[♪ music playing ♪]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Welcome to Spark Science. I’m your host, Regina Barber DeGraaff. I’m an astrophysicist at Western Washington University. And you know what I wish we had? History of science courses. But we’re gonna do the next best thing. Because today’s episode is about the birth of the periodic table.

In 2019, many people were celebrating 150 years of the table of elements. It was simpler times. And at the close of that year, my colleagues organized a reenactment featuring the scientist credited with the creation of the period table. I hope you enjoy this unique episode where we connect the Industrial Revolution to the birth of atomic theory. And then, we attempt to travel back in time where we hear, in their native language, the thoughts of Russian chemist, Dimitri Mendeleev, English chemist and physicist, John Dalton, and german chemist, Julius Lothar Meyer.

[♪ music playing ♪]

Today’s show is going to be really exciting because we are traveling through time. Not time traveling like in the movie Interstellar or Back to the Future. But we’ll have a chance to talk to Dr. Dimitri Mendeleev, the person given credit for creating the period table of elements in 1869, and some of his contemporaries. Why are people celebrating the table in 2019? And here to help me answer it is Dr. Serge Smirnov (a

biochemist), Dr. Dietmar Schwarz (a biologist), and Dr. Tim Kowalczyk (a physical chemist). All of these amazing folks are colleagues of mine at Western Washington University. Thank you all for coming to talk to me today.

>> Thanks for having us, Regina.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: 2019 is the international year of the period table. And you all took part in this reenactment and it took us through the creation of the period table. But before we get into like who you played, what did you do during that reenactment, what stuck with me the most during your performance at the Spark Museum was the state of chemistry before basically the late-1800s. And that was alchemy. Can you give us a little background about alchemy? What did it look like before the late-1800s? And how does it relate to your field? Tim, I think you know a lot about this.

Dr. Tim Kowalczyk: So yeah, I think in pop culture when we think about alchemy, we think about things like transforming lead into gold. Sometimes it’s called transmuting lead into gold or other metals into nobel metals. Other areas that we think of here are things like the philosopher’s stone or the search for the elixir of life, trying to seek immortality. All of these are kind of associated with Medieval times. But it’s really much more global of a phenomenon than that.

Alchemy was taking place in Ancient Egypt. There’s examples of chemical activity happening all the way from China to Europe

and the Middle East, all throughout the Middle Ages and Medieval times. So when we think about what the goals of alchemy were, it’s really about improving the human condition ultimately. So it was intertwined a lot with natural philosophy, trying to figure out how we could improve people’s lives in various ways. So whether that was with the search for medicinal special medicines in China, or whether it was the search for a material that could dissolve all other materials. That was another common item that was sought for.

The big central sort of gift that alchemy generated for the different societies at the time was experimentation—playing around with material to try to understand how it works so we could seek these life-improving objects and experiences.

[♪ music playing ♪]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: When speaking of alchemy in the ancient world, there was a fascinating with what some thought was spontaneous life. Dr. Dietmar Schwarz.

Dr. Dietmar Schwarz: People tried to understand how the world essentially worked as part of alchemy. People really fascinated with what is the nature of life, what is life? For a long time, people thought that there was actually some sort of life force that differentiated living organisms from other inanimate things. So that was part of alchemy.

It took until the end of the 19th century and the beginning of

the 20th century to really show that there really isn’t like a secret force to life. And the end of this chemistry tied back to the period table of elements.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So basically you’re saying it’s experiment, it’s talking about life. But like, what kind of experiments were happening in the 1800s that kind of relate to all of this?

Dr. Dietmar Schwarz: Certainly to vitalism, people started noticing that you could make substances such as urea from inanimate chemical, other chemical substances that were not related to life. Or people were able to make alcohol, ferment alcohol even with the yeast cells were dead. Basically showing that these processes that were previously thought to be specific to life could actually happen in a test tube without any living organisms present.

[♪ music playing ♪]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Biochemist Dr. Serge Smirnov brings our attention to the beginnings of scientific collaboration in Europe.

