“Great Mogul” Playing Cards – Belgium, ca. 1904
Did you know that today is National Periodic Table Day? But what does that have to do with this deck of playing cards? Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table of elements in 1869, and his love of the game solitaire helped him do so! In solitaire, playing cards are arranged into patterns according to their properties. Scientists had been struggling to organize the known elements into a system of classification. One day Mendeleev decided to make a set of cards on which he wrote the names and properties of known elements, and then he began to arrange those cards into rows, like you would in solitaire. The result was a table where certain chemical properties could be seen to occur in a repeating pattern, or in other words, periodically.
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