Today's Wisdom - The Periodic Table, Mountains and Nike

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By the 1860s, chemists had identified 63 elements and measured an atomic weight for each, yet the whole collection sat in a frustrating jumble. Some were soft metals that burst into flame in water, others were choking gases, and others still were dull and inert with no underlying order to explain them. It was rather like holding a shuffled deck of cards and sensing there were suits without knowing how to sort them. The man who finally dealt them out was a Russian chemist named Dmitri Mendeleev, born in Siberia in 1834. In early 1869 he was racing to finish a chemistry textbook for his students. While wrestling with how to organize the second volume he stumbled onto the pattern that had eluded everyone else.

According to the story Mendeleev himself told, the answer arrived in a dream. He had written each element and its properties onto cards, and when he woke he arranged them in columns of increasing atomic weight, starting a fresh column each time the properties began to repeat. Historians are politely skeptical of the dream, since he had clearly been building toward the idea for years. However it came, he presented the periodic law to the Russian Chemical Society that March. Its central truth was profound: the properties of elements recur at regular intervals when the elements are ordered by weight.

The stroke of genius that set Mendeleev above the several other scientists circling the same idea was his nerve to leave the table incomplete. Where the pattern demanded an element that did not yet exist, he refused to fudge the arrangement and instead left deliberate gaps, boldly predicting not just that undiscovered elements would fill them but their exact atomic weights and chemical behavior. He gave these phantom elements placeholder names like eka-aluminum and eka-silicon, borrowing the Sanskrit word for "one." The gamble paid off within his lifetime and silenced the doubters. Gallium was discovered in 1875, followed by scandium in 1879 and germanium in 1886, each one slotting into a waiting gap with properties almost precisely as Mendeleev had foretold. A chart that merely organized the known would have been useful, but Mendeleev had built something far rarer, a map that pointed confidently at the unknown and told chemists exactly where to look.

The staggering thing about mountains is that they are alive in a sense, still growing and shifting beneath our feet. The Earth's crust is broken into vast tectonic plates that drift on the hot, semi-molten rock below, moving about as fast as your fingernails grow. Where these plates meet, mountains are born. The process, known to geologists as orogeny, from the Greek for "mountain-making," unfolds over millions of years. The most common and most towering mountains on Earth are fold mountains, formed when two plates grind into one another and the crust between them has nowhere to go but up. A simple way to picture it is to lay a rug flat and push both ends toward the middle. The fabric buckles and crumples into ridges, and the crust behaves in exactly the same way, warping and folding into peaks.

Around 50 million years ago the Indian plate, drifting north, slammed into the Eurasian plate, and the crumpled land between them rose into the Himalayas. Because India is still plowing into Asia, that range has never stopped rising, and Everest grows some 4 to 5 millimeters taller every year even as erosion wears it down. Volcanic mountains build themselves from the inside out: one plate is forced beneath another, and magma is driven up to the surface and cools into peaks like Japan's Mount Fuji and the long spine of the Andes. Fault-block mountains form differently again. The crust cracks along great fractures, and enormous blocks of rock are shoved up while their neighbors drop down, which is how the Sierra Nevada of California was formed.

Wind, ice, and running water attack a peak from the moment it rises, carving valleys, sharpening ridges, and grinding stone into sediment across unimaginable spans of time. The Appalachians of eastern North America tell this side of the tale. Some 300 million years ago, when the ancestral continents collided to assemble the supercontinent Pangaea, they were thrust up to rival the Himalayas. Hundreds of millions of years of relentless erosion have since worn them down to the rounded slopes we see today. Every mountain, then, is caught between two titanic forces: the tectonic engine pushing it toward the sky and the weather patiently dragging it back down.

In 1962, a Stanford student named Phil Knight wrote a thesis arguing that high-quality Japanese running shoes could undercut the German brands, Adidas and Puma, that then ruled the American market. Most students file such papers away and forget them. Knight flew to Japan, talked his way into the Onitsuka Tiger factory, and secured the right to sell their shoes back home. In January 1964 he went into business with his old University of Oregon track coach, Bill Bowerman, each man putting in $500, and they called the venture Blue Ribbon Sports. Knight sold the first pairs from the boot of his car at track meets across the western states.

The two founders made an unlikely but perfect pair. Bowerman was a World War II veteran who had led mountain troops against the Germans in Italy. He approached shoe design like a mad scientist, slicing sneakers apart and rebuilding them to shave off weight and add grip. His most famous breakthrough came at breakfast one morning in 1971, when he stared at the grid of his wife's waffle iron and wondered what would happen if he poured rubber into it. The result was the waffle sole, a pattern that gripped the track without metal spikes and became one of the best-selling running shoe designs in history. That same year the company cut ties with Onitsuka and struck out on its own, needing a new name and a logo in a hurry. They settled on Nike, after the Greek goddess of victory, and paid a Portland State design student named Carolyn Davidson just $35 to create the swoosh. Knight was famously unimpressed, reportedly shrugging that he did not love it but it would grow on him.

Grow on him it did, and the logo now appears on the feet of roughly one in three people you pass on the street. The company went public in 1980 and soon overtook Adidas in the US market. Its defining moment came in 1984, when a Nike executive pushed a reluctant Knight to gamble on an untested NBA rookie named Michael Jordan, whom Adidas had passed on. The Air Jordan line that followed rewrote the rules of sports marketing and turned Nike into a global colossus, still earning billions a year decades after Jordan retired. In 1988 came the slogan that sealed its place in culture, "Just Do It," three words now as recognizable as the swoosh itself. As for Carolyn Davidson, Knight never forgot the bargain he had struck. Years after paying her $35, he called her back and presented her with a gold ring set with a diamond swoosh, along with a batch of Nike stock now estimated to be worth millions.

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