Brady Haran (of numberphile/sixty symbols/lots of other channels fame) made a video about this periodic table some months ago, it goes into how it is getting preserved as well.
> "Treatment to the chart included: brushing to remove loose surface dirt and debris, separating the chart from its heavy linen backing, washing the chart in de-ionised water adjusted to a neutral pH with calcium hydroxide to remove the soluble discolouration and some of the acidity, a ‘de-acidification’ treatment by immersion in a bath of magnesium hydrogen carbonate to deposit an alkaline reserve in the paper, and finally repairing tears and losses using a Japanese kozo paper and wheat starch paste. "
>In view of the table’s age and emerging uniqueness it was important for the teaching chart to be preserved for future generations. //
Does it tell us anything we didn't know, doesn't appear to. So what exactly is the value.
I'm a hoarder, and I like curios - particularly scientific ones. But, is their really any need or specific benefit in its preservation?
There's a related issue, when paintings (eg old masters) are purchased by the public purse to "preserve them for the country" or similar. Do we really gain anything (in the general case) if an analysis of the methods and substances has been kept along with a digital facsimile?
It's lovely to keep old stuff, but claims of necessity always seem to be a bit of a stretch.
Does it tell us anything we didn't know, doesn't appear to.
1. Have a look at the heading under "Gruppe." It's the formula of the element's oxide. That hasn't shown up on periodic tables for a long time. It implies that determining the oxide formula may have been tricky for students of the time. Today students are taught how to make any formula (not just oxides) given the group number of the component elements.
2. Mendeleev's name is explicitly mentioned. You also won't find that on any modern periodic tables.
3. The transition metals are not segregated but lumped into main groups. Today they're separated into ten groups of their own, but the rare earths and transuranium elements are kind of lumped together with no groups of their own.
GP's point is that this artifact doesn't introduce a new variant of periodic table that was unknown to historians. Hell, Wikipedia has had a virtually similar table listed in its history of the periodic table for close to 4 years now.
> 3. The transition metals are not segregated but lumped into main groups. Today they're separated into ten groups of their own, but the rare earths and transuranium elements are kind of lumped together with no groups of their own.
The only known f-block elements known at the time were lanthanum [1], cerium, thorium, uranium, and erbium. Plus didymium, which is actually a mixture of praseodymium and neodymium that was thought to be an element. On the base of atomic mass, there was clearly a large slug of missing elements, so the assumption was that when the d-block returns to hafnium, there must have been missing elements to fill in the expected rows.
The modern periodic table is centered essentially on electronic configuration. The standard table has the s-block on the left, the p-block on the right, the d-block in the middle, and the f-block below the table, vaguely indicated as appearing either immediately after the s-block or after the first element in the d-block. Elements are sorted into these blocks based on which orbital the last electron filters into, although by the time you hit the f-block, the nominal rule implied by the periodic table has lots of exceptions.
But this table predates the discovery of atomic orbital theory. It even predates the notion of atomic number--the elements are listed with their atomic mass. The group numbers that you see used to be common in chemistry, although often addended with A or B (where CAS said that the d-block groups were all suffixed with B and the others with A; and IUPAC said that the first half of columns were A and the second half were B).
[1] Sidestepping the entire debate here about whether lanthanum and actinium are d-block elements, or lutetium and lawrencium are.
> Have a look at the heading under "Gruppe." It's the formula of the element's oxide.
According to the Periodic Videos video (linked from another comment), the reason those are there is to justify splitting the list of elements into rows in those particular places. The reasoning today is to do with eletron shells (I'm not a chemist but I presume that electron shells are also the root cause of those formulae) but at the time periodic table was created electrons hadn't yet been discovered!
You are right (slaps forehead), and I was not thinking about the historical context.
The earliest tables were based on "valence", or the ratio with which an element tended to combine with other elements in compounds. Two of the most consistent and easily obtained compounds are those of hydrogen and oxygen, which nearly always combine with other "monovalent" elements in ratios of 1 and 2, respectively.
