John Browne - Seven Elements That Changed the World: An Adventure of Ingenuity and Discovery

The human quest for knowledge and insight has led to extraordinary progress. It has transformed the lives we lead and the world we live in. But that onward march has also thrown us huge challenges about how we treat each other and the planet on which we live. This book forces us to confront these realities and does it in a unique and fascinating way. It weaves science and humanity together in a way that gives us new insight. This is an expertly crafted book by a unique thinker and talented engineer and businessman.

Tony Blair

The progress and prosperity that humanity has achieved, writes John Browne, is driven by people scientists, business people and politicians The author has the rare distinction of having wide and deep experience of all three fields, and this is what makes Seven Elements such a fascinating and enjoyable book. Part popular science, part history, part memoir, these pages are infused with insight, shaped by the experience of a FTSE 100 Chief Executive and lifted by the innate optimism of a scientist.

Brian Cox

Seven Elements is a boon for those, like me, who gave up science much too soon in our teens. John Browne has found a fascinating way of helping us break through the crust of our ignorance. The scientific literate too will relish his personal mix of historical knowledge and technical prowess with his gift for making the complicated understandable.

Peter Hennessy

John Browne uses seven elements, building blocks of the physical world, to explore a multitude of worlds beyond. From the rise of civilizations, to some of todays most important challenges and opportunities, to the frontiers of research, he weaves together science, history, politics and personal experience. Browne tells a lively story that enables us to see the essential elements of modern life in a new, original and highly engaging way.

Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Quest: Energy, Security and the Making of the Modern WorldandThe Prize

To QNN

THE NUMBER SEVEN HAS always held a central place in myth, music and literature. The world was created in seven days; there are seven notes in the diatonic scale; and, according to Shakespeare, there are seven ages of man. In conceiving this book, I was also drawn to the number seven and so I asked myself: which of the seven chemical elements help us best to understand our world and how it came to be? I also thought about which have had the greatest influence on my life and which I have experienced most directly.

Carbon, which in combination with hydrogen forms the bulk of crude oil, was obvious. So too was iron, the backbone of all industry since the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution (and without which no oil could be extracted). Silver came next to my mind as the element that made possible photography, one of my lifelong passions. Looking for further inspiration, I found in my library my school copy of the periodic table, which organises the elements according to their chemical properties. As I scanned the chequerboard, from left to right, I passed along the elements, each containing one more proton in its nucleus than the last.

First is hydrogen, vitally important in combination with so many other elements to form the structures of life and, as a result, fossil fuels.made silicon another obvious choice for inclusion.

Appearing in its world-changing form at the same time as silicon in the 1940s was titanium, the next element I stopped at. Once it was going to be the miracle element, a dream that did not quite 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 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 the

As a teenager growing up in southern Iran, where my father was stationed, I was surrounded by oil and its awe-inspiring industry. I was thrilled by watching the huge machinery which drilled the wells that produced the oil. As I had learnt from Braggs lectures, oil is composed of hydrogen and carbon. Under the proper stimulus and in the presence of oxygen, wrote Bragg, the atoms rush into fresh combination, developing great heat in doing so. I was fascinated by the process of transformation which produced the energy to transform society. Carbon, in the form of hydrocarbons, brought people heat, light and mobility, and so created freedom and new ways of life.