When your teacher says you have to use a liberal news channel to research in class
by 1869
Mendeleev had been trying to find a pattern to the elements for a decade
whatever order he and the world's chemists tried to impose there were still elements that wouldn't fit a
universal theory seemed out of reach, but
[now] mendeleev hit on a new idea
He made up a pack of cards and wrote an element, and it's atomic weight on each one
Strange though this might sound so began the most memorable card game in the history [of] science
He called it chemical solitaire and began laying out the cards just to see where there was a pattern where they're all fitted together
Now previously chemists had grouped the elements in one of two ways either
by their properties like those that react very strongly with water or
By grouping them by the atomic weight which is what [Berzelius] and Cannizzaro had done?
MendeleeV sperate genius was to combine those two methods together
The odds were stacked against him
Little more than half the elements. We now know about had been discovered
So he was playing with an incomplete deck of cards
He stayed up for three days and three nights without any sleep
Just thinking
Solidly about the problem then on the 17th of February with a snowstorm raging outside. He decided to stay at home
He was exhausted, and he finally dozed off
The story goes he had an extraordinary dream
He saw almost all of the sixty-three known elements arrayed in a grand table which related them together
It was an Incredible breakthrough
I can imagine Mendeleev feeling like so many other scientific pioneers. It's that
Determination even
desperation to crack a puzzle and then that Eureka moment of revelation
Mendeleev had revealed a deep truth about the nature of our world that there is a numerical pattern
underlying the structure of matter
This is the periodic table as we know it today, and it's rooted in Mendeleev's discovery
It decodes and makes sense of the building blocks of the whole world
Now although it's so familiar to us. It's on the wall of every chemistry lab in every school in the world
If you really look at it. It's actually all inspiring
What's so remarkable? Is that it reveals the relationships between each and every element in order?
Mendeleev had brilliantly combined elements atomic weights and
properties into one [universal] understanding of all the elements
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