But quite the opposite could be the case. Some might argue that, if we were to abandon concern for who discovered what first and admit that science makes gradual progress by building on past knowledge, we’d lose all of the drama, the personalities, the human factor. It’s not that ‘firstness’ is hard to establish it’s typically hard even to define. The legal issues will always be (literally) a law to themselves, but such arguments risk creating a false impression of how science happens at all. That’s exemplified by the protracted and bitter argument over priority and patents on the CRISPR-Cas9 process of genome editing in the US, which have pitted Jennifer Doudna’s group at the University of California, Berkeley against that of Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute in Boston. But the reward structures that modern science has created – not just the Nobels and other awards but also (and often more lucratively) the patent system – have raised the stakes. As the case of Mendeleev and Meyer illustrates, priority disputes are nothing new (they were even more vitriolic in the Renaissance). There may be an opportunity to learn a useful lesson here. In that sense he offers more of a cautionary than an inspiring tale: scientists who ‘discover’ a new ‘law’ are apt to be dismissive of anything that seems to threaten it. But that doesn’t seem to reflect a difference of temperament, for the Siberian chemist was strongly conservative about pretty much everything else: the atomic hypothesis, the existence of atomic substructure, the reality of radioactive decay. It has been a common claim that Mendeleev’s was the ‘bolder’ approach. It was no coincidence that Lothar Meyer’s table appeared in a textbook, because he was more concerned with organising existing knowledge for pedagogy than with developing a predictive law.

And Gordin highlights that, for these 19th century scientists, both issues depended on what they wanted to do with their system. There are many ways to express the periodic system (just as there are to draw the table itself). Gordin’s point is not that it’s hard to say who discovered the periodic table first, but that, more profoundly, it is not clear what this notion of ‘firstness’ means. (He wasn’t alone in doing that either, though.) No wonder historian of science Michael Gordin, who knows more about Mendeleev than almost anyone, began a 2012 essay on the Mendeleev–Lothar Meyer priority dispute by saying ‘I have no idea who discovered the periodic system of chemical elements’. Of course he added important touches, in particular by leaving gaps for predicted new elements such as ‘eka-aluminium’ and ‘eka-silicon’ that were duly discovered in the ensuing decades, and named gallium and germanium. The ridicule that John Newlands had to endure for his ‘law of octaves’ in the early 1860s is well-known, and the British chemist William Odling also gave a pretty clear picture of the periodicity in an 1864 tabulation.Īll this precursory activity gives Mendeleev’s table an air of inevitability, not to mention a derivative feel. Gustavus Hinrich, working in the US, presented a spiral periodic system in 1867, and Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois portrayed the periodicity of the elements on his ‘telluric screw’ in 1862. Lothar Meyer did include a preliminary version of his table in his 1864 textbook. And this isn’t even to mention all the other antecedents to Mendeleev’s table, which he published near-simultaneously in Russian and German.

Lothar meyer periodic table