“Was 1869 Mendeleev’s ‘Crucial Year’?: Or, Henry Guerlac in St. Petersburg”

Although he was also celebrated for his pioneering history of the development of radar during World War II, Henry Guerlac is best known for his writings on Antoine Lavoisier — often called “the father of modern chemistry” for his work on oxygen — and especially his prize-winning book, Lavoisier — The Crucial Year: The Background and Origin of His Experiments on Combustion in 1772. Since then, the notion of a “crucial year” has cropped up from time to time in the history of chemistry. This talk explores the utility and the pitfalls of Guerlac’s approach by reexamining one of these instances: the formulation by D. I. Mendeleev of his version of the periodic system of chemical elements in 1869.

Michael Gordin is Dean of the College and Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History in the History Department at Princeton University, where he specializes in the history of modern science. From 2017 until 2023 he was director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. In 2013-4 he served as the inaugural director of the Fung Global Fellows Program, and he is associated with the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He came to Princeton in 2003 after earning his A.B. (1996) and his Ph.D. (2001) from Harvard University, and spending a term at the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2011 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and was named a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2019, he was elected as a member of the Leopoldina, the National Academy of Sciences of Germany. He has published on the history of science, Russian history, and nuclear weapons.