My all-time favourite scarf (made by Rooby Lane on Etsy from a periodic table by Science Notes)

I’m a chemist (no, really? I hear you cry) and like all chemists, I love the periodic table. Why do we love this weird grid of boxes and letters and numbers? Because it’s awesome, that’s why.

No, really, it is. Can physics or biology summarise pretty much everything important about their subject with one, single page of information? (Hint: nope.) But chemists have been able to do just that for the best part of 150 years.

The person we have to thank (mostly) for this brilliant bit of insight is one Dmitri Mendeleev. He was born in Siberia in February 1834 (there’s a bit of an issue with the exact date due to the Russian switch to the Gregorian calendar in 1918 but most sources seem to have settled on the 8th). He was the youngest of more than 10 children, but the really incredible bit about his story is that when he was just 15 years old his mother took him to Moscow, a journey of best part of 1000 miles. There were, at this time, some freshly-built stretches of railway, but make no mistake, it would’ve been a long and difficult trip.

Mendeleev’s mother wanted her youngest son to attend the University of Moscow. But when they got there, the University refused to accept him. So they moved on to the Main Pedagogical Institute in Saint Petersburg, which fortunately had more sense.

Mendeleev’s life is actually pretty colourful and makes for a great story (why is there no film??), but I won’t go into any more detail here, except to say that he gave a formal presentation on his periodic table of the elements in 1869. (Oh, and he also helped to found the first oil refinery in Russia, and did a lot of work on the technique of industrial fractional distillation, which literally no one ever seems to mention.)

So the periodic table is amazing, and if anything its creator was even more so. But what I actually want to do in this post is list some of my most favourite periodic table sites. There are few out there, and they contain a host of useful information above and beyond the standard atomic weight, atomic mass type-stuff. So, without further ado…

• 

  Sir Martyn Poliakoff recording for Periodic Videos

  Periodic Videos – produced by Nottingham University, this has a video for each element in the periodic table, including the newest ones. The videos all feature the gloriously-haired Sir Martyn Poliakoff and are great fun to watch.

• Science Notes periodic tables – if you ever need a high-resolution periodic table, fancy making your laptop background into a periodic table (surprisingly handy, actually), or just want to refer to their simple-but-effective interactive version, this is a great place to start (my scarf, pictured above, was made from a print of Science Notes’ 118 Element Periodic Table Poster with Hubble Stars and Nebula). 
• The Royal Society of Chemistry’s Periodic Table – particularly useful for students, as you can mouseover each element and key information such as electronic configuration appears in a little box on the same page – no clicking required. It’s really fast and easy to use. And if you do click on an element, a host of extra information appears above and beyond the usual history and uses, such as links to podcasts, videos and information about supply risk.
• MPSE: Merck’s Periodic Table of the Elements – if you want a periodic table app for your mobile device, this is a great one. It’s quick to load to beautiful to look at. Available for Apple and Android devices.
• Nature Chemistry: In Your Element – a periodic table of interesting and insightful essays (and I’m not just saying this because I wrote one of them) about the different elements.The most recent piece is on vanadium.
• The Periodic Table of Tech – this one is particularly focused on what the elements are used for. You might learn, for example, that californium isotopes are used to detect landmines, or that zirconium isn’t just good for making cubic zirconia gems; it’s also used in nuclear fuel rods. What I particularly like about this is that it has all the information on one page, so it’s particularly easy to browse.

There will be many others which I haven’t mentioned. If you have a different favourite, do comment below!

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