A Revolutionary Table

Having discussed eighteenth-century chemists selection and grouping together of pure chemical substances, and particularly their collective ways of classifying them around the concepts of middle salts and of metals, alloys, and metal calces, we are now in a position to recognize the conditions under which the chemical order of the 1787 Tableau was constructed, to distinguish its own achievements from those on which it built, and to revalue how revolutionary the proposals of the new chemists actually were. 

---

Schiff also brought his revolutionary ideas into his classes he was one of the first chemistry professors to set up a demonstration table in his lecture room (Fig. 4.3) that connected to a chemical preparation room. 

In this section, you saw how the ideas of quantum mechanics led to a new, revolutionary atomic model—the quantum mechanical model of the atom. According to this model, electrons have both matter-like and wave-like properties. Their position and momentum cannot both be determined with certainty, so they must be described in terms of probabilities. An orbital represents a mathematical description of the volume of space in which an electron has a high probability of being found. You learned the first three quantum numbers that describe the size, energy, shape, and orientation of an orbital. In the next section, you will use quantum numbers to describe the total number of electrons in an atom and the energy levels in which they are most likely to be found in their ground state. You will also discover how the ideas of quantum mechanics explain the structure and organization of the periodic table. 

With the discovery and disclosure of these events in the area of "High Tc Superconductivity", hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists actively became involved in research on these new materials. Newer materials and higher Tc s soon followed. The competition was fierce and the progress through 1987 and 1988 was moving at a rapid pace with numerous important discoveries. To date, the highest Tc is in the range of 110-125 K, some five times that obtained in 1973 on the revolutionary (A-15) intermetallic materials. These new copper -oxide systems, many of which will be described in detail by other contributors to this book, are presented in Table 10. 

Nor was Mendeleev s revolutionary Periodic Table a help. When he first published his Periodic Table in 1869, he was able to include only lanthanum, cerium, didymium (now known to have been a mixture of Pr and Nd), another mixture in the form of erbia, and yttrium unreliable information about atomic mass made correct positioning of these elements in the table difficult. Some had not yet been isolated as elements. There was no way of predicting how many of these elements there would be until Henry Moseley (1887-1915) analysed the X-ray spectra of elements and gave meaning to the concept of atomic number. He showed that there were 15 elements from lanthanum to lutetium (which had only been identified in 1907). The discovery of radioactive promethium had to wait until after World War 2. 

A critical and often overlooked component of the ability to foster such revolutionary advancements is program management. Innovation is not aided by traditional project management requirements and their onerous enforcement can be devastating for innovation, especially those structures that were developed for lean manufacturing processes. " Table 6.1 lists some characteristics of organizations that affect their ability to break through research barriers. 

The introduction of a successful process has been exploited very rapidly by petroleum refiners. Thus, in a few years a new process goes from its introduction to its maximum utilization (Figure 30). In each instance, the introduction of these processes has proven to be financially rewarding. However, it appears that the evolutionary process provides about the same return as the revolutionary process (Table 2). Perhaps this is why refiners are so reluctant to be the first one who makes the revolutionary advance. 

---