The periodic tableau: Form and colours in the first 100 years

Abstract

This Special Issue was selected by a dedicated ESHS committee after a public call for special issues. AbstractWhile symbolic colour use has always played a conspicuous role in science research and education, the use of colour in historic diagrams remains a lacuna in the history of science.Investigating the colour use in diagrams often means uncovering a whole cosmology that is not otherwise explicit in the diagram itself. The periodic table is a salient and iconic example of non-mimetic colour use in science. Andreas vonAntropoff's (1924) rectangular table of recurrent rainbow colours is famous, as are Alcindo Flores Cabral's (1949) application of colour in his round snail form, using the RGB scheme, and Mazurs's (1967) pine tree system, consisting of warm and cold colours that he attributed to specific groups of elements-an attribution that we can relate back to humoralism and alchemy. From the first periodic tables in the 19th century, individual researchers have used different colour regimes. While standardization may play an obvious role in chemistry and its diagrams, all the more impressive is the anarchistic use of colour in the various diagrams which continue to be created. This article focuses on periodic tables in chemical journals and text books, and explores and compares the development of colour codes found in the few existing polychrome diagrams from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Reconceptualizing chemical elements through the construction of the periodic system

“…This interpretation may be grounded in François Dagognet's () view of the periodic table as a mode of representation of the material world of the same kind as the graphic formulae of chemical molecules: see Hepler‐Smith (). See also Bock von Wülfingen ().…”