Where Dreams Come True

Image from penny4nasa,org

As far as anyone knows, no one from Earth has ever stood on the dark side of the moon.  To date, the U.S. is the only country to have successfully put people onto the lunar surface but those landings were all made on the side of the moon that faces our planet.  The U.S. lunar landings resulted from a furious national scramble to catch up with the USSR who, early on, was way ahead of us in the space race.  Russia had thrown down the gauntlet in 1957 by launching Sputnik into orbit.  The beach ball-sized satellite circled the earth every 92 minutes until it fell from its orbit three months later, burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere.  This rattled everybody’s cage; creating an instant crisis for American politicians, scientists, our military and us plain folks.  I remember being on a camping trip near the Salton Sea, lying in my sleeping bag, looking up and watching Sputnik drift slowly across the night sky above.

Image from vintag.es

There was no shortage of reminders for anyone growing up in the 1950s that America and the USSR were in the midst of a “cold war.”  When the air raid sirens were tested once a month in Los Angeles, everybody froze momentarily until they reassured themselves, “Yes, it is 10:00 a.m. and yes, it is the last Friday of the month.”  

Bomb shelters were built in some back yards

and kids in k-12 were put through “duck and 

cover” drills. 

Image from occurrencesforeignanddomestic.com

In the classroom we were told to turn away from the windows, drop to the floor and take cover under your desk.  If we were on the playground, we were to turn our back to the flash, drop to the ground and cover our head with our hands and arms.  All of which we knew was pointless since black-and-white footage of nuclear testing and its devastation were regularly featured on television.  Nor was it lost on any of us youngsters that the U.S. President was a former 5-Star General in the U.S. Army.

Fifty-nine years later I discovered that soon 
after Sputnik a Russian space craft had 

First photo of moon's far side taken by Soviet
space probe Luna 3; image from wikipedia.org

taken the first-ever photographs of the dark side of the moon.  This may well have been reported at the time but I don’t recall hearing about it.  I think it most likely that the media was directed to keep a lid on it. It was bad enough living with Russian satellites floating over our heads but at least we could see them.  God only knows what those dirty commies were cooking up out of sight on the other side of the moon.  The fact that the Russians had captured mankind’s first glimpse of this hidden surface helps explain why today nearly every crater, mountain or gully on the back side carries a Russian moniker composed of seemingly random sequenced letters and wholly unpronounceable by westerners.  

Image from wikipedia.org

This achievement by the Russians is mentioned in a book by Sam Kean entitled The Disappearing Spoon and other true tales of madness, love and the history of the world from the periodic table of elements.  Kean’s book appears at first glance to be about chemistry, but eventually pulls in just about everything imaginable.  As an example, there is a 200 mile-wide crater on the far side of the moon named after Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleev.  If your reaction to this is anything like mine, you are probably thinking, “Who the hell is he and why should I give a shit?”  Do you remember the periodic table of elements on that big chart the size of a twin bed sheet that hung on the wall in your chemistry class?  Well, it all came to Mendeleev in a dream; an accomplishment Kean insists deserves the kind of attention accorded to Darwin and Einstein. 

Mendeleev’s inspiration along with everything else in this book is riveting stuff.  For decades everybody’s been screaming about the downfall of public education in America but I’m now questioning if it ever was worth a damn.  How could I have completed a year of chemistry at a Los Angeles public high school in 1961 and never heard any of the magical and fascinating stuff in Kean’s book?

Print by William Blake of Nebuchadnezzar
Image from pinterest.com

I would have been very intrigued if someone would have bothered to tell me back then that the discovery, abundance or scarcity of most of the elements on the chart had radically altered the history of mankind.  I would have been putty in some teacher’s hands had they told me why Nebuchadnezzar II fell from power.  It wasn’t a war, a betrayal or a revolt; rather it was the wrong color paint.  It seems while he was having the palace spruced up he chose a shade that contained Antimony (symbol Sb and atomic weight 51).  Too much of this stuff spread on interior walls can send the inhabitants around the bend.  It wasn’t long before Nebuchadnezzar was sleeping and grazing in the fields with the oxen and howling at the moon like a banshee.  Why wasn’t that story part of the curriculum?  Kean has a ball buster of a tale for almost every element, none of which was ever made mention of in my chemistry class.  Kean takes readers through history demonstrating how individual elements won wars, made fortunes, toppled empires and advanced civilization.