Dr. Serge Smirnov: And one more thing to add, alchemy became one of the first areas of human activity where people had to communicate to one another and to explain what they’re doing. That’s what we do today in science. But alchemy, some of the work’s in isolation. But eventually, most

of them wanted to come out and say what they did. And that was catalyzed by emergence of universities in Medieval Europe. So it went hand-in-hand. But today we have this scientific communication established. But it started back then when alchemists of various nature and in various places, they wanted to be held. They wanted to be famous and they wanted to get some credit for it. But they also got into the habit of criticizing one another which is a very essential nature of modern science.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right so, basically what you’re saying is we have alchemy where it’s this study of trying to change elements or at least just study what those elements are, and study what life is, and study what the natural world is made out of. But also, it helped us make experiments and it helped us actually talk to each other and collaborate. And that’s kind of the beginnings of all of that.

[♪ music playing ♪]

Again, Dr. Tim Kowalczyk.

So were people not really collaborating in the natural sciences before? You said there was some isolation happening.

Dr. Tim Kowalczyk: I think it’s interesting. You can kind of tie the strength and vitality of those communications with the development of communication across societies over time. So there are early alchemical writings from 300 A.D. in Egypt that were recovered more recently. And you can find evidence

that some ideas that came out of that part of the world sort of resurfaced in Medieval Europe, were resurfaced in the Golden Age of Islam.

So you see those kinds of communications happening in some kind of writing over generation timespans. But then as we have things like the printing press allowing closer-to-realtime communication, where you can go and get a book that someone published in the same year that the ideas were written down. Or letters also helped establish the first collections of scientific work and the first ingredients of our modern scientific publication scheme. You can see how the pace and speed of communication is reflected in the development of alchemy into the modern physical and life sciences.

Dr. Serge Smirnov: Along the same lines, it’s interesting that alchemists in Europe were calling themselves “alchemists.” Alchemy is apparently an Arabic word: “al-kimiya’.” So the word was already an element of international exchange of ideas. There was an international process of, as you mentioned, expressing one’s ideas and making them available. And also communications were becoming faster because of the printing press. But also, the roads were better. The horse remained the horse. I mean, the communication– the mail still was still slow, but as more societal order was introduced throughout Western Europe or Eurasia, the more mail was traveling and people were hearing their letters.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: You were telling me about how the birth of the periodic table was around the same time as the birth of the Industrial Revolution. So let’s talk a little bit about that. I would like to give our audience a background. What do they need to know before we talk about the periodic table? How does it relate to the Industrial Revolution?

Dr. Serge Smirnov: I can start here a little bit. So historically, the Industrial Revolution is 1800s, soon after the steam engine was placed on railroad tracks. So this became the nature of power at factories because of the steam engine. Then transportation became much faster. More goods and better goods can be made. Those goods can be spread around much faster. That, among other things, meant much faster communication. Scientific journals, I think, emerged around this time. Periodic journals. Those reached everybody who paid attention and had resources to get access to.

On top of this, in addition to the steam engine, there were other industries which came about. For example, industries of of producing different paints. That was directly attached to chemistry, the chemical developments.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So you’re saying that Germany had– did they have a monopoly on a lot of paints? You were talking about that.

Dr. Serge Smirnov: If you don’t mind, I can talk about it. Germany was the central place in Europe where there were

most of universities. That’s one of the reasons why chemistry and science was– a lot of early chemistry literature we know is written in German. A lot of chemistry terms today are German.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: This is 150th anniversary of the periodic table, but it’s also the 150th anniversary, I believe, of the transcontinental railroad. So I think we see that connection. I like what you were saying. If we can transport a lot of those goods, maybe the demand for those goods goes up too. So how do you produce those goods? You need a lot of technology.

Dr. Tim Kowalczyk: I think it also highlights how quickly the world was changing at that time relatively to the 2-3 generations before that one. So much new information was being generated by virtue of access to energy and the amount of energy used per person in these parts of the world. It makes a world of difference in terms of the information flow coming in, just in terms of, for example, the number of elements that we knew were isolable increased significantly in that period leading up to Mendeleev’s classification and others as well.

