A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table Michael D. Gordin Basic Books, New York, 2004. $30.00 (518 pp.). ISBN 0-465-02775-X
In March 1869, when Dmitrii Mendeleev (1834–1907) was in the thick of work on his periodic system of the chemical elements, he left St. Petersburg, Russia, to visit cheese dairies in the countryside. Coming back, he lectured to students at the University of St. Petersburg on the breeding of dairy cattle and the analysis of soil on experimental fields. Far from devoting time and energy exclusively to the solution of vexing theoretical and taxonomic problems, Mendeleev was fascinated with agricultural reform and the social and political modernization of his country. He was 35 years old, and his ambitions were not satisfied by restructuring chemical science. He also dreamt of a new, unified, and rational Russian empire, and would continue to do so his entire life.
Like other Russian intellectuals, Mendeleev wholeheartedly supported the so-called Great Reforms of Tsar Alexander II that began in 1861. Rational and consensual decision making in science became the model for fundamental social reform in imperial Russia. Chemists, in particular, provided useful expertise for the reforming state to improve agriculture and industry. While Michael Gordin’s engaging book, A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table, follows Mendeleev’s scientific career, it also vividly depicts the man’s many political, economic, and social endeavors. He consulted for the Baku oil industry in the 1860s and 70s, fought against spiritualism in the 1870s, became director of the Chief Bureau of Weights and Measures in 1893, and contributed to the introduction of the metric system for optional use in Russia in 1899. Gordin’s narrative is at once a biography of a multi-faceted man; a history of imperial Russia from the beginning of the Great Reforms to the revolution of 1905; an intriguing case study of the entanglement of science, industry, and politics in the 19th century; and a history of 19th-century chemistry and physics. As far as I know, Gordin’s book is the most comprehensive biography in English about Mendeleev.
Gordin’s narrative starts with a historical reconstruction of Mendeleev’s major scientific achievement—the natural periodic system of chemical elements and periodic law. Yet the actual start of Mendeleev’s work on the periodic table was not stimulated by pure scientific interests alone. Gordin argues convincingly that Mendeleev’s teaching and pedagogical goals played important roles as well. In early 1869, when Mendeleev published his first attempt at a periodic system of elements, he was not concerned with establishing a new basic law of chemistry but with writing an introductory textbook for chemistry students at the University of St. Petersburg. The Karlsruhe Congress in 1860, at which chemists from all over Europe reached agreement on the calculation of atomic weights, provided important insights for Mendeleev’s approach to a natural classification of the chemical elements. Equally important for his approach were earlier attempts by chemists such as Jean Dumas and Johann Döbereiner who used atomic weights for the natural classification of elements. The periodic law, the proposition that the physical and chemical properties of chemical elements are periodically dependent on their atomic weight, was first established in November 1870 by Mendeleev as an originally unforeseen result of two years of intensive work that was both scientific and pedagogical.
In its final version, Mendeleev’s periodic table predicted three new elements, designated “ekaboron” (scandium), “ekaaluminum” (gallium), and “ekasilicon” (germanium). But before these predictions were partially confirmed by the discovery of gallium in 1875, Mendeleev began work on new ambitious research at the border between chemistry and physics—studying gas laws, the celestial ether, and meteorological issues. Although that early form of “large-scale, organized scientific research” in Russia led to the determination of deviations in gas behavior from Robert Boyle’s, Edmé Mariotte’s, and Joseph Gay-Lussac’s laws, it failed at its most ambitious goal—the experimental identification of celestial ether.
Under the successors of Alexander II, Mendeleev rose through the imperial hierarchy to become a major consultant. Gordin carefully follows Mendeleev’s many political and scientific engagements from the 1880s until his death in 1907. He proposed educational reforms and participated in a mission to Siberia (his childhood home) to survey iron production and forests.
Gordin also covers the scientist’s protectionist economic thought, his political theory, his participation in a balloon ascent for scientific observation in 1887, and the substantial revisions of his chemical textbook, Principles of Chemistry, in 1889. Gordin’s book concludes with scientific and political events that would put Mendeleev’s achievements into question: the discoveries of the noble gases, radioactivity, and the electron, as well as Russia’s political revolution in 1905.
