How English became science’s lingua franca
History and economics helped the language edge out German, French and Russian
Scientific Babel
Michael D. Gordin
Univ. of Chicago, $30
When the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev discovered the “periodic law” that he illustrated with a table of the elements, he published his finding first in Russian and then in a German translation. Shortly thereafter, though, the German chemist Lothar Meyer claimed to be first to perceive the periodicity in the properties of the elements when ordered by atomic weight.
Meyer had seen Mendeleyev’s paper. But in it, “periodicity” had been mistranslated as “phased,” leading Meyer to believe Mendeleyev hadn’t noticed how similar properties recurred periodically. For decades, dispute raged over who deserved credit for the periodic law.