Book review: Seven Elements That Have Changed the World, by John Browne

by John Browne
Weidenfeld & Nicolson

It's hard to throw a rock without hitting an object that has changed the world in someone's eyes. Hunt through bookshops and there you will find titles on all manner of purportedly world-changing items: maps, bags, equations, dresses, eruptions, diagrams, shoes, tea cosies, the banana and cod.

They might all be justified. Just as any experience changes the brain, so any product or resource can be said to have changed the world, given a broad enough definition of what it means to change. Perhaps somewhere in the world a publisher may be mulling a book proposal on the global impact of party balloons, paperclips or marshmallows.

But John Browne is on promising ground when he seizes on seven elements for his contribution to the pile. The number is essentially arbitrary, although he admits he can't think of an eighth element that compares in global impact to iron, carbon, gold, silver, uranium, titanium or silicon.

From the off it is clear greed is a theme. The Spanish conquistadors rampaged through 16th-century Muisca and Inca territories in search of gold, slaughtering native communities along the way. When Gonzalo Pizarro arrived at a village in search of El Dorado's city of gold, locals who weren't helpful were tortured, impaled or burned alive.

The allure of gold lay in its lustre, its refusal to tarnish, and its readiness to be worked. A single gram can be extruded into a wire more than 2km long or beat into a one-square metre sheet. On walking into the Museo del Oro in Bogotá, Browne is strangely entranced by the exquisite objects on display. "There is something calming, even comforting, about being bathed in the glow of gold," he writes.