Customer Reviews

Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements

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This is an odd book, and a poor history of chemistry. It is not a history of the elements (as the book jacket states) nor a description of Mendeleyev's work. In fact, the author devoted only 13% of the book to Mendeleyev and the periodic table, and over twice that heaping scorn upon ancient Greek philosophers. His description of the Arab alchemists and alchemy philosophy is excellent. After that, he loses his way, and, by the end of the book, Strathern has made it plain he is not a chemist and has little appreciation of the struggle to make a new and unknown reaction proceed down a desired pathway. Scientists noted for theories receive much more attention than specific advances. No mention is made the development of the balance and a definition of mass units or standard volumes to allow chemists to communicate. Lavoisier is grandly proclaimed as, "the Newton of chemistry," and Dalton, whose work on atomic weights and stoichiometery, -- providing chemistry the basic structure needed to advance and is still used by every practicing chemist -- is given the short shift on p. 261 when it is declared that "possessor of the finest chemical mind since Lavoisier" is Mendeleyev. This is a staggering statement, considering that Berzelius, Faraday, Davy, Thompson, Guy-Lussac, Kekule, Perkins, Avogardo, Liebig, Pasteur and many other fine chemists were active during that period.
How Mendeleyev used his table is not covered, and that the table's true value lay in the future in developing chemical bonding and valance theories is only hinted at. The reader is left with an unflattering picture of Mendeleyev (Rumpelstiltskin is mentioned more times than Dalton), and the book ends as it started, talking about dairy farmers.

Who among us can't recall, at least in a general way, the first day of high school chemistry when we were first confronted with that mysterious Periodic Table of the Elements hanging on the wall? Now, as ignorant novices in Chem 1A, we were at last to be initiated into its arcane symbolism.

MENDELEYEV'S DREAM is the story of chemistry, from the ancient Greek, Anaximenes, with his theory of air as the fundamental element compressible to water and stone, to the gnomic Russian genius, Mendeleyev, who conceived the Periodic Table in the mid-19th century. Conceived it in a dream during an exhausted sleep brought on by overwork and frustrated creativity. Sleeping, when he should have been on his way to address a meeting of local cheese-makers.

The author, Paul Strathern, has written a fine narrative overview of the evolution of the scientific method and the chemist's art, from the philosophical musings of the ancients on the nature of the universe, through the long centuries when alchemy held sway, to chemistry's current place in the Pantheon of Sciences. Along the way, Strathern introduces us to the greatest scientific minds and gifted eccentrics of their respective ages: Empedocles, Aristotle, Zosimus, Jabir ibn-Hayyan, Avicenna, Paracelsus, Nicholas of Cusa, Galileo, Descartes, Francis Bacon, van Helmont, Robert Boyle, Hennig Brand, Karl Scheele, Johann Becher, Henry Cavendish, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier, John Dalton, Jöns Berzelius, and a host of others. And, finally, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev.

The nature of the book's subject could easily lend itself to tedium, but the author's style is light - only once does he "balance" a chemical formula, and his intermittent dry wit was much appreciated. What, for instance, was Hennig Brand doing with those fifty buckets of putrefying human urine? His neighbors were undoubtedly not thrilled. And why might the Dutch Assembly have been justified in tacking-up "wanted-posters" around town for Johann Becher, who had just absconded on a fast boat for London?

A scientist himself, Paul has not penned a great technical piece. Rather, he's written an uncomplicated, engaging work of popular science likely to appeal to those of us who ... well, let's just say, didn't learn to transmute lead into gold, much less ace Chem 1A. Now, if someone could just do the same for differential calculus.

This is an outstanding book if you are very interested in both history and science. Some earlier reviewer were disappointed in not finding more information about chemistry, but it's not a chemistry book, it's a history book. A better book about the elements, including each specific element and how each was discovered, is "A Guide to the Elements" by Stwertka.

This book is about the history of chemistry, culminating in Mendeleyev's realization of the periodic table - the "order" in the chemical world that people had been looking for. It's not a book about Mendeleyev, but about his dream, which was every Chemist's dream. Hence, the title Mendeleyev's DREAM.

Strathern has a great grasp of history and an unusual ability to condense complex historical events into just a few sentences. This helps the reader understand the context within with various events take place -- extremely important. The reader who already has a grasp of some basic world history will get more out of this book, however.

I particularly liked how Strathern describes the various characters with warts and all. It makes it so much more fascinating! They are complex people with ambitions, phobias, superstitions, arrogence and so on. The lives of these people are stories in and of themselves, and Strathern makes these stories both readable and believable. I often found myself shaking my head in amazement and/or amusement.

