Did a Frenchman beat Mendeleev to the periodic table?

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Science and fame aren't always about the inventor

The thing about this is that it shows a lack of understanding about the scientific process. Not one of us works in a vacuum. Einstein's relativity theories started from a set of equations by Plank. Lauterbur and Mansfield won the Nobel in 2003 for MRI, but that was preceded by three others working on 3-D NMR, and really is built on proton NMR discovered by Bloch and Purcell in the 40's (they won their Nobel in 1952). That Mendeleev built on others' works is hardly surprizing. And his statement that it came to him in a dream is not necessarily a falsehood on his part, even given that fact. Remember that connecting the dots to others' work is always easy after the roadmap has already been drawn. His work saw a number of things about the structure of the table and its links to properties that made the table work where others' didn't - and at a time when data on elements was scarce. He was the first to draw these conclusions. All the previous systems that I have ever heard of, there were significant weaknesses. Overcoming them to make something really useful was a major feat. And his work was not well received. He had to really pound the pavement, so to speak, to get the scientific community to really look at the results.

(The earliest attempt to link properties to groups of elements can be attributed to Dalton in 1808, by the way. He was a Quaker, and because of this he assumed that God would only assemble compounds in their simplest form - water was HO, the product of combustion of carbon compounds was CO, etc. This, of course was a rather significant flaw. It worked for the seventeen or so elements known to man at the time, but it was quickly shown to be quite wrong.)

I am also a chemical educator. I have watched his Dr. Scerri is very good at punching at conventional wisdom. His conclusions are always enticing, and he seems to enjoy it most when they are provocative. He has been a rather constant and sometimes mildly offensive (imho) force in the debate on cognition in the sciences. I think the last paragraph of the article sums it up. What Mendeleev did was to see things where his predecessors didn't. That the idea of a periodic table wasn't his doesn't diminish his contribution. He made the first one (or one of the first ones, at any rate) that anyone had seen that worked well beyond the known information, and then he perservered to make sure that people understood that it was real, and that it mattered. That is why he is identified with the periodic table.

We have a real problem in this country with the idea of invention and innovation. Every advance is supposed to come from somebody who has an Einsteinian intellect, whose ideas come springing forth, fully formed, like Venus from Zeus' head. Somehow, Bill Gates' success is somehow not deserved because he didn't invent the BASIC language that he ported to the first personal computers. Oh, and he didn't build his own personal computer from grains of sand and a spool of silver wire, either. I hear people in my own department slamming the aforementioned Lauterbur because he didn't "invent" MRI without the contributions of others. I find this line of reasoning extremely disturbing. There are NO innovations that occur this way. And putting those milestone individuals like Einstein, Hawking, Newton, Euler, Gauss, Maxwell, etc. on such a pedestal does them a grave disservice, not to mention the others who had a hand in the process. It also takes one of the most beautiful parts of science - the way that one person's discovery becomes a dozen others' germ for their discoveries that become the germs for hundreds of others, including, more often than not, the original innovator's, all because of the communication of those ideas - and religates it to mysticism, something that is both incomprehensible and out of reach of mere mortals. And that does all of us a disservice, including all of the future scientists that I teach.

Posted by: always-a-geek   Posted on: 11/22/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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