Dozing at His Desk?

Michael D. Gordin. A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table. New York: Basic Books, 2004. xx + 364 pp. $30.

Reviewed by Simon Schaffer

In a brief burst of extraordinary energy between early 1869 and late 1871, Dmitrii Mendeleev, a St. Petersburg chemistry professor, formulated a chart of the 63 then-known elements from hydrogen to uranium, arranged in periods of increasing atomic weight and in groups of similar properties. For its author, this table was ultimately significant as an outward and visible expression of what he called the periodic law: elements’ atomic weights determine their properties, which vary from element to element in a periodic fashion. Much reorganized, reinterpreted, and extended, the periodic table still stands as the basic chart of chemical rationality, bringing order to the seeming chaos of chemistry’s kingdom. Like any other fundamental discovery, the origins of the periodic table accumulated their legends. Some were cultivated, much later in life, by the discoverer himself. There was silly talk of a marvelous dream, while dozing at the chemist’s desk, which inspired the new principle of order. Some imagined that Mendeleev had simply played solitaire with cards marked with each element’s atomic weight and a summary of its salient properties. Others urged the importance of Mendeleev’s long and strenuous experimentation—there is little if any evidence for such tales. Rather, as Gordin amply demonstrates, the periodic table and the periodic law emerged during the course of the conscientious composition of a mundane chemistry textbook.

Chemistry had long been a science devoted to classification and tabulation, its textbooks key objects of ordered synthesis. Mendeleev sought a pragmatic organizing principle for his exposition of state-of-the-art chemical doctrine for St. Petersburg students. He understandably regarded the result, his extraordinary Principles of Chemistry, as his “favorite child.” Eight editions appeared before Mendeleev’s death, each adorned with chatty footnotes of increasing length and detail. (Gordin seems equally devoted to extensive annotations, which spread over 60 infuriatingly unindexed pages of tiny type and contain much of the body of his argument). Just as it has been strangely hard to take seriously the suggestion that a dramatic innovation could emerge from workaday textbook writing in a sclerotic tsarist university, so it has been difficult rightly to appreciate the deeply entrenched conservatism in the name of which Mendeleev proposed a reordering of the elements’ empire. “People imbued with science are essentially and unavoidably conservative,” he insisted; there were no “revolutions or coups” in nature and none needed in the state.

Gordin has a seductively neat concept with which to make his argument about Mendeleev’s science and politics stick. In the application of orderly abstract systems to real-world phenomena, there will always be systematic misfits. The claim is that this was true both of chemical elements and Russian society. Such anomalies could be ignored, absorbed, or expelled. The choice of tactics was in the hands of the systematizer, whether imperial administrator or chemistry professor. This model certainly helps Gordin offer a workable account of Mendeleev’s initial work on elements’ periodicity. There were gaps in Mendeleev’s early schemes, terrae incognitae occupied by hitherto-unknown elements awaiting discovery. The periodic law let him guess these elements’ properties, their melting points, densities, and solubilities. Three of these elements were indeed identified in 15 years after the table’s first publication, by chemists in France, Sweden, and Germany. By downplaying any salient differences between prediction and reality,Mendeleev and his allies turned the western European chemical discoveries into sterling evidence for his periodic law’s power.

It’s not entirely clear whether Mendeleev’s colleagues were much more moved by his prophecies of new elements than by his remarkable skill in ordering what they already knew. Nor was Mendeleev the first chemist to predict unknown elements on the basis of their periodic ordering. Gordin passes disappointingly quickly over the important priority disputes that so disturbed Mendeleev’s career. Nor were all Mendeleev’s predictions right. In particular, he foresaw the existence of an element he portentously named newtonium, a space-filling ether of tiny atomic weight that could explain everything from optics and electromagnetism to radioactivity.

Gordin’s Mendeleev had firm views about predictive science and its role in bringing the Russian Empire from apparent chaos to harmonious order. The great chemist insisted that only systems capable of applying a grip on reality to management of the future had the status of science and the power to secure social stability. Here Gordin’s unprecedentedly careful analysis of Mendeleev’s long career in state service pays rich dividends. Typically, his work as economic consultant in agriculture and industry, his management of Russia’s entire system of weights and measures, his fights with spiritualists, and his bold balloon flight during a solar eclipse have figured merely as appealing color in an otherwise solid narrative of chemical inquiry. But, by treating each of these episodes as revealing clues to Mendeleev’s vision for the empire and for his science, Gordin manages to explain just how the future counted for this conservative expert, even though his imagined future never quite came to pass.

Gordin is at his best in documenting the vagaries of tsarist policy and St. Petersburg fashion. It seemed hard
to find a place where Mendeleev could make his science pay dividends for conservative politics. There were violent fights aired all over the newspapers when Mendeleev was barred entry to the empire’s Academy of Sciences. Patriotic journalists alleged an alien Germanic coterie in the Academy was biased against this true son of the Siberian soil. Ultimately, Mendeleev found his proper place as chief economic advisor to the viciously reactionary regime of Alexander III, counseling severe protectionism and an empire-wide system of vigilant standardization and immutable administrative order.

Mendeleev repeatedly taught the lesson that nature’s order was real and he was its lawgiver. He loathed modish fin-de-siècle enthusiasms, whether Marxist or radioactivist. He damned what he saw as the alchemical mysticism of radioactive transmutation peddled by the Curies in Paris. He pooh-poohed ambitious young Cambridge physicists’ seemingly absurd guesswork about the existence of subatomic particles. These spectacular errors by the Russian visionary barely damage the significance of the methodical table Mendeleev touted. But, as Gordin cleverly shows in his reflections on Mendeleev’s ether and on his politics, they explain clearly why he thought the table mattered. They remind us that this was an unabashed protagonist of classical 19th-century order, not a herald of unimaginable scientific modernity.

Very much more stable than Nicholas II’s Russia, the periodic table itself is yet occasionally troubled by systematic misfits. Its good order is now under the control of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. In the last year, Peter Atkins and his IUPAC colleagues have been arguing, yet again, about how it should be structured.Where should hydrogen, first of elements, be put? Is it more like lithium, or an inert gas, or is it to be given a proudly solitary place at the table’s head? The Union will decide on whether this troublesome element should be expelled, accommodated, or ignored. Thus patched-up and ingeniously mutated, Mendeleev’s astonishingly powerful table still survives any possible wreckers’ attentions.

A longer verison of this article appeared in the London Review of Books 27: 13 (7 July 2005). www.lrb.co.uk. Reprinted with permission.