A single, seamless ball would be left quivering where there had been two. Suddenly, with a final nudge, one sphere would gulp the other. Using a toothpick like a hockey stick, she’d brush the supple spheres toward one another until they almost touched. A minute later, my mother would drop to the floor despite her arthritic hip and begin corralling the balls. Lying there with the glass stick under my tongue, I would answer an imagined question out loud, and the thermometer would slip from my mouth and shatter on the hardwood floor, the liquid mercury in the bulb scattering like ball bearings. Being sick always gave me another chance to break an old-fashioned mercury thermometer, too. I didn’t mind staying home from school and medicating myself with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce.

I came down with strep throat something like a dozen times in the second and third grades, and for days on end it would hurt to swallow. This habit led to my fascination with the periodic table the first time I was left alone with a thermometer under my tongue. It was so, Kean says, but there was a serious - or hilarious - side effect.Īs a child in the early 1980s, I tended to talk with things in my mouth - food, dentist’s tubes, balloons that would fly away, whatever - and if no one else was around, I’d talk anyway. He'd heard silver had antibacterial effects. The Montana Libertarian began drinking liquid silver. So he decided he was going to get his immune system ready for the apocalypse in 2000.' 'He was especially concerned that people wouldn't be able to find antibiotics. 'Stan was a big believer that the Y2K virus was going to wipe out civilization,' Kean says. In one story, a single element from the periodic table changed U.S. Growing up, Kean says, the science teachers that captured his attention most were the ones who explained science through stories. Kean spoke with NPR's Guy Raz about how he made the periodic table exciting.

The book tells the histories of the elements in the periodic table, and in the process, gives a history of famous thinkers, war, literature, protest and more. But Sam Kean makes it just that in his new book, The Disappearing Spoon. Most people wouldn't describe the periodic table of elements as gripping.

The disappearing spoon review