Boron, Death Valley Days, and the Periodic Table of Death and Mystery

Boron = boring? That’s kinda-sorta why this atomic element didn’t get attention earlier in the Periodic Table of Death and Mystery series. Boron literally never came up in organic or biochemistry. It’s considered nonessential for human life (1) based on the biochemist’s periodic table, and it’s not even in my generic once-a-day vitamin and they include selenium(6).

That doesn’t mean boron (B) isn’t important in human history, past, present, and future. It is. Boron was originally found as evaporates, including in the complex salt, sodium borate (Na₂H₂₀B₄O₁₇) (3), better known as borax. As early as 300 A.D., the Chinese employed borax in pottery glazes, and it was even traded on the Silk Road to Marco Polo, who then brought it to Europe in the 13th century, specifically for pottery glazes.

The element boron (atomic number 5) wasn’t technically “discovered” chemically until the early 1800s. Pure boron has a brittle and a lustrous dark silverish crystal structure (2) but it isn’t found in its pure form on earth—ever. You’ll find boron in lots of other chemicals. It’s huge in industrial production, a backbone element in rocket fuel and pyrotechnics (“She burns green”—Public Domain Episode 3 (24)), it’s used in the production of bleach, and is even added as a food preservative (4). Have you ever used Pyrex® glass (5)? Its base is borosilicate glass, typically ~15% B₂O₃ (boric oxide) + 80% SiO₂ (silicon dioxide) + 2% Al₂O₃ (aluminum oxide) which has superior thermal properties (9). Oh, and you can use borax to make slime (recipe below 10)

The largest commercially mined deposits of borax are in Turkey and Boron, California (go figure) (3), but borax didn’t come into common use until the mid- to late-1800s (3) when large deposits were found in a remote desert valley in California by a marketing genius (11). And that’s the direction we are traveling in our 20-mule team today (12). To borax, mining, and a radio program (1930-1931) and TV show (1952-1970) called Death Valley Days.

Humans exaggerate ALL THE TIME: the best thing I ate, the worst boyfriend ever, historic mudslides, snow accumulation never seen in our lifetime! Well, Death Valley, which is now a premiere National Park, lives up to its superlatives. In the U.S., it’s the hottest (Furnace Creek July 10, 1913, 56.7°C or 134.1°F), driest (average rainfall < 2 inches or 5 cm), and lowest (Badwater Basin, 282 ft or 86 m below sea level) (13, 14). IMO, You definitely need to add Death Valley on your bucket list of U.S. National Parks to visit, along with Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Everglades.

When borax was first seriously mined in Death Valley during the late 1800s, a 20-mule team wagon set-up was used to port 10 tons of borax ore out of Death Valley per wagon load. Each team consisted of two huge wooden wagons—one carrying ore and the other holding 1200 gallons of water—18 mules, two horses, and two men—the driver or skinner, and a swamper, who handled the second wagon’s brake and camp chores. Teams left every fourth day to wend their way out of inhospitable territory along winding roads that necessitated incredible skill. Because how does someone drive wagons and mules that stretch for over 180 feet (55 m) long up a switchback mountain road? By golly, those drivers deserved every penny of the $100 a month they were paid. (15)

The 20-mule train only freighted borax six years. By 1893, railways had been built and the ore was shipped by train. But the 20-mule team became an icon in borax advertising when they made their first appearance at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The Pacific Coast Borax Co. used the mule team to popularize the mysterious and iconic images and lore of Death Valley and parleyed that into a campaign to get their products into the American home in dozens of different forms.

But why borax? What is it? And why was it a household name starting in the early 20^th century? Borax is found in fertilizers, fuel additives, soap, antiseptics, and cosmetics. My grandmother even kept a box of 20-Mule Team borax laundry detergent by her washing machine. But companies really pushed it as an essential hygiene product, which is one reason its use exploded. Borax hit during a time when the culture embraced cleanliness and germ eradication in the Western World. The Great War had just devastated the population of Europe, but when deaths were totaled, more troops had died of sepsis and disease due to poor sanitation than on the actual battlefield (16). The company’s goal was to “put a box of borax in every home” by pushing the theme that sanitation saves lives (17).

The radio program Death Valley Days was just a continuation of the borax advertising campaign, but the P.C. Borax Co. didn’t want anyone sitting at a desk in New York making up stories. They needed someone special, and boy, did they find her. One of the few employees of the McCann Erikson advertising agency who qualified had experience writing for radio and was also a wife and mother of two young children, Ruth Woodman (18, 19, 20). But she was more than just a script writer. Ruth Woodson was pretty amazing.

Born in 1894, a graduate of Vassar, Woodman worked in journalism writing for magazines and traveled in the early 1920s to write articles about Turkey, China, Egypt, and India. She started writing for radio in 1928 and worked on scripts for Dupont’s Cavalcade of America, and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. She was the perfect choice of the Death Valley assignment with her foreign travel and her radio writing chops because the P.C. Borax Co. insisted on true stories based on real-life pioneers, miners, early travelers, and settlers of the Death Valley region. And to get them, Woodson, who lived with her family in Rye, New York, traveled to Death Valley and its surrounds every summer for nineteen years.

According to her own accounts and notes, she visited rough bars and dusty saloons, packed into areas on horseback visiting ghost towns and campsites, gambled with prospectors and miners, sat down with grizzled gas station attendants and bartenders to gather their lived experiences, recollections, stories, and legends. She met locals, including Death Valley Scotty of Scotty’s Castle, and did meticulous research wherever she went. Then she went back to New York and turned her raw notes into thirty-minute scripts seeped in authenticity that captivated audiences for decades (21). All her letters, papers, and notes for the radio and T.V. show—Oh, did you know she wrote for television, too? Over 700 scripts for both—are archived at the University of Oregon Libraries (22). Unfortunately, they are not available online. You have to travel to Oregon to get access.

Woodman retired in 1959 (22) and is remembered as one of the pioneering women writers in radio and television. She died in 1970, and for all of you biographers out there looking for your next book about a woman breaking barriers, please, pretty please, write one on Ruth Woodman. Oh, the stories she could tell. And has told already.

Slime recipes (10)

Supplies:

Borax powder

Clear glue for clear slime OR white glue—use ones composed of polyvinyl acetate (PVA)

Water (tap water is fine)

Food coloring

2 Bowls, measuring spoons, measuring cups

Optional additions to the finished slime: glitter, small googly-eyes, little stars, iron filings (for magnetic slime)

Instructions:

In the first bowl, add ¼ teaspoon borax powder into ½ cup warm water. Keep mixing until the borax has completely dissolved.

In the second bowl, add ½ cup glue with ½ cup water. Mix until a single smooth consistency.

Here’s the fun chemistry part: Pour the dissolved borax in the first bowl into the diluted glue in the second bowl. Stick your hands in and knead the lumpy, stringy mixture until smooth and stretchy. If you have additions, put them in now and mix some more. The borate ions in the borax cross-link the glue to form the stretchy rubbery slime (23).