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SAM KEAN tells us that 鈥�90 per cent of particles in the universe are hydrogen, and the other 10 per cent are helium. Everything else, including 6 million billion billion kilograms of Earth, is a cosmic rounding error.鈥� It is this rounding error that provides the fascinating content of The Disappearing Spoon.

Kean鈥檚 interest in the chemical elements began as a young boy when his mother collected the spilt contents of thermometers and stored them in a plastic pill bottle. By all accounts, Kean was a sickly child and a clumsy one too, so there was much mercury to be had. His mother would pour it into the pill bottle鈥檚 lid and let Kean watch the mercury 鈥渟plitting and healing itself flawlessly鈥�. This early, if somewhat hazardous, fascination with the curious metal led to a lifelong passion for the periodic table.

Another metal to grab Kean鈥檚 imagination was gallium. It is solid at room temperature but melts at 30 掳C. A popular trick 鈥� before health and safety ruined the fun 鈥� was to give guests gallium teaspoons and then watch their surprise as the spoons melted when they stirred their tea (hence the eponymous 鈥渄isappearing spoon鈥�).

Kean begins his exploration of the elements with these idiosyncratic metals and then proceeds to cover every element under the sun. It is an ambitious project. Writing about Dmitri Mendeleev and others who produced the first periodic table is one thing, but saying something interesting about every one of 118 elements in a mere 19 chapters is something else entirely.

This is a big task and, most of the time, Kean gets it right. There are lots of interesting titbits, such as the fact that aluminium was once considered a precious metal. Only the most esteemed guests of Napoleon III got to eat with aluminium cutlery; the rest had to make do with mere gold.

Kean is at his most engaging when writing about human folly. As he puts it, 鈥渢he history of the periodic table is the history of the characters who shaped it鈥�. And what characters they were: from the 鈥渜ueer fish鈥� Mendeleev, who didn鈥檛 believe that atoms existed, to chemical warfare enthusiast Fritz Haber.

The tales are loosely but expertly woven together. Kean has Bill Bryson鈥檚 comic touch when it comes to describing genius-lunatic scientists. He is somewhat less adept, though, when writing about the science behind the periodic table. For example, he describes electron d-shells as looking like 鈥渕isshapen balloon animals鈥�, which, try as I might, I simply couldn鈥檛 visualise.

But it would be unfair to dwell on these shortcomings. The book is not so much a primer in chemistry as a lively history of the elements and the characters behind their discovery.