The Unpleasant Instance of the Periodic Table: Translating into a Priority Dispute

In February 1869, St. Petersburg University chemistry professor Dmitrii I. Mendeleev (1834-1907) formulated a version of the periodic system of chemical elements, a two-dimensional array of the 63 known chemical elements according to their atomic weight and chemical properties, the direct ancestor of the table that graces the walls of every chemistry classroom in the world today.  Mendeleev almost immediately published several articles in Russian on this system, as well as sending an extended abstract to be translated into German in the somewhat marginal Zeitschrift für Chemie.  In 1870, a German chemist named Julius Lothar Meyer (1830-1895) submitted to the prestigious Liebig’s Annalen an expanded version of his own 1864 classification of the elements, citing Mendeleev’s German abstract favorably and claiming that the Russian scientist had just missed the core of the system, had not realized that the system was “periodic” — that the properties of the chemical elements change in a regular, cyclic fashion as one scrolls through the atomic weights.  What followed was the most extended, vituperative, and hostile priority dispute in nineteenth-century science, hinging around the translation (or mistranslation) of a single word.  As the struggle, which lasted throughout the 1870s, developed, Mendeleev, Meyer, and their German and Russian (and French) colleagues became embroiled in a discussion about whether Russian “counted” as a legitimate international language of science, along the lines of English, French, and German.