Image from removeandreplace.com

I know damn well no one told me that the chart on the wall was a complete catalog of all the matter that exists in the known universe.  If they had, I guarantee my ears would have perked up.  Why did I have to wait half a century to hear from Kean that the elements are arranged on the chart in a manner that reveals how they interact with each other providing much of the basis for other sciences such as physics and biology?

Ural Mountains; Image from h2o-travel.com

Possibly the best way to have hooked me on chemistry class would have been to tell me Mendeleev’s life story.  Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was born in Siberia in 1834.  He was the youngest of somewhere between 11 and 17 brothers and sisters, as sources vary.  When his father passed away his mother, in an effort to support the huge family, ran a glass factory for a couple of years until it burned down. 

Twelve Collegia housed in 440 ft long building
constucted by Peter The Great in 1744
Image from shutterstock.com

Mendeleev was then 15 and showed so much potential that his mother saw her youngest son’s career as the surest means of survival for her family.  She took him on horseback 1,200 miles crossing the Eurasian Steppes and the Ural Mountains to apply to an elite university in Moscow.  They lacked the necessary contacts and Mendeleev was rejected.  No matter, they mounted up and rode another 400 miles to St. Petersburg where Mendeleev was admitted to the same school his father had attended.  With Mendeleev enrolled and the rest of the family transferred to St. Petersburg, his mother died. 

Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleev
tImage from paranormalnews.ru

His mother’s faith in her son was well-placed and after several years of lab work in and around Europe, he became a professor at St. Petersburg where his work on elements reached a breakthrough in 1869.  There were no less than 5 other scientists in addition to Mendeleev working on a way to display the known elements in a chart.  Mendeleev, like the others, was endlessly pouring over and revising versions that never quite proved satisfactory.  Near exhaustion, he fell asleep one evening and had a dream where the solution presented itself.  He woke up and wrote down the table which turned out to be perfect, save for one correction which he added later.  The dream is cited in every source I found on Mendeleev except Kean’s book.  Maybe Kean felt it sounded too good to be true.  Yet leaving it out of Mendeleev’s story is like a mafia film without the scene where the old goombah shows the young goombah how to make pasta sauce.  I was eventually convinced the dream took place by a 1967 English translation of an old Russian psychology article on scientific creativity whose premise was based on the dream and attributed quotes to Mendeleev himself describing the experience.

History credits Mendeleev as the originator of the periodic table because his approach proved to be head and shoulders above anyone else’s.  The charts published by others more closely resembled a list element groups where as Mendeleev’s table, because it was arranged by atomic weight, presented the elements as a system.  Not just any system mind you, Mendeleev documented on a single page the operating system that governs the sub-atomic structure of the entire physical universe.  No small feat.  Where others ignored or left gaps for 8 elements unknown at that time, Mendeleev plugged them into the proper place with a name and precise atomic weights; correctly predicting that the elements existed and was later validated when they were discovered.

Tsar Alexander II; image from uvu.edu

Mendeleev’s accomplishment resulted in his becoming a prominent figure in Russia.  He ended his first marriage after becoming obsessed with another woman who agreed to wed him only after he threatened to kill himself if she didn’t marry him.  Mendeleev refused to wait the 7 years dictated by the church before remarrying and was technically guilty of bigamy.  The priest who performed the ceremony was defrocked but no less than the Tsar of Russia himself stepped in to insure that Mendeleev was given a pass.  Mendeleev’s brash and outspoken manner earned him numerous enemies within the scientific community and this cost him a Nobel prize in 1906, the year before his death. 

Please tell me, how could Mendeleev’s story not have been made a center piece to my secondary education?  The Berlin Wall may have come down preserving capitalism for the time being, but is it any wonder why the U.S. continues to come up short with its share of home-grown scientists?.  I’m not going to put it all on the public schools, others had opportunities to influence America's youth such as Walt Disney but he certainly wasn’t doing anything to help in 1961.  His studio’s big box office hit that year was The Absent-Minded Professor starring Fred Mac Murray.  A farce about a goofball character who flies around in a car doused with an anti-gravity material called “flubber.”  Mac Murray’s portrayal of the professor was so moronic that in hindsight, flubber was undoubtedly laced with Antimony.