Elements

118 cards · Hard

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Elements

118 cards · Artist AI generated

Dmitri Mendeleev worked the periodic table out by playing cards with it. He wrote each of the sixty-three known elements and its properties onto a separate card and dealt them into rows and columns, shuffling and relaying them the way he rearranged a hand of patience, which was how he passed the long Russian train journeys. The pattern turned up in the layout.

What convinced everyone else was the gaps. The cards would not align without holes left in them, and rather than close the holes Mendeleev insisted something belonged there and wrote down what it would be like. Gallium turned up in 1,875 and germanium in 1,886, both close to his description. When gallium's density came out wrong, he told its discoverer to measure again, and he was right.

The numbering is the count of protons, which is why it runs cleanly from one to a hundred and eighteen with nothing skipped. Past uranium at ninety-two, though, almost none of it exists on Earth in any quantity. Those elements were manufactured a few atoms at a time, and some survive for less than a second. The end of the table is a list of things that had to be made before anyone could count them.

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