Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements

by Paul Strathern

Release Date: 04 June, 2002

Edition: Paperback

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quest---Chemical Heritage Magazine

Despite its title, this book actually has rather little to do with Mendeleev (or Mendeleyev, which is the transliteration favored by the author). He appears in the Prologue as a "gnomic figure seated at a vast littered desk," but disappears in the first sentence of the first chapter, eventually reappearing for the denouement in the book's two final chapters. The 250 pages in between are in a sense primarily an interlude to Mendeleev's periodic table as the triumphant solution to the 25-century "quest for the elements." That the book presents the solution as emerging from a dream is unfortunately evocative of another dream in the city of Ghent a few years before Mendeleev's in St. Petersburg.
Even before I began to read Mendeleyev's Dream, however, I felt apprehensive. The list of other books by the author Paul Strathern suggests that he tackles big topics, which are too often sketched in broad penstrokes and treated superficially. Two more of his titles on the inside back of the dust jacket-The Big Idea: Scientists Who Changed the World and Philosophers in 90 Minutes-cemented my uneasiness.
The blurb on the inside front of the dust jacket claims that the author "unravels the dramatic history of chemistry through the quest for the elements." That's a tall order for such a short book (less than 300 pages of text), all the more since the quest for the elements represents only one aspect-albeit a central aspect-of chemistry's expansive and complex history.
Mendeleyev's Dream begins where natural philosophy traditionally begins, with Thales of Miletus. We are taken on a short tour through the rational thought of the great Ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians before moving on to alchemy, which, despite its "mixed motives" and foolish aims, was nevertheless "the practice which was to give us chemistry." While that is certainly an essential part of chemistry's origins, it overlooks connections to the even older craft traditions, such as dyeing, mining, smelting, and metalworking.
After a visit with Paracelsus and iatrochemistry, the book makes a detour through the beginnings of the scientific revolution. According to the author, this demonstrates the change in thinking necessary to escape such shackles as the four elements, which he terms "one of the biggest blunders in human thought." The story then skips along the alpine peaks of events and colorful personalities in the history of chemistry from van Helmont and Boyle to Newlands and Mendeleev. It's a most entertaining story, and this is the level at which the book is most successful. There are many interesting episodes and anecdotes, and I especially enjoyed the sections on Hennig Brand and the discovery of phosphorus and on the many discoveries of Karl Scheele, who unfortunately received little credit for any of them.
This book is a popular account for the general reader, and the author offers this as his reason for the lack of citations. Consequently, those who know something of chemistry and its history are likely to have a number of quibbles with the author. I certainly do. In addition, I want to offer a significant quibble on behalf of general readers who would not be able to do so themselves. The author proceeds on the premise that past ideas and concepts are worthwhile only insofar as they point toward today's ideas and concepts. I believe that this is a distorted view of the history of science and that it gives general readers significant misconceptions about the movement of science, which sometimes represents progress, but often doesn't.
As far back as Ancient Greece, the atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus appears "breathtakingly modern-far, far ahead of [its] time," whereas Aristotle's compounding of errors "put human intellectual thought on the wrong course for centuries to come." By the time that Johann D�bereiner proposed his law of triads in the 1830s, "chemistry had suffered enough from mistaken theories . . . The way forward now lay through experiment." This hardly suggests the increasingly complex interplay between theory and experiment in chemistry since the mid 19th century.
The author tells us that the ancients knew of nine genuine elements and that three more were discovered in the late Middle Ages. However, "their discoverers did not see them as such, because they didn't know what an element was." I would contend that ancient and medieval natural philosophers knew what an element was as well as we do. It's just that their concept doesn't coincide with ours. But for the author of Mendeleyev's Dream, that means not knowing.
This same attitude about the past as seen from the vantage point of the present appears in various claims and statements scattered through the book. "Separating truth from legend is always easy afterwards, when we can apply modern criteria." "At least half of Newton's intellectual life was wasted on nonscientific pursuits." "The idea of a feminine metal was evidently anathema to the Victorian English scientific establishment. This was to be the start of a distressing trend. All elements discovered since 1839 . . . have been given the Latin neuter ending -ium, or the Greek neuter -on in the case of the inert gases. This sexless nomenclature was even extended to curium, which was named after Madame Curie. . . . This choice of gender was presumably made with no conscious derogatory intent, but one can't help feeling that it says something about the predominantly male society of chemists."
While conveniently omitting any mention of elements such as mendelevium, the author doesn't mind telling us something about a few of the male members of the Royal Society. Newton's celibacy ensured "that he didn't have to admit his repressed homosexual inclinations even to himself," yet he was able to impress their "effect on the scientific world at large." In addition, his presidency of the Royal Society enshrined in it the misogyny that Robert Hooke had previously encouraged. I fail to see the relevance of these gibes, which seem to be included for no other reason than being politically correct. They're minor, but they detract from the book.
Unfortunately, these minor detractions, along with the author's attitudes about scientific progress, are a major flaw in his entertaining and panoramic sketch of the quest for the elements. While I enjoyed the author's lively story, I did not find this a satisfying book. Ultimately, I must conclude that it is flawed both for those who know something of chemistry and its history, as well as for its intended audience, those who don't.

From air, water and stone to the Periodic Table

Who among us can't recall, at least in a general way, the first day of high school chemistry when we were first confronted with that mysterious Periodic Table of the Elements hanging on the wall? Now, as ignorant novices in Chem 1A, we were at last to be initiated into its arcane symbolism.

MENDELEYEV'S DREAM is the story of chemistry, from the ancient Greek, Anaximenes, with his theory of air as the fundamental element compressible to water and stone, to the gnomic Russian genius, Mendeleyev, who conceived the Periodic Table in the mid-19th century. Conceived it in a dream during an exhausted sleep brought on by overwork and frustrated creativity. Sleeping, when he should have been on his way to address a meeting of local cheese-makers.

The author, Paul Strathern, has written a fine narrative overview of the evolution of the scientific method and the chemist's art, from the philosophical musings of the ancients on the nature of the universe, through the long centuries when alchemy held sway, to chemistry's current place in the Pantheon of Sciences. Along the way, Strathern introduces us to the greatest scientific minds and gifted eccentrics of their respective ages: Empedocles, Aristotle, Zosimus, Jabir ibn-Hayyan, Avicenna, Paracelsus, Nicholas of Cusa, Galileo, Descartes, Francis Bacon, van Helmont, Robert Boyle, Hennig Brand, Karl Scheele, Johann Becher, Henry Cavendish, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier, John Dalton, J�ns Berzelius, and a host of others. And, finally, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev.

The nature of the book's subject could easily lend itself to tedium, but the author's style is light - only once does he "balance" a chemical formula, and his intermittent dry wit was much appreciated. What, for instance, was Hennig Brand doing with those fifty buckets of putrefying human urine? His neighbors were undoubtedly not thrilled. And why might the Dutch Assembly have been justified in tacking-up "wanted-posters" around town for Johann Becher, who had just absconded on a fast boat for London?

A scientist himself, Paul has not penned a great technical piece. Rather, he's written an uncomplicated, engaging work of popular science likely to appeal to those of us who ... well, let's just say, didn't learn to transmute lead into gold, much less ace Chem 1A. Now, if someone could just do the same for differential calculus.