The Disappearing Spoon: Chapter 3: The Galápagos of the Periodic Table Summary & Analysis

Kean proposes that “the history of the periodic table is the history of the many characters who shaped it.” One of these characters is Robert Bunsen, who didn’t actually invent the Bunsen burner but instead improved its design. Before that, however, Bunsen had a passionate interest in arsenic: he worked with arsenic-based chemicals that smelled horrific, caused hallucinations, and left black residue on his tongue. Although this led him to develop the best antidote to arsenic toxicity, he still paid the price of his arsenic obsession when a glass beaker in his lab exploded and caused him to lose most of his eyesight.

At this point, Bunsen developed a fixation with natural explosions and he spent time researching geysers and volcanoes. He then invented the spectroscope, a tool that uses light to examine the elements by heating them and looking at the specific colors of light they produce. After this, he developed a version of the Bunsen burner to use within the spectroscope in order to heat the elements inside. These innovations led to a rapid acquisition of knowledge about the elements. At this point, the periodic table did not yet exist. The person credited with developing this organizational framework was Dmitri Mendeleev, although he didn’t do it alone.

Mendeleev was born to a large family in Siberia, and studied in St. Petersburg, Paris, and Heidelberg, where he was briefly the student of Bunsen. He became a professor in St. Petersburg in the 1860s. At this point, several scientists had already proposed tables of elements, and Mendeleev even shared a prize with a German chemist for both separately discovering what was called “periodic law.” Bizarrely, later in life, Mendeleev refused to believe in things he couldn’t see, including atoms and electrons. Before this point, however, he made enormous contributions to human understanding of the elements, such as the fact that elements are defined by their atomic weight.

Mendeleev was able to accurately sort what were, at the time, the 62 known elements in the universe, and also had the foresight to realize more elements would be discovered. He was even able to predict the properties of these unknown elements based on the properties of those that were known. Significantly, the discovery of noble gases in the 1890s did not contradict Mendeleev’s table, and they could be added without jeopardizing the existing structure. Mendeleev was an extraordinary character: he completed his major achievement in the final hours before a deadline and married a second wife while the tsar turned a blind eye due to his scientific achievements. He was, however, eventually fired due to his anarchist political beliefs.

Mendeleev’s speculations annoyed Paul Emile François Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who was the scientist to actually discover gallium (which Mendeleev had called eka-aluminum)—not just predict that it existed. Gallium melts at 84ºF, making it one of the only liquid metals humans can touch. A popular trick is to make spoons out of gallium and watch them “disappear” (in reality, melt) when they come into contact with a cup of tea. After hearing about Lecoq de Boisbaudran’s discovery, Mendeleev tried to take credit for it, which in turn led an irritated Lecoq de Boisbaudran to falsely claim that the periodic table had actually been invented by a little-known French scientist.

Mendeleev then responded by claiming that there was an error in Lecoq de Boisbaudran’s data. While at first glance this seemed like brash and baseless speculation, he was actually correct, and Lecoq de Boisbaudran was forced to retract his initial data before publishing a correct version. In this case, a theory proved an experiment wrong, not the other way around. Still, trying to decide whether theories or experiments are more important in driving scientific innovation is a fruitless endeavor, as both are vitally important. Although Mendeleev outlined the initial version of the periodic table, this has been subject to much revision over the years. For example, Mendeleev conceded that at the time, little could be known (or predicted) about a group of elements called the lanthanides.

Back in 1701, a German teenager named Johann Friedrich Böttger performed a trick of making two silver coins “disappear.” King Augustus of Poland arrested Böttger and tried to force him to perform the trick in his castle, which he couldn’t do. However, Böttger promised that he could make porcelain, which was something of an obsession for the European elite ever since Marco Polo first brought some back from China in the 13th century. Europeans tried to make it themselves with little success. King Augustus had already assigned Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus to develop a porcelain-making technique, and now he gave Böttger the role of Tschirnhaus’s assistant. 

Working together, Tschirnhaus and Böttger successfully discovered a porcelain recipe which soon spread across Europe. Mining of feldspar, a key ingredient in making porcelain, took off—including in the Swedish village of Ytterby. The Ytterby quarry, as scientists would soon discover, was filled with lanthanides. In the 18th century, Sweden experienced its own particular age of Enlightenment, leading to a proliferation of scientists including Johan Gadolin, who was born in 1760. While living in Turku (now part of Finland), he imported and studied rocks from the Ytterby quarry. There, he discovered a remarkable six of the 14 lanthanides, all of which he named after Ytterby or Sweden in some way.