There is a veritable crop of history-of-science storybooks hitting the shops these days, of which 60-year-old Paul Strathern has written at least a dozen. In this meandery, chatty tale, which concludes with Dmitri Mendeleyev's cracking of the Periodic Table of the Elements in 1869, he starts with the Greeks, with their water-air-fire-earth four-element theory which, in Strathern's view, "crippled scientific thinking for two millennia".
It's a crusty, scientistic view he often airs. Lauding some Arabian physician-alchemists, he bemoans the alchemical "intellectual catastrophe" which engulfed great mediaeval European thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas. But of course, alchemy, for all its occult attempts to mint gold, kept chemistry going. By 1300, the False Geber had discovered vitriol (sulphuric acid), while others stumbled across minerals, acids, salts and pure alcohol.
Strathern relishes the tale of the 16th-century wandering Swiss rogue, Paracelsus, and his folk-medical "iatrochemistry". Parcelsus isolated zinc and metallic arsenic, and described the properties of bismuth and cobalt. A century later, Hennig Brand isolated phosphorus in Hamburg, from 50 buckets of urine allowed to "putrefy and breed worms".
In his Sceptical Chymist (1661), Irishman Robert Boyle first defined an element, and wrote up many experiments clearly so that they could be repeated, and even invented a litmus test with "a syrup of violets". However, Strathern berates Boyle for alchemy, and absolutely mugs Newton for it, let alone the latter's heresy of calculating the date of Creation from the Old Testament.
But Strathern heroises the 18th-century Swede, Karl Scheele, who accurately recorded the taste of hydrogen cyanide, isolated chlorine and helped others identify barium, molybdenum, manganese and tungsten. He gets shirty again when it comes to phlogiston, the spurious "element of combustion" championed by Johann Becher, Georg Stahl and, indeed, Henry Cavendish - according to Strathern "an eccentric's eccentric" who "left the rest of the field baying and wittering" in his wake.
The great Antoine Lavoisier, of course, settled the phlogiston debate by isolating a gas he called oxygen, without crediting the technique to Joseph Priestly. Strathern notes Lavoisier's wife's subsequent "rational scientific ceremony" when, dressed as a Grecian priestess, she burnt the works of Becher and Stahl on an altar. The father of modern chemistry, Lavoisier named 33 elements, and Strathern forgives him for the fact that eight were compounds, and two more were light and heat. After Lavoisier was guillotined in 1794, the English Quaker John Dalton took Proust's Law of definite proportions, and developed a system of atomic weights, in which hydrogen was taken to have an atomic weight of one. By 1810, he had established the atomic weights of 20 elements.
By 1818, the Swedish chemist Jons Berzelius had established atomic weights for 45 elements, and new patterns were emerging. When Alexander Charcourtois listed atomic weights in ascending order, he found strikingly similar properties after every 16th element. John Newlands bettered that with his "law of octaves", which lined up the halogens and alkali metals neatly.
But the true picture arrived in 1869 with Dmitri Mendeleyev, a Russian. Mendeleyev jammed together his Periodic Table by claiming that the atomic weight of thorium had been incorrectly measured, and predicted two new elements which, when discovered over the next decade (gallium and germanium) wrote his Periodic Table in stone.
Strathern's tidily resolved history is peppered with some fascinating asides (many of them word-origins), and dubious pronouncements that modern science is the dawn towards which all civilisations aspired. As with a lot of storybooks, the science doesn't go terribly deep, with Strathern preferring to follow good yarns, and making much, say, of the "gnomic little" Mendeleyev with his jumping tantrums. As a result, the book is a bit of a hairy jumble, but highly diverting for all that.