sculpture, architecture and music. The Festa del Redentore is a celebration of the city’s enduring spirit during times of adversity. We watch the rockets shoot skywards and explode in jubilant
streams of colour. Atoms of each element flare their characteristic colour: copper blue, strontium red and sodium yellow.
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But the element of essential importance to the light display is carbon. Without it the rockets would never leave the ground.

Carbon is the fuel supply in gunpowder. In ancient China, where the first fireworks were invented, honey was the source of carbon; the drier the honey, the greater the carbon content. The explosive mixture was reported to burn hands and faces and even burn down houses. Later, charcoal, made from the carbonisation of firewood, came to be the traditional fuel element of gunpowder.
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Now, as in the first fireworks of the Festa del Redentore centuries ago, carbon is the fuel element that ignites these yearly festivities.

The fabric of which most of Venice is made is threaded through with carbon. The most widely used stone in the city is a form of limestone, calcium carbonate, from Istria, a peninsula which was part of the territories of the Republic. From Istrian stone the great columns, archways and façades of Venice’s historic palazzos were crafted. Both easy to carve and resistant to weathering, this carbonaceous mineral dominates the city. Carbon, too, is intrinsic to the paper and ink on which Venice laid down its monumental artistic and intellectual achievements and is embedded in the wooden ships with which Venice waged war and expanded her mighty Republic.
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The unusual ability of carbon atoms to bind to themselves to form long chains and rings makes carbon one of the most versatile elements.
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Carbon creates the structures off which other elements hang to create the great complexities of the world. Carbon is not only the foundation of the Venetian Republic, but also of all human civilisations and humans themselves. Carbon is the backbone of DNA, the genetic code from which our bodies are built, repaired and replenished. It is the element of life.
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But carbon, in isolation, is mostly useless. Gunpowder would not explode if the fuel consisted purely of carbon, which ignites only at extremely high temperatures. An oxidiser is needed to speed up the burning of the carbon to make the firework go off with a bang. It is the complex mix of carbon and oxygen that fuels the fireworks at the Festa del Redentore each year.
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Context is almost everything for the carbon atom.

There are very few uses for pure carbon. It appears in graphite, from which pencils are made, and in diamonds. It is used for jewellery and drill bits. Graphene, a pure carbon lattice which is just one atom thick, could soon revolutionise many high-technology industries.
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But overwhelmingly carbon needs other elements to make a difference to the world.

An outbreak of the plague was one of the first nails in the coffin of the Venetian Republic as it began to decline in the sixteenth century. In May 1797, the Republic came to an end when Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops surrounded the lagoon entrance. The Great Council of Venice had little choice but to surrender. With Zen-like calm, the Doge removed his ducal ‘corno’ and passed his white linen cap to his valet, saying simply: ‘Take it, I shall not be needing it again.’
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After the Republic fell, the city reinvented itself by turning to a trade
of a very different kind: becoming an attraction for more and more visitors. Now, throughout the summer the historic walkways and squares are packed with tourists of all nationalities who come to marvel at Venice’s cultural legacy. Despite the modernisation of the Venetian economy, the city itself appears much the same as it did when the Republic fell in 1797. The absence of four-wheeled transport gives the impression that modernisation has passed the city by. However, without the constant stream of aeroplanes landing at Marco Polo airport, or the cars and buses crossing the Ponte della Libertà, the economy would collapse. Much like in the fireworks exploding above the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, carbon now fuels the economy in the form of hydrocarbons used for transport.
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Of all carbon’s combinations, hydrocarbons are the most world-changing. Hydrocarbons are a variety of molecules which are made from the elements hydrogen and carbon. Generally, when they are mixed with oxygen from the air and a spark is added, heat is released. This exothermic reaction, with enough oxygen, also releases carbon dioxide and water vapour.
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In the form of fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – carbon has granted us simple and abundant energy sources with which to shape the world. The rapid improvement in living conditions and growth in global population seen over the centuries since the Industrial Revolution could not have happened without these fuels. They are the focus of carbon’s story.

I begin with coal, the use of which exploded during the Industrial Revolution and placed societies on the road to global economic growth. Then comes oil, first pumped from wells at the end of the nineteenth century and used as a cheap, bright and clean source of illumination that extended the time available for both work and leisure. However, it was in combination with the automobile that oil really changed the world. The automobile gives people the freedom to go where they want, when they want. And beyond that, oil powers the global network of trucks, ships and aeroplanes that transport cargo and passengers and ensure the functioning of our modern society. And finally natural gas, the most volatile of fossil fuels, which for millennia humanity has simply regarded as waste as it was too difficult to use. Now it has found a powerful purpose in electricity generation and is capable of being moved from where it is produced to where it is needed. The end of my story of carbon tackles an important question: are
coal, oil and gas, though of great benefit, the stuff which through our enormous consumption will create catastrophic consequences for humankind?

