Carbon: the Story of an Atom
from the book The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
adapted by Jim Nies
Primo Levi was an Italian chemist who, being Jewish, was interned in Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp. He imagined the story of Carbon while in the camp. Eventually it was published along with other essays in the book, The Periodic Table. The language and style are quite difficult. The writing erudite, somewhat academic, and written in Italian, thus translated. But the basic story is quite amazing.
I've tried to turn it into a more accessible, exciting read while trying to preserve the science.
CARBON
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If you take your pencil and drag it across a piece of paper, millions of atoms of carbon will be scraped off its tip leaving a black line across the page. If you put your eye down close to the paper you might be able to see what look like tiny grains of sand. If you zoom in much, much closer on these grains, using a very powerful electron microscope, such as those scientists have, you might be able to see individual atoms of carbon. These atoms are the smallest bits of carbon that can be.
Although carbon makes up just a tiny part of Earth and its atmosphere, it is a very important element, undoubtedly the most important element, because it is the element of life. Carbon deserves to have a story, and this is it. This story is about one particular carbon atom, one of the billions and billions of carbon atoms that are part of Earth and the plants and animals that live on Earth.
The hero of our story, Carbon Atom, who we will call Char, is very old, actually older than Earth herself. Char was made in a giant red star billions and billions of years ago far out in the universe. That was so long ago that it was almost before anything. After another very, very long time the big red star blew up, as most stars do when they get old. Big Red Star blasted its elements, including Char, far out into the universe, and some of that star, including Char, came from outer space and became part of Earth as it was being formed in our solar system. Our Char was actually part of a giant meteor that crashed into the Earth when it was still hot and molten and bubbly.
Char was part of Earth's igneous crust for another very long time. But, eventually rains came and fell on hot rocks. Clouds of steam rose up, and Gaia cooled, and water ran down and flowed into ponds. The ponds filled up and flowed into lakes and the lakes filled up and flowed into oceans, and the oceans filled up and spread over most of Earth.
Char spent about a billion years sitting in a bubbly hot pool on the edge of the sea. Then a surprising thing happened—she was swallowed by a diatom, swallowed up by a living thing!. Char became part of the the diatom's shell, and when the diatom died she fell, along with billions of others, to the bottom of the ocean. It was dark down there, and for millions of years tiny shells of other diatoms, and lots of other little sea-creatures, rained down on Char, until she was pressed into a mountain of stone almost a kilometer thick.
And there she sat. She sat there until Earth's continents moved; when that happened a whole range of mountains was thrust up from the depths, thrust up high into the sun and the wind and the rain.
Now Char was part of a mountain! She sat there as part of that mountain for 400 million years—from long before the dinosaurs to long after. She was stuck, tangled up in a molecule with three atoms of oxygen and one atom of calcium. She was limestone.
Sometimes, over that very long time, it got a little warmer. Sometimes it got a little colder. Sometimes it rained and sometimes it didn't And as the years passed, the other rocks, and the pebbles and sand and soil overhead, were worn away by rain and wind. The limestone rock of which Char was a part finally came to lie on the surface of the earth, a ledge jutting out over the bank of a river.
Exposed as she was, Char now lay within reach of people. According to Char's timeframe, human beings had only been around for a very brief time, showing up long after the dinosaurs were gone. But human beings learned quickly and invented tools and civilization and science. Eventually some of these humans became prospectors and miners, with tools like the sledgehammer and pickax.
It was the year 1840—nine years before the great California gold rush, that a blow from a pickax detached a chunk of limestone, with Char as part of it, and sent it on its way to a lime kiln. The stone was hauled away to a fiery oven. Here it was roasted until Char separated from the calcium atom and from one of the oxygen atoms. What was left behind in the kiln was lime, which is what the people wanted to get and use to make plaster and cement. But Char, still firmly clinging to two of her three former oxygen companions, got away. As carbon dioxide she rose up the chimney of the kiln, tumbled about with the other molecules that make up our air and then blew away as part of the wind.
Char had a wild and bumpy ride, down dusty roads, across great lakes, along the treetops of a forest. On a hot and humid day Char dissolved into the water vapor of a cloud. She shot skyward in a warm updraft, was chilled, and joined with many others to form a rain drop, and then, as part of a thunderstorm she fell.
She fell and fell, until she splashed onto a rock not far from the bank of a brook. Joining other drops falling from the storm, she slid down the rock, trickled into a rivulet, tumbled into a stream, cascaded into the river, plunged over a waterfall, and finally flowed into the ocean.
Char was now at sea, and for four years Char, our carbon atom, dissolved as she was in the water of the ocean, drifted with the currents. Then a wave tossed her high up on the sand of a beach. There the hot sun evaporated the water, and Char, along with her two oxygen companions, was once again a part of air.
She traveled with the wind for six years. Once, she swept over vast expanses of Arctic ice as part of a fierce blast of wind that swept down from the north pole and sent a great chill across Canada, and Minnesota and Wisconsin and Illinois, and all the way down to Florida where the icy air froze ripening oranges.
Char, our carbon atom, drifted randomly as winter melted into spring and spring warmed into summer. But then that summer something quite amazing happened. Still accompanied by her two oxygen partners (who continued doing their job of keeping Char a gas and not a solid or liquid), she was borne by the wind along a row of vines. As she tumbled along, she brushed against a leaf. In an instant Char found herself drawn inside a growing plant, no longer part of the breeze. She was inside a leaf! In there, she bumped into clumps of molecules and soon stuck to one. Meanwhile, the leaf turned in the sun. In a flash of sunlight, photosynthesis rearranged the atoms in the molecules and Char turned into sugar.
