It's a massive slab of human genius,
up there with the Taj Mahal, the Mona Lisa, and the ice cream sandwich --
and the table's creator, Dmitri Mendeleev, is a bonafide science hall-of-famer.
But why? What's so great about him and his table?
Is it because he made a comprehensive list of the known elements?
Nah, you don't earn a spot in science Valhalla just for making a list.
Besides, Mendeleev was far from the first person to do that.
Is it because Mendeleev arranged elements with similar properties together?
Not really, that had already been done too.
So what was Mendeleev's genius?
Let's look at one of the first versions of the periodic table from around 1870.
Here we see elements designated by their two-letter symbols arranged in a table.
Check out the entry of the third column, fifth row.
There's a dash there.
From that unassuming placeholder springs the raw brilliance of Mendeleev.
That dash is science.
By putting that dash there, Dmitri was making a bold statement.
He said -- and I'm paraphrasing here --
Y'all haven't discovered this element yet. In the meantime, I'm going to give it a name.
It's one step away from aluminum, so we'll call it eka-aluminum,
"eka" being Sanskrit for one.