Who knew that Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, also invented the whoopie cushion?
Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But Priestly did store the gases he collected “in pig bladders he happened to have lying around the house.”
That’s one of many combustible facts contained in The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry (HarperCollins, 2005) by Larry Gonick, an award-winning San Francisco cartoonist, and Craig Criddle, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. The 250-page bubbling cauldron of knowledge teaches enough about atomic structure, chemical bonds, the periodic table and thermodynamics to be a supplemental textbook for high school chemistry classes—and for Criddle’s own fall-quarter course, Aquatic Chemistry and Biology. “It would be good refresher material,” says Criddle, PhD ’89.
The author of 11 previous cartoon guides to such diverse subjects as the universe, sex, genetics and physics, Gonick set out to emphasize that there is something mysterious about chemistry. That’s why Criddle’s cartoon alter ego makes discoveries and pronouncements—“As a cook, nature is obsessive-compulsive”—dressed in an alchemist’s cloak.
Criddle and Gonick worked for two years on the book, exchanging more than 1,200 e-mails as they refined the text and giggled at their own jokes. Gonick “was like a really smart doctoral student who just wouldn’t stop asking questions,” Criddle says. “We’d often get to a point where I’d say, ‘Well, Larry, we’ve now arrived at quantum mechanics, and that’s about as far as we’re going to go for an introductory cartoon book.’”
Indeed, the focus was on keeping the book accessible—and entertaining. To illustrate reaction rates, Gonick compares ill-trained, uncooperative weasels washing clothes by hand to a nuclear blast dryer that crisps clothes in a millisecond. Why? “Weasels are always funny.”
Criddle, who specializes in biological processes for water quality control and hazardous waste sites, is more apt to pen an article entitled “Hydraulic analysis of in situ reactors created by extraction-injection wells: a nested cell and its application at Oak Ridge, TN.” But in the cartoon guide, he had fun giving Aristotle “a hard time” about how many elements there really are.
Seriously, though. Criddle didn’t flinch from taking on hugely abstract concepts like entropy—and making sure the pedagogy was up to date. “In 2000 there started to be a lot of activity in the chemistry education world and in chemistry journals, and the way this book teaches entropy is not a conventional way,” he notes. “We don’t use the words ‘order’ and ‘disorder,’ but we talk about a spreading out of energy. People have an intuition for that, and you can build on that.”
A spreading out of energy. Kind of like the whoopie cushion.
