Failure™ Magazine

The Disappearing Spoon

A love letter to chemistry and the periodic table.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Science & Technology

When most people think of the periodic table, they recall the oversize chart hanging on the wall of their high school chemistry class—intimidating and perplexing to all but the most gifted eleventh graders. In “The Disappearing Spoon” (Little Brown), veteran science writer Sam Kean makes the periodic table interesting and accessible to the science-challenged reader, tying elements like cadmium, radium, and tellurium to true tales of passion, adventure, and betrayal. And the stories aren’t limited to the likes of Isaac Newton and Marie Curie, Kean also relates the exploits of obscure characters like David Hahn, a teenager who obsessively collected radioactive elements and attempted to construct a model nuclear breeder reactor in the potting shed behind his mother’s house.

In the following Q&A interview, Kean discusses a handful of his favorite stories from “The Disappearing Spoon,” wrapping up by explaining the title of the book and the prank it refers to.

Who developed the periodic table?
Many popular accounts of history get it wrong, as at least five different scientists created periodic tables before Dmitri Mendeleev, the commonly acknowledged father of the periodic table. For instance, English chemist John Newlands constructed a table where the properties of the elements repeated every seven units, and he whimsically compared the seven columns to the do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti of the musical scale. Even Mendeleev published his first table sideways, rotated ninety degrees from the tables of today. But he was a brilliant scientist, and he predicted the existence of elements that had not been discovered. Overall, Mendeleev’s work with the table is comparable to Darwin’s with evolution. Neither man did all the work, but they did the most, and they did it more elegantly than others.

How did the elements in the periodic table get their names?
In the days when all respectable gentlemen knew Greek and Latin, scientists used to name elements after mythological creatures—like thorium, named after Thor, or promethium, after Prometheus. Or they used simple descriptions of the element in Greek or Latin. For various reasons, the elements beryllium, chlorine, praseodymium, and thallium are all named after words for “green.”

The most enduring fashion for naming elements, predating even the table itself, is patriotism. That’s why we have names like francium, americium, californium, germanium, etc. There was even an “illinium,” an “alabamine,” and a “virginium” (after Illinois, Alabama, and Virginia), but claims for those elements fell apart.

The most popular recent trend is naming elements after great scientists. Eleven of the last fourteen elements are named after scientists, starting with einsteinium and concluding with copernicium, element 112, which was added to the periodic table in June 2009.

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