There were some complaints in earlier reviews about Strathern spending too much time on Medieval and Ancient times. I didn't think that was a problem at all. I found it all very interesting, then again, I'm interested Ancient and Medieval History. I think it's important to learn what went on prior to modern science, back in the days of alchemy and elixers. It makes modern science look pretty good.

After I was done with the book I found myself picking it up over and over again, re-reading various passages, still shaking my head in amazement.

Despite its title, this book actually has rather little to do with Mendeleev (or Mendeleyev, which is the transliteration favored by the author). He appears in the Prologue as a "gnomic figure seated at a vast littered desk," but disappears in the first sentence of the first chapter, eventually reappearing for the denouement in the book's two final chapters. The 250 pages in between are in a sense primarily an interlude to Mendeleev's periodic table as the triumphant solution to the 25-century "quest for the elements." That the book presents the solution as emerging from a dream is unfortunately evocative of another dream in the city of Ghent a few years before Mendeleev's in St. Petersburg.
Even before I began to read Mendeleyev's Dream, however, I felt apprehensive. The list of other books by the author Paul Strathern suggests that he tackles big topics, which are too often sketched in broad penstrokes and treated superficially. Two more of his titles on the inside back of the dust jacket-The Big Idea: Scientists Who Changed the World and Philosophers in 90 Minutes-cemented my uneasiness.
The blurb on the inside front of the dust jacket claims that the author "unravels the dramatic history of chemistry through the quest for the elements." That's a tall order for such a short book (less than 300 pages of text), all the more since the quest for the elements represents only one aspect-albeit a central aspect-of chemistry's expansive and complex history.
Mendeleyev's Dream begins where natural philosophy traditionally begins, with Thales of Miletus. We are taken on a short tour through the rational thought of the great Ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians before moving on to alchemy, which, despite its "mixed motives" and foolish aims, was nevertheless "the practice which was to give us chemistry." While that is certainly an essential part of chemistry's origins, it overlooks connections to the even older craft traditions, such as dyeing, mining, smelting, and metalworking.
After a visit with Paracelsus and iatrochemistry, the book makes a detour through the beginnings of the scientific revolution. According to the author, this demonstrates the change in thinking necessary to escape such shackles as the four elements, which he terms "one of the biggest blunders in human thought." The story then skips along the alpine peaks of events and colorful personalities in the history of chemistry from van Helmont and Boyle to Newlands and Mendeleev. It's a most entertaining story, and this is the level at which the book is most successful. There are many interesting episodes and anecdotes, and I especially enjoyed the sections on Hennig Brand and the discovery of phosphorus and on the many discoveries of Karl Scheele, who unfortunately received little credit for any of them.
This book is a popular account for the general reader, and the author offers this as his reason for the lack of citations. Consequently, those who know something of chemistry and its history are likely to have a number of quibbles with the author. I certainly do. In addition, I want to offer a significant quibble on behalf of general readers who would not be able to do so themselves. The author proceeds on the premise that past ideas and concepts are worthwhile only insofar as they point toward today's ideas and concepts. I believe that this is a distorted view of the history of science and that it gives general readers significant misconceptions about the movement of science, which sometimes represents progress, but often doesn't.
As far back as Ancient Greece, the atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus appears "breathtakingly modern-far, far ahead of [its] time," whereas Aristotle's compounding of errors "put human intellectual thought on the wrong course for centuries to come." By the time that Johann Döbereiner proposed his law of triads in the 1830s, "chemistry had suffered enough from mistaken theories . . . The way forward now lay through experiment." This hardly suggests the increasingly complex interplay between theory and experiment in chemistry since the mid 19th century.
The author tells us that the ancients knew of nine genuine elements and that three more were discovered in the late Middle Ages. However, "their discoverers did not see them as such, because they didn't know what an element was." I would contend that ancient and medieval natural philosophers knew what an element was as well as we do. It's just that their concept doesn't coincide with ours. But for the author of Mendeleyev's Dream, that means not knowing.
This same attitude about the past as seen from the vantage point of the present appears in various claims and statements scattered through the book. "Separating truth from legend is always easy afterwards, when we can apply modern criteria." "At least half of Newton's intellectual life was wasted on nonscientific pursuits." "The idea of a feminine metal was evidently anathema to the Victorian English scientific establishment. This was to be the start of a distressing trend. All elements discovered since 1839 . . . have been given the Latin neuter ending -ium, or the Greek neuter -on in the case of the inert gases. This sexless nomenclature was even extended to curium, which was named after Madame Curie. . . . This choice of gender was presumably made with no conscious derogatory intent, but one can't help feeling that it says something about the predominantly male society of chemists."
While conveniently omitting any mention of elements such as mendelevium, the author doesn't mind telling us something about a few of the male members of the Royal Society. Newton's celibacy ensured "that he didn't have to admit his repressed homosexual inclinations even to himself," yet he was able to impress their "effect on the scientific world at large." In addition, his presidency of the Royal Society enshrined in it the misogyny that Robert Hooke had previously encouraged. I fail to see the relevance of these gibes, which seem to be included for no other reason than being politically correct. They're minor, but they detract from the book.
Unfortunately, these minor detractions, along with the author's attitudes about scientific progress, are a major flaw in his entertaining and panoramic sketch of the quest for the elements. While I enjoyed the author's lively story, I did not find this a satisfying book. Ultimately, I must conclude that it is flawed both for those who know something of chemistry and its history, as well as for its intended audience, those who don't.

