THE DISAPPEARING SPOON

Paul Emile François Lecoq de Boisbaudran (the man in the portrait in the middle) was born in a winemaking family in the Cognac region of France in 1838. Lecoq de Boisbaudran eventually became the best spectroscopic surgeon in the world and in 1875, after spotting never-before-seen coloured bands in a mineral, he concluded, instantly and correctly, he'd discovered a new element. He named it Gallium, after Gallia, the Latin name for France. However conspiracy merchants accused him of slyly naming the element after himself since Lecoq, or 'the rooster', is gallus in Latin.

Here is where I decided to put two ladies on either side of Lecoq's portrait. The conspiracy merchants were probably men, but I don't doubt that women could have thought that as well; they just didn't have the possibility to raise their voices in these scientific matters.

Now I want to go into a side-tangent to explain why these ladies are saying "Ga". Imagine recounting an event to someone; you might skip the irrelevant parts of the episode by saying "bla bla bla". Another situation you might use "bla" is when you are having an argument with your sibling and you are sick of it; so you cover up your ears and say "bla bla bla". The two ladies on either side of Lecoq are doing the same. But why are they saying "Ga" instead of "bla"? The two syllables have the ending 'a' in common. So, we need to figure out the 'bl' and 'G' bits. If you write out the alphabet from the letter B to the letter L (the two letters that are left in 'bl') and find the middle letter, you will get G. Using a little bit of imagination, 'bla' translates into 'Ga'. I found this highly amusing and convenient as Gallium is 'Ga' in the periodic table. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that, in English, 'bla' is written as 'blah'. In the same article, there was a very elegant sentence that neatly described what happened with this nonsense theory of mine:

The discovery of eka-aluminium, now known as gallium, raises the question of what really drives science forward- theories, which frame how people view the world, or experiments, the simplest of which can destroy elegant theories.

It took a few years, but in 1878 the Frenchman finally had a nice, pure hunk of gallium. Though solid at a moderate temperature, gallium melts at around 30 degrees Celsius, meaning that if you hold it in the palm of your hand (body temperature is around 37 degrees Celsius), it will melt into a grainy, thick puddle of pseudoquicksilver. It's one of the few liquid metals you can touch without boiling your finger to the bone. As a result, one popular trick is to fashion gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch as your guests recoil when their Earl Grey 'eats' their utensils. This is exactly what I wanted to show with the cup and spoon at the bottom of the drawing. To make it more special, the spoon is melting at the base of the cup in the form of a comb-structure, typical of roosters.