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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 earth's atmosphere were similarly brave, but that
chemical prophecy turned out to be less inspired.
Mendeleev's relationship with the Russian
establishment was equally turbulent. He was advisor to the
Tsar, vitriolic proponent of protectionism, and he later
introduced the metric system to the Russian Empire. But
his dramatic rejection at the hands of the Russian Academy
of Sciences sent him into a tailspin that saw him spend
his later years clawing to hold onto the reputation he established
in his youth, while trying to reinvent himself as a scientific
legend, a Siberian Isaac Newton. Mendeleev was a loyal subject
of the Tsar, but he was also a maverick who thought that
only an outsider could perfect a modern Russia. He wanted
to remake Russia just as he had remade chemistry, and his
successes -- and his failures -- were significant.
And yet, Mendeleev may be the most important
scientist about whom we have known almost nothing -- until
now, that is. In A Well-Ordered Thing, historian
Michael Gordin changes that, drawing a portrait of the man
in three full dimensions. A clever and detailed portrait
of a man who had nearly been lost to history, A Well-Ordered
Thing is a fascinating journey into the world of Imperial
Russia -- and into the life of one of its most notorious
minds.
Michael Gordin is an assistant professor
of History at Princeton University where he teaches the
history of science and Imperial Russian history. A member
of the Harvard Society of Fellows, he lives in Princeton,
New Jersey. A Well-Ordered Thing won the Basic Prize
in History of Science.
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