So we were mentioning in the alchemy discussion that there were some efforts to do some experiments. There were actually very early efforts to classify the underlying elements going all the way back to Greek philosophers who proposed the four elements that you hear in a lot of pop culture about earth,

wind, water, fire. But then going beyond that, there was a chemist, Jabir ibn Hayyan, or an alchemist really, who did attempt to classify elements that look more like the elements we know today. But the nature of the experiments weren’t as reproducible as the kind that now establish our current cadre of elements. And getting to that point of establishing this larger set of elements where we can start to make the classification make sense was really enabled by the Industrial Revolution.

Dr. Serge Smirnov: I would add that the instrumentation available to scientists at time of Dalton and after– this instrumentation was, in large part, made possible by the Industrial Revolution itself. So the Industrial Revolution not only demanded more scientific discoveries, but also facilitated scientific discovers with better instruments.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: We’re going to take a quick break and when we come back, we’re going to travel back in time to 1869.

[♪ music playing ♪]

Welcome back to Spark Science, where we explore stories of human curiosity. I’m your host, Regina Barber DeGraaff. And we’ve traveled back in time to the year 1869. I have the pleasure of speaking to some of the scientists that were instrumental in creating the periodic table and the beginnings of atomic theory. The Russian chemist Dimitri Medeleev, the English physicist John Dalton, how’s it going? And the german

chemist, Julius Meyer.

You’re famous for these quotes and helping create the periodic table. So I’ve given you binders from the future. I would love it if you could actually read your quotes in your native language and then also translate it for us and for myself. And we can actually dissect these quotes and better understand the periodic table.

Dr. Tim Kowalczyk: Great. So this is from John Dalton.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yourself right?

John Dalton: That’s right. I, John Dalton propose that matter though divisible in an extreme degree is nevertheless not infinitely divisible. That is, there must be some point beyond which we cannot go in the division of matter. I’ve chosen the word, “atom,” to signify these ultimate smallest indivisible particles. Atoms of the same chemical element have the same chemical properties and do not transmute or change into different elements.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So you truly believe there is an atom and that is the smallest we can go, that is what matter is created out of.

John Dalton: Right. We can divide up to that point, and no further.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Dr. Mendeleev, you are credited of putting together this periodic table. How does that relate to Dr. Dalton’s quote and how does this all relate to each other?

Dimitri Mendeleev: What I think and what I did is based entirely on work of my colleague, John Dalton, and other colleagues and contemporaries. For each, I’m very grateful. Let me read first in Russian what I think about the nature and then we’ll proceed in English. [Reading quote in Russian.] I, Dimitri Medeleev propose that properties of basic matter as well as of complex compounds of elements display periodic dependence on atomic weights, masses of the elements. This thinking allows us to find a lot of logic and order in seemingly chaotic behavior of various substances and compounds.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So where chemistry was during this time, you really want to put order to it. Kind of like physics has laws. We kind of want to give chemistry similar universal fundamental principle laws.

Dimitri Mendeleev: That’s exactly the case. When I started teaching chemistry as a young professor, I was preparing my own textbook in general chemistry. I wrote volume number 1 for first batch of elements. I realized to cover all the elements, I will have to write 7 volumes. And that was definitely not feasible for me. It was even much harder for the students to digest and understand. So I really wanted to display chemistry as a logical science, truly as a science. I was looking for those

laws for a number of years, hence the periodic law and the periodic table.

Julius Lothar Meyer: And it worked very spectacularly, colleague Mendeleev, because you actually predicted there would be elements that would be found.

Dimitri Mendeleev: Danke schoen, Professor Meyer. My pleasure. So why don’t you tell us your story?

Julius Lothar Meyer: I also was too young to have met Dr. Dalton here. But in fact, Dr. Mendeleev and me, we actually met at the first chemical conference in Karlsruhe.