I first began to understand the dramatic ability of hydrocarbons to shape the world in the 1950s as a child living near the Masjid-i-Suleiman oilfields in Iran. My father worked for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP), and he would often take me out to visit the oilfields with their ‘flares’ burning what was then useless natural gas. The intense heat, noise and sulphurous fumes were overpowering. At the age of ten, I remember being taken to the site of Naft Safid Rig 20, a well which spectacularly caught on fire years earlier. The well exploded, spewing hundreds of metres of pipe into the air. The pipe lay where it landed all around the well head. I also vividly remember watching the orange glow of the blowout of the Ahvaz No. 6 oil well burning fifty miles from our house. I was enthralled by the sheer power of oil.

My interest in the oil industry would remain with me for the rest of my life, leading me to join BP in 1966. At BP I tackled the technological and political challenges of oil extraction. I navigated through unstable political terrain of Russia and Colombia, facing oligarchs, drug barons and guerrilla fighters. I saw how, in the struggle for access and control of this highly valued resource, oil brings out the greed and malign spirit of powerful leaders. It occasionally brings out the good. It certainly changed nations who own it and, indeed, it changed the world.

But carbon’s story begins millennia before we began to use oil on an industrial scale. In 1969, I was working in Alaska and there I witnessed a natural phenomenon that led me to reflect on humanity’s earliest use of hydrocarbons. I was a member of a field survey team, taking measurements in the Brooks Range Mountains across which the Trans-Alaska Pipeline runs. During a storm, I watched lightning strike a bituminous outcrop, setting the exposed veins briefly on fire. It is just possible that, thousands of years earlier, early humans saw the same phenomenon and so learnt about the combustible properties of coal.

Today, by far the largest consumer of coal in the world is China. There is a striking continuity here, for the earliest known use of coal dates from
around 4000
BC
in the Shen-yang area of north-east China. Pieces of soft, black rock, known as jet or lignite, scattered about the ground were found by early humans and carved into decorative objects, such as beads and ornaments with which to pierce ears. Jet, being easy to carve and polish, was perfect for creating ornaments. It is still used in jewellery today because of its distinct, high-quality finish. The term ‘jet black’ originally comes from this rock.

Coal is the heaviest form of hydrocarbon. It has a smaller proportion of hydrogen to carbon than oil or gas. Therefore it is more difficult to burn and, when burnt, it produces a greater proportion of carbon dioxide than these hydrocarbons.
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Coal comes in different forms; the more hydrogen it contains, the easier it is to ignite. The early inhabitants of China probably saw coal ignited by lightning, or perhaps by the sparks from a fireplace, and then realised that they could use it as a source of heat and light.

By the time of the Han Dynasty, beginning around 200
BC,
coal was being used on a large scale for both domestic and industrial purposes. It is not surprising that humanity’s first use of coal was in China. Small deposits are found in every province, while the world’s largest coal deposit is in the north, centred on the province of Shansi.

When timber, the traditional and most easily accessible fuel, became scarce during the eleventh century, the use of coal expanded dramatically, mostly in the growing iron industries in China. At this very point in history, China became the centre of innovation for the world. It invented gunpowder, the compass, paper and the printing press, the so-called Four Great Inventions.
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These took many centuries to reach the West.

Putting to use the energy inherent in hydrocarbons, China established itself as the world’s leading power. At that time, China seemed to be on the verge of an industrial revolution, but soon after its boom in innovation its coal consumption slowed and its development relative to the West faltered. This led to the ‘Great Divergence’, the term given to the increasing split between the West’s and East’s power and wealth through the later centuries of the last millennium.

Why did this happen? Was it simply due to differences in geography and geology? Or were the differences cultural, China emphasising the group over the individual? It is one question Joseph Needham set out to
answer in his great work
Science and Civilisation in China.
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I like to think that it was at least in part about access to energy, and that contains a lesson for today. Whatever the answer, Needham writes: ‘By 1900 China was out of the race, and Western industry dominated the world.’
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Meanwhile, Great Britain, one of China’s chief competitors, was using its own source of abundant coal to fuel the world’s first Industrial Revolution.

Writing in 1798, Thomas Malthus observed how, throughout history and across different cultures, living standards had not grown.
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Humanity existed perpetually on the threshold of basic subsistence. Agrarian societies did develop new technologies to increase food production, but this only led to an increase in the population and reversion to a level of basic subsistence. Economic resources could never outpace population growth; humanity was stuck in a ‘Malthusian Trap’. Yet as Malthus was writing, great changes were beginning to shape Great Britain around him. These changes would soon disprove his theory.

Between 1750 and 1850, Great Britain’s industrial output grew seven times, while the population grew less than threefold. Living standards rose and rose. There is no simple answer as to why this happened in Great Britain first. But just as the decline of China relative to the West was linked to its stagnating coal industry,
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the industrial rise of Great Britain was, at its core, dependent on putting to use its abundant coal reserves. Between 1700 and 1830 the production of coal increased more than tenfold. Steam engines replaced manual labour because coal in an amount equal to the weight of a man can produce the equivalent energy of the same man working for one hundred days.