Dmitri Mendeleev: The Table of Dreams

Saint Petersburg, February 1869. A man of 35, professor of chemistry at the university, has been sitting for hours in front of small cards that cover his whole desk, with no room left for a cup. On each card is the name of a basic substance, its weight under it, and under that what he knows about it. People know more than 60 such substances, and they do not agree on how to order them. The carriage has been waiting in the square since morning, the horses are cold, and the tea has gone cold on the chair. His friend Inostrantsev walks in and asks: when did you last sleep? He answers: I don't remember. Then he turns a letter over and writes names and numbers on its back, line under line.

This is a novel, not a biography. It starts with the youngest child of a large family in Tobolsk, in Siberia, who arranges bottles on the shelves of a glass factory run by his mother. It follows him on the day the factory burns, then on a long journey with his mother and sister across the Ural Mountains to Moscow and then to Saint Petersburg, then in a sickbed while the doctors say he has months, then in a laboratory he builds in his flat in Heidelberg, then with a book in search of an order, then with the empty places in his table, until scientists in France, Sweden and Germany find the substances he described before anyone had seen them, and then he flies alone above the clouds in a balloon. The main events, dates and names are real, and the story is told in scenes and dialogue as if you were watching it.

The science is explained with pictures from daily life: the basic substances are like letters, only 28 of them and millions of books; similar substances are like brothers and sisters in one house who walk the same way; their properties come back again and again like the days of the week; an empty place in the table is like a drawer in a printer's type case that waits for its letter and is given to no other; the light of each substance in a flame is like a fingerprint that matches no one else's. No equations and no difficult terms. A final section tells you clearly what is real and what is imagined in every chapter.

The book is written in Arabic.