A well-ordered thing

"When a young Dmitrii Mendeleev drafted the Periodic Table of Elements as a guide for his chemistry students at St. Petersburg University, he already had dreams of building a unified scientific empire in his home of Russia, with a place for himself in the limelight." "That the Periodic Table predicted the existence of three unknown elements and became the framework for modern chemistry helped Mendeleev's cause; it gave him a platform for social change and sensationalism. When he battled the emergence of Spiritualism in Russia, playing the skeptical foil in the seances he attended, newspapers…