Death at Number

The five others went first, one by one, and contemporary sources noted how humane the spectacle was, as the participants did not need to see each other. Thousands of Stockholmers had turned out to watch, on this cold day of 30 January 1744, as the last of the six, Gustaf Schedin, accountant at the Insjö copper works, mounted the scaffold. As the culmination of the show, he would be both beheaded and then cut to pieces. The summer before, Schedin had led the fourth Dalecarlian Rebellion: the last march of the free miners and farmers of Dalarna— the mine-rich county 100 miles north-west of Stockholm—to the Swedish capital, in a movement expressing raging discontent with the king, Fredrik I, and his disastrous war with Russia. This sort of thing had been successful before: the fiercely independent-minded people of Dalarna traditionally wielded a certain power, rich as they were in natural resources—the jewel in the crown being the famous Great Copper Mountain mine in Falun. Once it was the largest of its kind in the world, and yielded something like 70 per cent of the world’s copper production. The Falun mine, like many others, was once managed as a cooperative operation, and worked by free miners called mountain-men (bergsmän) with special privileges and laws of their own. But their time was at an end. In 1743 the uprising ended in a bloodbath in Stockholm, and now the six leaders were to be executed. The copper mine was also losing its privileged position. It had given the Swedish kings and queens economic strength for numerous more-or-less successful military adventures down in continental Europe, but was now in decline, and so was the military power of Sweden. This traditionally male activity—becoming angry and getting the lads together to sort things and people out—is chemically related to high levels of the large organic molecule testosterone. For a inorganic chemist inclined to find a good story, it would have been great to now present a direct link between copper and the way we make this molecule in our bodies, starting from cholesterol, claiming that this made the men from Dalarna more inclined to hasty revolutionary actions.