Disappearing Spoon Chapter 3: Summary & Reflection

Summary:

     Kean starts off with the story of Robert Bunsen. Bunsen is well known for his work with the Bunsen burner. Though he did not actually invent it, but merely improved it. He then moved on to start working with arsenic. Until an accident occurred that almost took out his right eye persuaded him to put that aside. He than began studying naturally occurring eruptions. Bunsen, in a later time, then went back to his work with chemistry at the University of Heidelberg. During this time, Bunsen then invented the spectroscope. Kean then moves on to talk about Dmitri Mendeleev. Dmitri, in fact, did not come up with the idea of a periodic table on his own. Six other people all came up with their own individual takes on the periodic table.
    Dmitri gets credit for his work with the periodic table because of his predicted elements on his table. Though, he did encounter many mistakes. Such as,  believing that the sun's halo contained an element called coronium and believing that there were elements that came before hydrogen. The elements of the periodic table can be similar to pieces of a puzzle that must be put together in the correct order and grouping. The town Ytterby is the most relevant to the periodic table because it is where a lot of lanthanides were discovered.

Reflection:
   The one thing that i enjoyed the most about this chapter is how it spoke about Mendeleev not having worked on making the periodic table on his own. This was new information for me I was not aware of there being more than just one person working on something like this. I also liked that the story of Johann Friedrich Bottger explained how porcelain was made, but also how superstitious people had been during that era.