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NOTA BENE: CHEMISTRY
Mendeleyev's Dream
The Quest for the Elements
by Paul Strathern
Hamish Hamilton, London, 2000. 320 pp. L12.99. ISBN 0-241-- 14065-X.
In 1869, the Russian Dmitri Mendeleyev was puzzling over how the chemical elements might be organized according to their properties. Forty years earlier, Doebereiner had recognized that some elements, such as the halogens, formed triads with similar properties. During the 1860s, Alexandre-Emile Beguyer de Chancourtois and John Newlands had independently recognized that the properties of the elements tended to repeat themselves with increasing weight. But it took Mendeleyev's theoretical insight to create the arrangement of the elements that closely resembles the periodic table we use today. Mendeleyev was bold enough to leave gaps where no known element fit into the pattern and to suggest that the atomic weights of some elements had been calculated incorrectly. Initially, his reliance on...