Bonaparte’s Bursting Buttons: A Thin Story
On my way to Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, one late November I realized that I had not packed any winter clothes. It turns out that I was not the first to make this blunder. None of the half a million or so Germans, French, Swiss, Poles, Italians, and other nationalities who passed through the town or in its vicinity in June 1812 had packed any winter clothes, something many of them were to later regret. They were on their way, although they did not know it at the time, to Moscow. What they also did not know was that they were going to make what was arguably the world’s worst aller-retour journey ever: Vilna to Moscow and back (at that time the town was known under its Polish name and had recently been acquired by the Russians in the process of the annihilation of the Polish state). It was June, and they were in a good mood, as the Russian Tsar had recently fled Vilna followed by his quarrelling generals, and they were under the command of possibly the most competent military leader since Alexander the Great: Napoleon Bonaparte. The lack of warm clothing was not going to bother me, however. By the morning the snow had melted, and luckily I was not on my way to Moscow on foot. I was in Vilnius to search for some buttons, preferably made of tin. The story of Napoleon’s buttons and their allegedly fateful role in the disastrous 1812 campaign is widespread among scientists and science teachers. This is partly due to the popular book with the same name by the chemists Penny LeCouteur and Jay Burreson, and I wanted to find out whether there could be any truth in it, or whether it was just another of the legends and rumours that has formed around this war. Briefly, the story goes like this: metallic tin is a dense material (lots of atoms per cubic centimetre) and was supposedly the material used for many of the buttons of what was known as la Grande Armée. Unfortunately, metallic tin has a nasty Mr Hyde variation, known as grey tin.