Dimitri Mendeleev: International conference.

Julius Lothar Meyer: International conference. And we also had the honor to learn and study under the same mentor at the University of Heidelberg.

Dimitri Mendeleev: Professor Bunsen.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So you’re like research siblings!

Dimitri Mendeleev: And in terms of our ideas, we co-developed, so to speak.

Julius Lothar Meyer: Yes, I also wrote a textbook and tried to organize the elements and make them more accessible to my

students.

Dimitri Mendeleev: And you made perfect wonderful observations, as I understand.

Julius Lothar Meyer: Yes.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yes, so can you share with us your kind of synopsis, your thought about the startings of atomic theory?

Julius Lothar Meyer: Yeah so, my ideas are very similar to Dr. Mendeleev’s ideas. But I was having some additional musings or suspicions about the true nature of atoms. Well, let me read this. [Reading quote in German.] So let me read this in English. I, Julius Lothar Meyer, postulate that the as yet undivided elements are absolutely irreducible substances is currently at least very unlikely. As it seems that the atoms of elements are not the final, but only the immediate constituents of the molecules of both the elements and the compounds. The Molekeln or molecule as foremost division of matter, the atoms being considered a second order, in turn, consisting of matter, particles of a third higher order.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So this idea that the atoms can actually be broken down into subatomic particles, which we know now. Spoiler alert. In the future, that’s actually true.

Julius Lothar Meyer: Yeah I heard they discover new particles

every year!

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Every year!

Dimitri Mendeleev: And we are building new instrumentation to discover those very unstable elements.

[♪ music playing ♪]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: We have a lot of magic here. I traveled back in time. Now let’s mentally travel forward in time. What do you think is going to be that next wave of chemistry, using the periodic table?

Dr. Tim Kowalczyk: I think today we’re starting to become more efficient using 21st century technologies like computing and advanced instrumentation to explore and take advantage of this classification scheme as best as we can. An example that I like to share related to my field of computational chemistry–

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Dr. Tim Kowalczyk’s.

Dr. Tim Kowalczyk: Yeah. So one one example would be taking advantage of these subatomic particles to take advantage of their ability to exist in what we think of as multiple conditions at the same time as opposed to just an on or off condition. It’s so-called quantum computing, an exciting direction that our current understanding of the elements can

take us in. More broadly, as we continue to collide particles together and try to discover new elements, there is a hypothesized island of stability at which point we may be able to find nuclei that are stable for longer than the milliseconds or less that we currently see.

Dr. Serge Smirnov: And I will quickly add, as a biochemist– the devices we use today to collide atoms and particles to create larger unstable atoms, those cyclotrons. We use similar devices, cyclotrons, in our hospitals. I’m a biochemist so my work is partially related to this. Cyclotrons are used in hospitals to generate less stable radioactive nuclei to be injected as probes to analyze problem spots in patients, tumors and the other. So the idea that atoms can have subatomic particles now is paying back big time in terms of benefits to human health.

[♪ music playing ♪]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well I want to thank you all for letting me travel back in time and coming to your lab. Thank you for teaching me all about chemistry and the periodic table.

[♪ music playing ♪]

Dr. Dietmar Schwarz: [Speaking German.]

Dr. Serge Smirnov: [Speaking Russian.]

[♪ music playing ♪]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Thank you to doctors, Dietmar Schwarz, Segre Smirnov, and Tim Kowalczyk for taking the time to help us celebrate the year of the periodic table in late 2019. Spark Science is produced in collaboration with KMRE and Western Washington University. Today’s episode was recorded in the digital media center at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.

Thank you to Darren Brown and the DMC crew. Our producers are Suzanne Blais, Robert Clark, and myself, Regina Barber DeGraaff. Our audio engineers are Zerach Coakley, Julia Thorpe, and Ariel Shiley. If you missed any of our show go to our website, SparkScienceNow.com. If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, send us a message on twitter or Facebook, @SparkScienceNow. Thank you for listening to Spark Science.

[♪ music playing ♪]