The Suitcase Maker's Dream

Dmitry Mendeleyev, born Jan. 27, 1834

Was he a Nobel Laureate? No, although today awards and prizes are bestowed in his honor. Was he admitted into the Russian Academy of Sciences? Also no, although these days research institutes, universities, streets, cities, and even a crater on the moon are named after him. Yet ask any Russian, young or old: Who was Russia’s greatest scientist? They will all give the same answer: Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev.

All geniuses wind up being the subject of anecdotes. Truly great geniuses even have their own mythology.

One myth about Mendeleyev is that he came up with the ideal proof for vodka – 80 (40 percent alcohol by volume), a myth very popular with Russians and actually not so far-fetched. The fact of the matter is that Dmitry Ivanovich did defend a doctoral dissertation in 1865 titled, “On Combining Spirits with Water.” However his interest in this subject was purely scientific: the molecules in this solution arranged themselves quite beautifully. In reality, as far back as a couple of centuries before Mendeleyev defended his dissertation, a 76-proof grain distillate known as polugar was already common, and by 1843 the 80-proof standard was adopted to combat those trying to evade the rather hefty taxes levied on spirits. People probably just liked the idea of a great scientist sharing their basic human proclivities.

“Even for me it’s surprising – what didn’t I do over the course of my scientific life?” Mendeleyev once reflected. Indeed, he did a lot, and all of it successfully. Natural resources, metallurgy, agronomy, economics, meteorology, flour milling – this is just a partial list of all the fields that captivated him. One moment he was flying high in a hot air balloon to observe an eclipse, and the next he was sewing himself a suit with a vast number of conveniently placed pockets. St. Petersburg street clocks were installed on his initiative. In fact, only about ten percent of his numerous scientific works were devoted to the field for which he is best known – chemistry.

Reminiscences of Mendeleyev often include the following anecdote: once a cabbie began to bow to a passerby, respectfully rising and removing his cap. When his surprised passenger inquired “Who is that?” the cabbie replied, “That’s the famous suitcase maker Mendeleyev!” Mendeleyev did not really have a career crafting suitcases, but there is a grain of truth in this legend. In order to transport his huge collection of files, he glued together his own cardboard containers that were both easy to carry around and quite attractive.

Mendeleyev loved everything beautiful. For him, beauty was found in order. More than once he lamented to his chemistry students the lack of an orderly system for representing what was known about the elements. How he longed to bring order to this chaos! At the very least, it would make his lectures easier.

Many others were also pondering this problem and trying to come up with a classification system for the elements. They all ultimately abandoned the endeavor. For example, in 1866 the English chemist John Alexander Newlands noticed that if the elements were arranged according to their relative atomic weights, a pattern emerged whereby every eighth element exhibited analogous behavior. This reminded him of a piano keyboard, and the phenomenon he discovered came to be called the “law of octaves.” This metaphor was a bit too cute for nineteenth century science and wound up dooming the idea. Newlands was ridiculed and people jokingly wondered whether his elements could play a little tune. The British chemist abandoned his research and disappeared from view.

Three years later Mendeleyev not only devised a system for organizing the elements, arranging them in accordance with their atomic weights, but he even left space for as yet unknown elements. In addition to predicting the properties of these mystery elements, he described how they would be discovered. He then had the audacity to correct the atomic weights of eleven already known elements (and he was right).

Even contemporary scientists have trouble understanding how Mendeleyev managed to devise his periodic table, given the meager information that scientists had at their disposal in the 1860s. This puzzle gave rise to a second myth about Mendeleyev: that the periodic law came to Dmitry Ivanovich in a dream.

It is possible that a joke made by Mendeleyev himself is responsible for this myth. He had a reputation as a bit of an oddball, and liked to joke with people. Weary of answering journalists’ endless questions about his table, when one asked him, “How did this idea enter your head?” Mendeleyev replied, without missing a beat: “Certainly not the same way you get an idea, my good man! You’re just sitting there, and before you know it they’re paying you a fiver per line. But it might be that I spent twenty years thinking it over.”

The problem of the periodic table truly consumed him. In early 1869, those around him began to notice that Mendeleyev seemed nervous and was barely sleeping. All his time was spent on his own version of solitaire: arranging and rearranging calling cards, on the flip sides of which he had written all the known properties of each element. He tried this way and that, but it was never quite right. The historic moment came on the first of March. He awoke that morning and, the story goes, even before washing up, grabbed the first piece of paper he could lay his hands on and jotted down the periodic table. Had he really dreamed it? That is not how Mendeleyev described it, but when your work is your entire life, the wheels keep turning even in your sleep.

For about six years science paid almost no attention to his discovery. But then a new element was discovered, gallium, the properties of which perfectly matched those predicted by Mendeleyev. Yet the density reported by its discoverer differed from Mendeleyev’s prediction. Mendeleyev was unperturbed: “Call it whatever you want, even japonium,” he retorted (the element had been named by its patriotic French discoverer), “but the density has not been correctly determined.” Again, he was later proved right. When, subsequently, new elements were discovered, their properties always turned out to be just as Dmitry Ivanovich had predicted.

Before long the periodic table took on a life of its own. It attracted an army of devotees and many who wanted to improve on it. There are now almost seven hundred versions of the table: round ones, triangular ones, spiral shaped ones, and even three dimensional cylinders, stacks, and platforms – people “dreamed up” all sorts of designs. In some cases, people from other fields even created parodies of the table. Pharmacologists arranged drugs in an analogous manner and also found some patterns. In the field of nutrition, various foods were similarly systematized. Odd as it may seem, one nutritional table even included arsenic, since it was once standard fare for guests one never wanted to invite back.

The American scientist Glenn Seaborg had a favorite tie that featured the periodic table. He was so bothered by the blank squares that he discovered ten elements to fill them in. The 106th element was named in his honor: seaborgium.

This is an honor Mendeleyev never got to enjoy. Of course there is, by now, a mendelevium, but it was named long after the great chemist’s death. It’s a fitting name, someone remarked, since “it’s an unstable element.”

It is true that, with age, Dmitry Ivanovich turned a bit irascible. There were frequent run-ins with colleagues and slammings of doors. He also smoked a lot. “You’re going to die anyway, whether you smoke or not,” he said. “Better to smoke.”

To this day, Mendeleyev’s periodic table continues to be filled in.

The first Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded more than five years before Mendeleyev’s death, yet he never received one. This injustice may bother some, but Dmitry Ivanovich could not have cared less about awards and titles.