Chapter 3

Summary:
          This chapter was all about the discovery of many of the different elements that we know of today. Writer, Sam Kean, starts off talking about the Bunsen burner. He goes on explaining that chemist Robert Bunsen  did not really invent the burner, but he brought different ideas together to make the Bunsen burner we know today.
          Now that he was speaking of false inventors, he begins to speak about Dmitri Mendeleev - more commonly known as the father of the periodic table. He continues to state that Mendeleev was wrongly named the inventor of the table. Like Robert Bunsen, Dmitri Mendeleev did not invent the periodic table, but he did make enormous contributions to it. He goes on to explain that Dmitri was a Russian chemist and the youngest of 14 children. His father died during his childhood and his mother died shortly after he was enrolled to college. He was credited with finding out that there were many more elements that had not yet been discovered.
          Once scientist saw his idea of the periodic table, they built on it looking for more elements to fill in the blanks. Scientist, Lecoq de Boisbaudran, discovered the element gallium, which Mendeleev knew existed but never found. Across the Baltic Sea in 1701, teenager Jonah Friedrich Böttger was forced to find porcelain in order no to be hung for lying about being able to make gold. In the process he was an apprentice to a scientist and together they discovered many of the elements that Mendeleev could not.

Reflection:
          Writer ,Sam Kean's side notes,  are really interesting to hear because he was able to write this book with the help of other chemists. I disliked that the chapter wasn't longer to give more information about the scientist that helped him with Ytterby. I learned that Mendeleev was not really the inventor of the periodic table. I was honestly flabergasted in the fact that I believed he was the creator this whole time. On a date with bae, I would bring up the fact that Mendeleev wasn't the actual father of the periodic table because that honestly surprised me.