A well-ordered thing2004

"When a young Dmitrii Mendeleev drafted the Periodic Table of Elements as a guide for his chemistry students at St. Petersburg University, he already had dreams of building a unified scientific empire in his home of Russia, with a place for himself in the limelight." "That the Periodic Table predicted the existence of three unknown elements and became the framework for modern chemistry helped Mendeleev's cause; it gave him a platform for social change and sensationalism. When he battled the emergence of Spiritualism in Russia, playing the skeptical foil in the seances he attended, newspapers across St. Petersburg paid attention. When he ventured into the sky as the novice pilot of a hot-air balloon, it made meteorology noteworthy in Russia. His attempts to distill a pure "ether" from the...