After lauding the brilliance of Dmitri Mendeleev across multiple chapters of Inside the Box, David Epstein admits to keeping something from the reader:
He was not the first person to discover the periodic pattern, nor the second.
Prior to 1860, there were zero periodic tables in history. In nine years following the Karlsruhe conference, where the weights of elements were standardized, there were six. All six arose independently. They differed in appearance, and in details, but all six contained the fundamental insight—that the features of nature’s building blocks change predictably and then reset regularly with increasing weight.
In 1862, a French geologist arranged the elements in a three-dimensional descending spiral, like the stripes on a barber pole. Looking down a vertical column of the spiral showed the pattern. The diagram was complicated, though, so a publisher left it out and the paper was ignored.
In 1863, a British sugar chemist started organizing elements and soon insisted that when elements were ordered by weight their properties reset and repeated every eight places. When he presented his findings in a lecture to the London Chemical Society, he likened it to musical octaves. It was a poetic thought, but led an audience member to treat him like a charlatan and ask if he shouldn’t arrange the elements in alphabetical order instead. He had no academic position, and the Chemical Society declined to publish his work.
In 1864, a prominent English chemist who had attended the Karlsruhe conference drafted a periodic table. He, too, saw the main idea, and unlike the previous two scientists had the professional standing to push it forward. He didn’t, though, perhaps because he considered it merely a classification scheme, and not a law of nature.
In 1867, a Danish immigrant to America and polymath devised a periodic system that looked like a wheel, with elements arranged along spokes radiating out from the center. He was a highly eccentric outsider to chemistry, and the diagram was confusing. His work passed like a ship in the night.
In 1868, a German chemist drafted a periodic table that unlike the others, placed nearly every known element in a system that was both consistent and clear. Like Mendeleev, he was sitting in the room when Stanislao Cannizzaro delivered his argument for standardizing the weights of elements. And, like Mendeleev, he too was writing an intro textbook when he came up with his table. He faced the same constraints as Mendeleev, and produced basically the same table. But a publisher misplaced it and it wasn’t published until years later.
In 1869, Mendeleev published the first version of the table that would eventually hang in every high school science classroom.
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Mendeleev became the “father of the periodic table” because his system was relatively complete, and because his daring predictions of as-yet-undiscovered elements were vindicated. He also wasn’t a chemistry outsider, was only moderately eccentric, made a diagram that was simple to understand, and, to his great fortune, his publisher didn’t lose it or leave it out. Also: Mendeleev really wanted to be known as the discoverer of the periodic law, so he fought for his claim.
Mendeleev won what science historians call a “priority dispute.” They have a name for it because it is so incredibly common.
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Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed with the patent office on the same day.
The list of momentous breakthroughs that were independently discovered by multiple people pervades every domain. In astronomy: the discoveries of sunspots and the distance to stars; in math: decimal notation, logarithms, and the principle of least squares (used everywhere from machine learning to medical trials); in chemistry, the discovery of oxygen; in physics, the law of conservation of energy (at least five and arguably twelve co-discoverers); in biology, the theory of infection by microorganisms; and all manner of world-changing practical inventions—photography, the thermometer, the telescope. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently invented calculus, leading to the aptly named Newton–Leibniz calculus controversy. (The Newton–Hooke controversy, meanwhile, was over gravity.) Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently arrived at the theory of evolution by natural selection. When a stunned Darwin—who had not yet published his findings—read Wallace’s unpublished manuscript, he wrote to his mentor: “I never saw a more striking coincidence.”
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The programmable digital computer was independently invented in three countries in a short span. The transistor was invented by teams in the United States and France within months of each other and enabled our digital age.
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In 1961, Robert Merton, a pioneer of the sociology of science, wrote that “multiple discovery” (which has itself been multiply discovered over generations) is so ubiquitous that “singletons” should be considered the exceptions.
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The lone genius trope was popularized in nineteenth-century England, when the word “creativity” itself was invented. It was part of an intellectual movement that championed humanity’s power to discover the secrets of nature and turn them into practical gains. It was important for progress but also fed the image of the lone, outside-the-box genius, and dovetailed with the era’s so-called cult of the hero.
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If ever there was a paradigm shift, that was it. And yet, none of the pieces of Darwin’s theory of evolution—selection, adaptation, heritability, the struggle for survival, even random changes that are passed down—were entirely new. Several were reasonably common among naturalists who studied plants and animals. Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, believed that all “warm-blooded animals” had a common origin in the distant past.
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Darwin’s breakthrough came from meticulously compiling available but disparate knowledge into a coherent whole in order to answer pressing questions of his time, like “Why does breeding work so well?” and “Why do we keep finding fossils of creatures that don’t currently exist on Earth?” Darwin kept at least 231 scientific pen pals—from conchologists and ornithologists to gardeners—whom he peppered with questions and questionnaires. He cut up their letters and pasted information into his own notebooks. Darwin learned that breeders already recognized that random hereditary changes occasionally appeared. They even had a word for them: “sports.”
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After he disembarked from the Beagle, Darwin read a popular biography of Adam Smith, the “father of economics,” and considered how order could emerge from competition. As Waller wrote: Darwin’s notebooks “show how deeply he was rooted… in the intellectual trends of the early 1800s.”