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Americans like to buy things and own them—barbecues and refrigerators, computers and iPods, cars and bikes, boats and even private planes. Some folks make their appliances last a long time, but manufacturers rely on most people to buy new ones every five years or so. The few critics of our system sometimes charge that items from appliances and vehicles are designed to break down relatively quickly, to prod consumption along. Walking through a showroom or past shop windows, how many people stop to wonder where all the stuff comes from or what happens there? Here is the short answer: Nearly everything you use every day is based on minerals mined somewhere, often leaving behind disfigured land and a toxic mess. Materials still mined in the western United States include metals, particularly gold, iron, copper, zinc, and molybdenum—plus gypsum, borates, and other salts, and most cement ingredients. Mining is the prow of America’s consumer-propelled ship. Its whole purpose is to dig up resources for transformation to consumer goods. But the resources are nonrenewable, so mining progressively eliminates and eventually exhausts them. The processes of exploring for and exploiting mineral deposits consume vast resources also, especially water and energy. Natural processes spread mine pollution into water, soil, and air, at times killing all life in creeks, streams, and reservoirs. Geographer Lewis Mumford once estimated that “Mining’s effects on the earth are now on the same scale as hugely destructive natural forces.” He guessed the minimum amount of material moved by global mining operations at 28 billion tons in 1963—nearly twice the sediment all the world’s rivers carry annually. Determining just how much land may be affected by mine wastes, and how much farther the damage might spread, is more dif- cult. The massive scale of today’s mining operations dwarfs Mumford’s figure. The dominant U.S. mining law offers wide swaths of U.S. public lands to any and all comers, whether foreign or domestic (box 4.1).

The 1870s marked the onset of an exceptionally fruitful and dynamic period in the development of chemistry in the Czech Lands. University education and research in chemistry was taking place at several universities and technical universities, where the structure of the main chemical subjects developed gradually into organic, inorganic, analytical, physical, fermentation, and medical chemistry, just to mention the main specialties. At the same time, the process of the Czech National Revival led to the cultural, linguistic, social, and political emancipation of the modern Czech nation and stepwise almost entirely separated the linguistically Czech and German scientific communities in all their representations, including university education. In Prague, the divided German and Czech Polytechnics (and later Technical Universities) existed since 1869, whereas the Charles-Ferdinand University split into its Czech and German counterparts only in the years 1882 and 1883. The chemical community was organized in several professional associations that also reflected the ethnic division of the scientific scene. The Society of Czech Chemists, founded in 1866, had almost exclusively Czech membership, while a specialized German chemical association has never been created in the Czech Lands. This study deals with two closely intertwined themes: the reception of the periodic system in the Czech Lands and in Europe and the crucial role of the Czech chemist Bohuslav Brauner in this process. I am going to demonstrate a specific set of conditions that shaped the process of appropriation of this new scientific idea by not only scholarly argumentation, but also particular circumstances, in this case Slavic nationalism and Russophilia in the Czech society at the turn of the nineteenth century. The course of dissemination and reception of the periodic system also showed linkage to the linguistic emancipation of the Czech nation as reflected in the controversy over the Czech chemical terminology, where the periodic system served as argument to one party of the dispute.

In this essay I examine how the periodic system or table was introduced in Denmark in the late nineteenth century, how it was used in chemical textbooks, and the way it was developed by a few of the country’s scientists. Danish chemists had in the period an international orientation, which helped them in getting acquainted with Mendeleev’s system and appreciating its strength. The main reason they felt the system to be attractive was its predictive force, especially its prediction of new elements and ability to accommodate new chemical knowledge. I pay particular attention to the work of Hans Peter Jørgen Julius Thomsen (1826–1909), which is an important example of “neo-Proutean” attempts to understand the periodic system in terms of internally structured atoms. Moreover, I direct attention to Mendeleev’s connection to Danish science by way of his membership in the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Thomsen’s speculations of composite atoms as the ultimate cause of the periodicity of the elements were vindicated by the new developments in atomic theory. A semi-quantitative explanation was offered by Niels Bohr (1885–1962) in 1913, and in subsequent refinements of his atomic model he came close to an explanation of the entire periodic system. The essay briefly considers Bohr’s work on the periodic system in its local context, including its relation to the earlier ideas of Thomsen. In order to appreciate how the periodic system of the elements was received in Denmark, it will be helpful to provide some basic information of the country’s chemical landscape. In the period here considered, approximately 1870–1920, Denmark was a small country, scientifically and culturally almost completely dominated by its capital, Copenhagen. As far as chemical research and education was concerned, the most important institutions were the University of Copenhagen, the Polytechnical College, the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural College, and the Pharmaceutical College, all located in Copenhagen. Although the number of chemists grew rapidly during this period, only a few of them were trained at the University and even fewer had an interest in the more theoretical aspects of the chemical sciences.