Abstract
Today the periodic table is viewed as a scheme embracing all the “building blocks” of the material world in a very simple chart. The rectangular matrix hanging in chemistry classrooms around the world has become a standard. It is so familiar and seems so natural that it has been used as kind of icon for the order of nature. Its Gestalt has become so symbolic that it retains this meaning even without its contents, when the chemical elements are replaced by any kind of items such as vegetables, cheeses, etc. How and when did this specific visual representation of the periodic law stabilize and acquire such a cultural significance?
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References
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E. G. Mazurs, Graphic Representations of the Periodic System during One Hundred Years (University of Alabama Press, 1957–74). A first survey was published as early as 1896 by F. P. Venable, The Development of the Periodic Law (Easton, Pa: The Chemical Publishing Co, 1896 ).
See also A. E. Garrett, The Periodic Law (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1909 ).
For instance Y. Margarshak, J. Malinsky “A three dimensional periodic table,” Nature (November 1992): 360; Kathleen Carredo, “Chemistry for kids,” Journal of Chemical Education 70, no. 8, (August 1993): 658–659.
A first attempt was made in 1934 on the occasion of Mendeleev’s 100th birthday, G. N. Quam, Mary Batell Quam, “Types of Graphic Classifications of the Elements,” Journal of Chemical Education 11 (1934): 27–32, 217–223, 288.
Mazurs’s taxonomy is based on three divisions — short, medium and long charts. Each of these is divided into classes, in turn subdivided in types. One has to be cautious in using his classification, however, because Mazurs modified the original tables for the purpose of comparison: all of the elements known in the 1970s are included, all groups are shown vertically, and the tables were renumbered by Mazurs (see Mazurs, The Graphic Rrepresentations,op. cit., 17). Beginning of volume 2, in the English edition.
Mendeleev, D. M. Principles of Chemistry,trans. George Kamensky (London: Longmans, Green, 1891), 2:16. Ibid., 19.
The discontinuity did not follow from Mendeleev’s adherence to a theory of the discrete structure of matter. Mendeleev, like most of his contemporaries, professed a kind of agnosticism on this issue. The atoms and molecules he referred to are not to be considered as the ultimate units of material substances. Rather they are the basic units of chemical combinations. See Van Spronsen, The Periodic System,op. cit. (1), 223–225.
Mendeleev, “The Periodic Law of the Chemical Elements,” Chemical News 40 (1879): 243: “Even as, up to Laurent and Gerhardt, the words `molecule’, `atom’, and `equivalent’, were used one for the other indiscriminately in the same manner, so now the terms `simple body’ and `element’ are often confounded one with the other. They have however, each a distinct meaning, which is necessary to point out, so as to prevent confusion of terms in philosophical chemistry. A `simple body’ is something material, metal or metalloid, endowed with physical properties and capable of chemical reactions. The idea of molecule corresponds with the expression of a simple body (…) But in opposition to this, the name of `element’ must be reserved for characterising the material particles which form simple and compound bodies, and which determine their behaviour from a chemical and physical point of views. The word `element’ calls to the mind the idea of an atom; carbon is an element; coal, diamond and graphite are simple bodies”.
Mendeleev clearly identified the elements as the cause of the discontinuity of chemical combinations: The periodic law, he wrote, “expresses the properties of the real elements, and not of what may be termed their manifestation visually known to us. The external properties of the elements and compounds are in periodic dependence on the atomic weight of the elements only because these external properties are themselves the result of the properties of the real elements forming the isolated elements or the compound. To explain and to express the periodic law is to explain and to express the cause of the law of multiple proportions, of the difference of the elements, and the variation of their atomicity, and at the same time to understand what mass and gravitation are” (Principles of Chemistry, op. cit. T. II, 210 ).
Mendeleev, “The Periodic Law of the Chemical Elements,” Chemical News 40 (1879): 291. Principles of Chemistry,op. cit. T. 11, 19.
B. M. Kedrov has compiled the various representations published by Mendeleev in a Russian resource volume on the discovery of the periodic system published in 1958. I am in debt to Masanori KAJI who provided me with copies of the tables published in the eight Russian editions of the Principles of Chemistry along with English translations of their titles. I thank him for his kind help. Principles of Chemistry, op. cit. T.II, 18.
Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “Mendeleev’s periodic system of chemical elements,” British Journal for the History of Science 19 (1986): 3–17; Masanori KAJI, “On Mendeleev’s path to the discovery of the periodic law. Analysis of his work 1854–1869,” Journal of History of Science (in Japanese) 27 (1988): 24–36; Nathan Brooks, “Dimitrii Mendeleev’s Principles of Chemistry and the periodic law of the elements” in Communicating Chemistry, Textbooks and their Audiences,ed. A. Lundgren and B. Bensaude-Vincent (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2000), 295–309. ’Principles of Chemistry,op. cit. T.I1, 18.