Char, our carbon atom, had become part of a beautiful ring-shaped structure, a big molecule shaped like a hexagon, dissolved in water. She had become part of a molecule of the sugar glucose. This glucose began oozing along the leaf as a thick, sticky liquid. Slowly, the sap flowed down the leaf to the stem and into a shaggy, twisted vine. Several days later she oozed into an almost ripe grape, and became part of a beautiful bunch of fruit.
Two weeks later a strong hand pulled the bunch of grapes off the vine, and all at once things started happening fast. Char who was now inside the grape, was dumped, along with lots of other carbon atoms (inside of lots of other grapes), into a tub, where the bare feet of boys and girls stomped on them. Carbon atom was squeezed between slimy toes. She became part of a puddle of juice which was drained off and poured into a huge oak barrel. Strange things began to happen inside that barrel. All around Char, molecules (each having their own carbon atoms)fermented. They changed from sugar into alcohol along with some carbon dioxide gas. Two years passed and then a rich red wine was drawn from the barrel and sealed with a cork into a thick green bottle. The bottle was stored away in cellar, a place almost as dark and still as Char's old limestone ledge.
Nine years of cool, dark stillness—and then the cork popped out of the bottle and Char found herself splashed into a tall-stemmed glass glistening with the light of a chandelier hanging high above a linen-covered table. Wine swirled around the glass as it was lifted high. A big nose poked over the edge of the glass and sniffed, savoring the wine's bouquet. A mouth opened-and Char slid, once again in darkness, down a throat and into a stomach.
Char churned through a grumbling gut and on down through a long twisting tube. She came alongside the wall of the man's intestine and quickly found herself pulled through a membrane and into the warm, pulsing blood on the other side. Blood carried her to the man's liver where she was packed away, stored in case of emergency, a reserve supply of energy. There she stayed, curled up with other atoms in her hexagon, for more than a week.
The following Sunday, the man who had sipped wine was saddling his horse. A clap of thunder startled the animal and it reared and bolted across a field. The man chased after, his legs straining over the hard ground. In the space of a few moments the hexagon stored in his liver was unwound. Sugar, with Char as part of it, was dragged by the bloodstream all the way to a muscle fiber in the man's leg. The muscle needed energy to help the man run. So the sugar molecule was split apart, releasing energy and heat to the cells around it. As soon as the panting lungs and pounding heart could do it, oxygen was rushed in. It hooked right up with Char, and our hero was once again a gas. Away she went as carbon dioxide, carried by blood to the man's lungs, then up his trachea and out his mouth as he gasped for air. Char was once again loose in the atmosphere.
Char rode around the windy sky for twenty years, blowing over mountains and across oceans and all the way around the world. She blew free until, in a forest on Manitoulin Island, she came alongside the leaf of an ash tree, where photosynthesis again captured her and brought her in to be part of a living thing. The glucose sugar she became combined in a long chain of molecules to form cellulose, and now Char found herself to be part of the trunk of a sturdy young sapling.
Ash trees can live for hundreds of years, so Char of seemed set for a while. But, it was not to be. A shiny green beetle laid an egg in a crack in the bark, and when this egg hatched, a small caterpillar dug its way into the wood. Blindly it drilled and grew and gnawed and chewed. Eventually it bit off the shred that our atom was part of. The caterpillar swallowed, and once again Char was in a belly. Eventually the insect grew fat, gnawed out a chamber for itself and stayed there, motionless, all winter long. When the weather warmed in April, the larva changed into a pupa and then, a few weeks later, the pupa emerged an adult beetle. Char was part of another new living thing. In fact, Char now helped make up part of one of the insect's thousand eyes, helping it to see.
It wasn't long before the insect mated, laid its eggs, and died. Its corpse dropped through branches and undergrowth until it lay on the forest floor. The fluids and soft flesh were soon gone but the hard shell, the chitin carapace, was almost indestructible. Snow and sun came and went. Leaves, needles, branches and even raccoon droppings settled on top of it until it became part of the spongy humus into which the trees stretched their roots. But Char was still there. She stayed there until a bacterium, one of the vast number of microorganisms living in the soil, ate a fragment of the old insect. In the process of digesting that cracked piece of carapace, the bacterium hooked the atom of carbon back up with two atoms of oxygen and created carbon dioxide. Once again carbon atom was loose in the atmosphere.
She blew five times around the world, taking many years to do so, until this very summer, when she was captured by a blade of grass in your state. A Holstein cow ripped the grass from the pasture, chewed it in its cud, and digested it. When the dairy farmer milked that cow, Char began a very interesting trip that brought her to be part of a gallon of milk sitting in a cooler in a supermarket in your town.
This morning, a kid in in your town poured Char into a bowl of cereal. Inside that kid, a long molecular chain containing our atom of carbon was broken apart. A fragment passed across the intestinal threshold and entered the bloodstream. It migrated upward, came to the edge of a nerve cell, and entered.
The cell it entered belongs to a brain. That cell is now working with other similar cells to help the brain think and understand, and to read or hear words and make sense out of them.
Yes, Char is part of you right now and She is helping you think about this story.