While I did enjoy reading this book, I found its subtitle, "Quest for the Elements," rather misleading. It IS a fascinating history of all science from the perspective of chemistry. After the prologue, however, elements are not mentioned again until page 178 out of 294, at the end of Chapter 7, and not discussed in any detail until chapter 8. I was disappointed because the subtitle and the dust jacket led me to expect more focus on the history of chemistry itself, rather than ancient the Greeks and Arabs who preceeded chemists, or the polical and social intruigues surrounding men who had minimal impact on the science. If you are expecting a book about the discovery of elements or the impact of the periodic table, this is NOT it. Paul Strathern and/or his publishers should have come up with a more appropriate title. I am a PhD chemist who loves to read, and I have found that my science is severly underrepresented in the popular literature (both books and magazines). This book does not help to fill the void.

The title is slightly misleading, as the book is mostly about alchemy, philosophers and other discoverers of elements and chemical principles. But what a super book - it begins and ends with Mendeleyev, yet in between we are treated to a complete history of the groundwork that went into the discovery and classification of the elements. We meet many famous names, some not-so-famous and a few unsung tyros, along with their discoveries and what led up to them. Many of the discoveries were accidental, others through hard work and the rest by following scientific principles.

All of this is far from dull; the author has an undercurrent of subtle humour running through the whole book, making one break out into a wry smile every now and then. The key players in this 'dream' are the names that we remember from school, but have forgotten who they were, what they did and why ... this reminds us and fills in a lot of blanks, as well as fleshing out the characters - why they were like that and how they became drawn ino the field of alchemy/chemistry - some for mercenary gain, others for more esoteric reasons.
We also hear other names not normally associated with Science - Borodin (music), Francis Bacon (plays), Lucretius (poetry) and many more.

I shall read more of this author's works, if they are in the same vein as this - a thoroughly absorbing and gratifying read!

As someone who loves popular science and history, but who is neither a scientist nor a historian (I'm an illustrator), I found this journey, culminating in Mendeleyev's insight, to be one of the most engrossing and eye-opening books I've read in quite some time.

Reading the other reviews above reinforces my belief that the more one knows about a subject the harsher (and more fussy) the criticism. Though some of the negative comments may be deserved, I nevertheless recommend this as an imminently readable history of the personalities who sought to uncover the secrets of the elements. I'm convinced that if science education were supplemented with the kind of engaging narrative backstory contained in Strathern's book, non-science-minded students would take a much greater interest in learning molar masses and balancing chemical equations.

Mendeleyev's Dream continues a disturbing recent phenomenon post Sobel's "Logitude" of apparently hurriedly pulled together science history books.
Catch phrases like "must have seen" or "surely would have felt" are evidence of hasty writing substituing for solid research. One last bug: what is it with publishers these days? So many travelogues without maps...and here an entire book essentially about the construction of the periodic table...with no periodic table? A little more care and preparation would help.

While -Mendeleyev's Dream- leaves somthing to be desired as history, it is the most entertaining review of the development of alchemy, and later chemistry, from Thales and and Empedecles who postulated the basic Elements to Mendeleyev. His review of emerging science during the Dark Ages, Middle Ages and the Renaissance introduce us to a wild cast of characters. Nicolas of Cusa, Giordono Bruno, who almost aced Galileo out of the job of teaching mathematics at Padua to Hook, Newton, Priestley and LaVoissier.

His description of how Joseph Priestley invented seltzer water and discovered that pure dephlogistated air (aka Oxygen) gave a cheap harmless high is worth the price of the book.

As a History 3 stars, as entertainment 10!

I thought this was a quite engaging book until I neared the end, and the author's science started to get a little sketchy. His description of why warm Coke is fizzier than cold Coke seems to be wrong, and in the final chapter about Mendeleyev, there are a couple of mistakes, such as confusing bismuth with boron, and a bizarre confusion between uranium and indium, which looks like it needs explaining. All in all a decent book let down by these oversights.