Books of Interest to Caveman Chemists

The outstanding collection of projects includes a few for the production of commodity chemicals that I particularly admire, for both their specific contents and their relatively unique pedagogical contribution. After all, the milestones of modern industrial society are chemical processes--such as those for the production of sulfuric acid, ammonia, and sodium sulfate--that most people neither understand nor appreciate, and there's no better way I can imagine for coming to understand these crucial technologies than by replicating them yourself. Kevin Dunn's book will show you how.

Some sections may be more understandable to someone taking the course, but teachers, chemistry students, history buffs, and cavemen and cavewomen will all find something of value and interest in the book.

Clear instructions are given for 28 projects, which include how to make bronze from metal ores; glass from sand, ashes, and limestone; paper from grass or straw; soap from fat; alcohol from honey; photographs from egg whites; chlorine from salt water; and celluloid from cotton.

Clearly Dunn's heart is in the right place, in that he wants to bring the initial stages of chemistry to life by linking them to everyday objects and showing how they can be made, and talking about the chemical reactions behind their making. ... Indeed it is clear that Dunn is no mean scholar, and it is possible to extract an excellent history of the origins of the chemical industry from his book.

Caveman Chemistry would be ideal as a supplemental text in an honors chemistry class or interdisciplinary seminar, for stand-alone use in a course for non-chemistry majors, or especially as an enrichment resource for gifted secondary students. It would also be a wonderful introductory text for those studying the history of technology or experimental archaeology. In light of the mediocrity of writing in many contemporary science textbooks, especially at the public school level, Dunn's distinctive voice and wide-ranging yet intense delivery add to this book's strong appeal.

In every case, the emphasis is on using materials at hand, for two reasons: students should learn to make things from scratch, and know what they have made—bicarbonate of soda or ethanol, for example. Along the way, he provides much more than just chemistry-set recipes: reaction diagrams are given, as well as the equations, and the history of our ancestors' increasing ability to make the chemicals and products we now take for granted is explained in considerable detail.

Some people seem to think that automobiles, camcorders, and plastics grow on trees. Suggest to the bonehead that someone had to design the product and someone had to create the raw materials that went into it, and they're stunned. Suggest to them that real people can smelt metal from ore, make a battery, make their own photographic film, explosives or plastics, and they just won't believe you. But this book shows how you can do just those things.