How a Wooden Table Helped an Element Collector Buy Periodictable.com

​Something you should know about periodictable.com is that it does not, in fact, contain a complete, accurate periodic table of elements. And its owner feels bad about it.

"I've neglected it because I've been doing other things. It hasn't been updated with the latest elements, which feels shameful," Theodore Gray,  ​noted author of The Elements, told me. "I'll get around to doing it eventually, but I'm the only one who can update it. It's not written in the usual way."

That's because Gray has done very little the "usual way." You see, Gray is also a cofounder of Wolfram Research, which founded the immensely useful and popular data search engine Wolfram Alpha.

Wolfram Alpha and periodictable.com both run on a programming language and computational software partially invented by Gray called Mathematica, so ​flerovium and ​livermorium, named in the last couple years, are still called by their placeholder names, ununquadium and ununhexium on Gray's table. He says updating the page isn't very easy to do, and he can't really just hire someone to do it.

Gray says that, in a sense, he's moved on from elements. He's no longer actively trying to add to his world-class element collection, which includes more than 100 elements and sits in his office. Instead, he moved on to molecules, the things you make when you put the elements together. And, now that Molecules is out, he's working on a book called Reactions: "a logical trilogy," he says.

But even though Gray isn't totally focused on elements at the moment, he once was, which is why he owns periodictable.com. And, don't get me wrong, the site is a fantastic resource. It's got many, many photos of most of the elements, their atomic weights, some facts about each one, and much more information than you're going to get off a poster in chemistry class.

It's also got a picture of his periodic table table. And that's where the story of periodictable.com begins.

"I made a period table table, like, a wooden one. So I bought periodictabletable.com," Gray said. "But then I started doing more work with elements in general and I thought, 'wouldn't it be nice to have the definitive domain for this?'"

At the time, back in the mid 2000s, periodictable.com was owned by a guy named Roy Alexander, who registered it in 1997. Alexander was using the site to sell a three-dimensional periodic table, but not much else.

So Gray started prodding.

"I spent a long time courting him, but it's difficult get someone who has a domain that costs him next to nothing to sell it to you," Gray said. "It took a year of convincing him, a suitcase full of cash, and an agreement to continue selling his 3D periodic table design."

Alexander's periodic tables are still for sale on the site as part of the agreement. Gray wouldn't say exactly how much it cost him to buy the site, but said he's not letting it go anytime soon.

"The domain is too good to give up for anything other than millions of dollars," he said. "It's worth more to me than it is to someone else, and it's really interesting to see how many obvious-sounding domains are sitting with nothing terribly useful there."

Gray's version of the site is still useful, beautiful, and incredibly weird. But here's hoping this article spurs a reaction—one that causes him to update the site. Is there chemical shorthand for that?

This story is part of The Building Blocks of Everything, a series of science and technology stories on the theme of materials. Check out more here: http://motherboard.tv/building-blocks-of-everything