Karolina had this to say about the inspiration behind the exhibition:
The logo for the Un & IUPAC year depicts the “father of the periodic law”, Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev, who is placed next to a chemical element named after him. As a researcher working on the history of periodic system, I want you to look at that picture, squint your eyes, and imagine another bearded man there instead of Mendeleev. I ask you to do this because there were in fact several other bearded men who could be placed on that logo.
Like historian Michael Gordin, who has written a marvellous book on Mendeleev, I confess that I have little idea of who actually discovered the periodic system of chemical elements. From all the bearded men that could be titled as its discoverers, however, I would like to direct attention to a German chemist called Julius Lothar Meyer in particular. This exhibition presents Meyer’s systematisation of the elements. Arguably, Meyer’s graphs give us the most striking early visualisation of the periodic relationship between the mass of the elements and their chemical properties.
Many a time have I felt grateful for conducting my historical investigations in 2015-2019 rather than fifteen, thirty, or fifty years earlier. Apart from being able to move from one European conference to another with relative ease, I can press Ctrl+F, follow electronic trails, and download a PDF of books put together by scholars of Soviet Union. The vast majority of the sources I needed were available from the first week of my PhD.
But some things are best studied in life rather than on screen. Things too fragile, or too inconveniently put together for scanners and cameras. One such thing is Lothar Meyer’s graph showing the periodicity of chemical elements.
You would struggle to find a digitisation that shows its full scope and detail online, and big thanks are due to the staff at the Chemistry Library and Conservation at the UL for providing us with the original document. One can try to show it all on screen, (and together with the staff of Whipple, we have tried to ensure a Comfortable Online Viewing Experience), but you should come over to Free School Lane and have a look yourself. If I had the resources, I would put it on a bus: here at Whipple, you will learn something about the experts who you will not get enough of!
The exhibition is taking place in the usual cases on Level 1 of the Haycock Theatre at the Whipple Library, and can be viewed by anyone during library opening hours. We have also put together a virtual exhibition, which you can view here: https://www.whipplelib.hps.cam.ac.uk/special/exhibitions-and-displays/curating-chemical-elements
The exhibition will be on until March 2019, and we hope as many of you as possible will be able to stop by and enjoy!"