When a new element was discovered, the ratios with which it formed oxides and hydrides could be determined, and this would allow its placement on the table.
A student from the late 1800s would only be able to think in terms of equivalents, not electrons and their orbitals - as you point out. The inclusion of hydride and oxide formula templates would have been an integral part of using the table.
>Does it tell us anything we didn't know, doesn't appear to. So what exactly is the value.
What's the value of museums? Of history?
This artifact allows you to place yourself in the shoes of a chemistry student 150 years ago. This is what they would have seen in the classroom. Not something like this, but exactly this.
History is often taught through dates and names; "King blah-blah conquered this land in year blah". But that's just biographies of governments. What's often missing is what the world view of a person living at the time was.
Artifacts like this -- and museums in general -- are a part of gives you the answer to this question.
To wit: there's nothing about DOS that you wouldn't be able to learn online, but starting DOOM on a 486 in the Living Computer Museum will give you an experience that you wouldn't get by just reading about it.
To devalue my comment in this way is not at all fair, that is not at all what I asked.
If you have a picture of the poster then I can see exactly what students at the time had, even that amount of detail is largely superfluous to any benefit - beyond mere curiosity - that I (or seemingly anyone) can derive from it.
As a society, it strikes me we should get over clinging to stuff just because it's old. Rather than preserve a not-especially-interesting artefact for posterity; record it, report the detail of it; then leave it in private hands. Use public money for now; University money for current educational needs.
Your last para at least approaches the question. But, (and I've done this) the experience of playing an 80s game on an emulator is largely the same, close enough to the experience that you can learn anything implicit in the experience itself IMO.
But, this is quite different, that artefact isn't going to be put up in a lecture hall of the C17th, if anything a facsimile will ... at which point the artefact, despite your protestations, still appears to have a intrinsic value approaching zero.
People have assigned a value to this because its the 'first', and as long as people value that, that's enough isn't it?
Why should Usain Bolt be held in any higher regard than the 2nd fastest man in the world? Who even is 2nd in the world? People care about the first, everything else pales.
> But, is their really any need or specific benefit in its preservation?
Maybe a little, but probably really only to someone doing specialized research on Chemistry education.
This find seems a lot like a hypothetical discovery of the "oldest surviving Parisian passenger bus map, dated 1952 [1]." It wouldn't be the oldest bus map, nor even the oldest bus map of Paris, nor would it tell you much about the Parisian bus system that you couldn't find from other sources.
[1] I'm aware there are likely older surviving maps, but I made this up to make a point.
I'm fascinated by real prehistoric artefacts like stone axe, etc even though those physical artefacts have probably no scientific value after having been analyzed, described, photographed, 3d modeled, etc. And we also do have museum of computer history with all that old hardware.
That old stuff anchors in spacetime the path of our civilization and bears witness to the chain of thought and actions that led us to the current place.
I too am fascinated by artefacts. Neil MacGregor's "A History of the World in 100 Objects" is a favourite book of mine, for example (and I have a physical copy!).
But, here's the rub, once analysed, understood, etc., (which for a simple image we can do readily; we already knew about the producer, the printers, the paper and ink types, the manner of production, the information held on the page is not novel AFAICT), what real value beyond that of any rare trinket does it have.
We grow out of bringing home every stick or stone, as children wish to.
It seems like magical thinking to imagine the logical 'soul' of the artefact cannot be extracted.
The chart is essentially the same as in https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Periodic_table_by_Me..., except that there are some more elements filled in. Specifically, gallium was added, and the lanthanides (particularly cerium/lanthanum/didymium) seem really confused.
(Yes, this is before chemists realized that didymium wasn't an element but a mixture of rare earths. Rare earths confused the hell out of chemists at the time, because they are so chemically similar that it's difficult to extract them from another, and they don't sit well in the standard grouping because f orbitals don't play meaningful roles in bonding--hence the chemical similarity).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eRLeS1UdPo
He also made a video discussing what is on the the table
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfC4OGbbHLc