Margaret Harris reviews It’s a Gas: the Magnificent and Elusive Elements that Expand Our World by Mark Miodownik 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, hydroge.