The first person to use gas for illumination was a French engineer by the name of Philippe Lebon. In 1801 his revolutionary system of methane pipes and jets lit up the Hôtel de Seignelay so brilliantly that ordinary Parisians paid three francs apiece just to marvel at it. Overnight guests may have been less enthusiastic. Although methane itself is colourless and odourless, Lebon’s process for extracting it left the gas heavily contaminated with hydrogen sulphide, which – as Mark Miodownik cheerfully reminds us in his latest book – is a chemical that “smells of farts”.
The often odorous and frequently dangerous world of gases is a fascinating subject for a popular-science book. It’s also a logical one for Miodownik, a materials researcher at University College London, UK, whose previous books were about solids and liquids. The first, Stuff Matters, was a huge critical and commercial success, winning the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize for science books (and Physics World’s own Book of the Year award) on its way to becoming a New York Times bestseller. The second, Liquid, drew more muted praise, with some critics objecting to a narrative gimmick that shoehorned liquid-related facts into the story of a hypothetical transatlantic flight.
Miodownik writes about the science of substances such as breath, fragrance and wind as well as methane, hydrogen and other gases with precise chemical formulations
Miodownik’s third book It’s a Gas avoids this artificial structure and is all the better for it. It also adopts a very loose definition of “gas”, which leaves Miodownik free to write about the science of substances such as breath, fragrance and wind as well as methane, hydrogen and other gases with precise chemical formulations. The result is a lively, free-associating mixture of personal, scientific and historical anecdotes very reminiscent of Stuff Matters, though inevitably one that feels less exceptional than it did the first time around.
The chapter on breath shows how this mixture works. It begins with a story about the young Miodownik watching a brass band march past. Next, we get an explanation of how air travels through brass instruments. By the end of the chapter, Miodownik has moved on, via Air Jordan sneakers and much else, to pneumatic bicycle tyres and their surprising impact on English genetic diversity.
Though the connection might seem fanciful at first, it seems that after John Dunlop patented his air-filled rubber bicycle tyre in 1888, many people (especially women) were suddenly able to traverse bumpy roads cheaply, comfortably and without assistance. As their horizons expanded, their inclination to marry someone from the same parish plummeted: between 1887 and the early years of the 20th century, marriages of this nature dropped from 77% to 41% of the total.
Miodownik is not the first to make the link between bicycle tyres and longer-distance courtships. (He credits the geneticist Steve Jones for the insight, building on work by the 20th-century geographer P J Parry.) However, his decision to include the tale is a deft one, as it illustrates just how important gases and their associated technologies have been to human history.
Anaesthetics are another good example. Though medical professionals were scandalously slow to accept nitrous oxide, ether and chloroform, these beneficial gases eventually revolutionized surgery, saving millions of patients from the agony of their predecessors. Interestingly, criminals proved far less hide-bound than doctors, swiftly adopting chloroform as a way of subduing victims – though the ever-responsible Miodownik notes that this tactic seldom works as quickly as it does in the movies, and errors in dosage can be fatal.
Not every gas-related invention had such far-reaching effects. Inflatable mattresses never really caught on; as Miodownik observes, “beds were for sleeping and sex, and neither was enhanced by being unexpectedly launched into the air every time your partner made a move”.
The history of balloons is similarly chequered. Around the same time as Lebon was filling the Hôtel de Seignelay with aromas, an early balloonist, Sophie Blanchard, was appointed Napoleon’s “aeronaut of the official festivals”. Though Blanchard went on to hold a similar post under the restored King Louis XVIII, Miodownik notes that her favourite party trick – launching fireworks from a balloon filled with highly flammable and escape-prone hydrogen – eventually caught up with her. In 1819, aged just 41, her firework-festooned craft crashed into the roof of a house and Blanchard fell to her death.
Miodownik brings a pleasingly childlike wonder to his tales of gaseous derring-do
The lessons of this calamity were not learned. More than a century later, 35 passengers and crew on the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg airship (which included a smoking area among its many luxuries) met a similarly fiery end.
Occasional tragedies aside, Miodownik brings a pleasingly childlike wonder to his tales of gaseous derring-do. He often opens chapters with stories from his actual childhood, and while a few of these (like the brass band) are merely cute, others are genuinely jaw-dropping. Some readers may recall that Miodownik began Stuff Matters by describing the time he got stabbed on the London Underground; while there is nothing quite so dramatic in It’s a Gas (and no spoilers in this review), he clearly had an eventful youth.
At times, it becomes almost a game to guess which gas these opening anecdotes will lead to. Though some readers may find the connections a little tenuous, Miodownik is a good enough writer to make his leaps of logic seem effortless even when they are noticeable. The result is a book as delightfully light as its subject matter, and a worthy conclusion to Miodownik’s informal phases-of-matter trilogy – although if he wants to write about plasmas next, I certainly won’t stop him.
- 2024 Viking 304pp £22.00hb
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