In particular, the analogies between Li/Mg, Be/Al, B/Si could not be shown. These “diagonal analogies” remained a scandal for the periodic law until it was discovered that they depend on the number of valence electrons and the size of atoms.
See Van Spronsen, The Periodic System,op. cit., 153.
For instance, Glenn T. Seaborg “From Mendeleev to mendelevium and beyond,” Chemistry 43, no. 1 (1970): 6–9.
A. Werner, quoted in Van Spronsen, The Periodic System, op. cit., 151–152. It seems that a similar table was proposed by Thomas Bayley as early as 1898 in Journal of the American Chemical Society 20 (1898): 925–935.
F. Soddy, The Chemistry of the Radioelements: Part II: The Radioelements and the Periodic Law (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1913). J. W. van Spronsen “Soddy and the classification of the elements,” in Frederick Soddy (1877–1956),ed. George B. Kauffman (Amsterdam: Reidel Publishing, 1986), 93–112. Soddy was deeply influenced by William Crookes 3-D model constructed in 1888, the so-called “pretzel model.”
It is important to notice how misleading the blank spaces could be as long as atomic weight was the criterion, because there was still uncertainty as to the number of elements. We know, for instance, that in 1904 Mendeleev attempted to insert two hypothetical elements in the Group 0 of inert gases above helium (coronium and ether); see Mendeleev, An Attempt towards a Chemical Conception of Ether (London: 1904 ).
Niels Bohr, “The structure of the atom and the physical and chemical properties of elements,” Engl. transl. in The Theory of Spectra and Atomic Constitution (Cambridge, London: Cambridge University Press, 1922 ), 70.
Niels Bohr, ibid., 71.
Fritz A. Paneth, Radioelements as Indicators (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co, 1928), 132. Quoted by L. Foster, “Why not modernize the textbooks also: 1. The periodic table,” Journal of Chemical Education 16 (1939): 409–412. On p. 412.
Hevesy G., Paneth, F. A., A Manual of Radioactivity (London: Oxford University Press, 1st German edition 1923, 2d Engl. Edition 1938 ), 160.
From J. W. van Spronsen’s book The Periodic System of Chemical Elements: A History of the First Hundred Years (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1969), 153 (Figure 54); reproduced here by kind permission of J. W. van Spronsen.
Ibid., 151 (Figure 53); reproduced here by kind permission of J. W. van Spronsen.
Ibid., 174 (Figure 72); reproduced here by kind permission of J. W. van Spronsen.
L. Foster, “Why not modernize the textbooks also.” op. cit., 411.
W. F. Luder, “Electron configuration as the basis of the periodic table,” Journal of Chemical Education (January 1943): 21–26. W. F. Luder, a professor in Boston, designed a table based on the arrangement of the electrons in the various quantum levels and combined the short and the long periods. See Van Spronsen, The Periodic System of the Elements,op. cit.
A. von Antropoff, “Les formes usuelles du système périodique des éléments,” Annales GuébhardSéverine 13 (1937): 161–174.
New Notations in the Periodic Table,” Official Journal of the IUPAC 60, no. 3 (March 1988): 432–36.
Ibid., 435.
See for instance, W. Conrad Fernelius, “Some reflections on the periodic table and its uses,” Journal of Chemical Education 63, no. 3 (1986): 263–266.
Glenn T. Seaborg, “Some recollections of the early nuclear age,” Journal of Chemical Education 45, no. 5 (1968): 278–280; idem, “From Mendeleev to mendelevium,” Chemistry 43, no. 1 (1970): 6–9; idem, “The New Elements,” American Scientist 68 (1980): 279–289
This shift is illustrated in Eric Scerri “Prediction of the Nature of Hafnium from Chemistry, Bohr’s Theory and Quantum Mechanics,” Annals of Science 51 (1994): 137–150; idem, “Correspondence and Reduction of Chemistry,” in Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics,ed. S. French and H. Kamminga (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic publishers, 1993), 45–64; idem, “Plus ça change,” Chemistry in Britain (May 1994): 379–381.
For instance in 1989, Michael Laing published a table duplicating the location of the elements of the first two periods in order to avoid the blank spaces and to emphasize the subgroup analogies. (Journal of Chemical Education, no. 9 (September 1989): 746, table 13).
Mazurs, Graphic Representations,op. cit., 136–148.
Charles Janet, La structure du noyau de l’atome considérée dans la classification périodique des éléments (Beauvais: novembre 1927); “The Helicoidal Classification of the Elements,” Chemical News 38 (1929): 372, 388–93.
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Bensaude-Vincent, B. (2001). Graphic Representations of the Periodic System of Chemical Elements. In: Klein, U. (eds) Tools and Modes of Representation in the Laboratory Sciences. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 222. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9737-1_9
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