The father of the periodic table
Mike Sutton looks at how Mendeleev’s patience revealed periodicity in the elements
The urge to discover patterns in our surroundings appears to be a fundamental human trait. Thousands of years ago, our remote ancestors built massive stone monuments that were precisely aligned to significant points in the annual solar cycle. And in the 19th century, thoughtful chemists noticed family resemblances among the elements and tried to embed them in an explanatory paradigm.
A century and a half ago, Dmitri Mendeleev took a crucial step in this search for order among the elements, by publishing the first draft of his periodic table. In 2019 the world-wide community of chemists is celebrating this anniversary, and rightly so. Like Stonehenge, the table reflects regularities in nature which were due to causes that remained mysterious when it was originally constructed. But how did Mendeleev come to build his monument?