The Elements: An Illustrated History of the Periodic Table

The thoughts and deeds of great thinkers always make great stories, and here are a hundred of the most significant. Each story relates a confounding puzzle that became a discovery and changed the way we see the world. We call these Ponderables.

Knowledge does not arrive fully formed, it requires many minds to puzzle over the evidence and, step by step, edge ever closer to the truth. Here we track the history of the Periodic Table, a powerful yet elegant tool that lays bare the building blocks of the Universe. Our story involves philosophers, alchemists, and scientists. It includes Democritus of ancient Greece who said that the four elements of nature - water, air, earth, and fire - must be made of atoms, otherwise our world is just an illusion; the French aristocrat Antoine Lavoisier, who was first to show that water was not an element at all; and Dmitri Mendeleev, the wildly bearded Siberian who constructed a table of 60-plus elements and argued, correctly, that there were many others.

We know a lot more about atoms and the elements today, but where will the story go next?

A 12-page removable timeline embeds the story in historical context.