Bill Gates reveals inspiring reason he has a wall-mounted periodic table with real samples of each chemical

Bill Gates is known as the mind behind one of the world's top tech firms that changed the world and also designed his spectacular home in Medina. In addition to the mansion, Bill Gates has an entire wall designed as a full-size, 3D periodic table at his office in Seattle, in addition to handsome floor-to-ceiling bookshelves carved into the walls. Gates’ love for chemistry inspired him to create this state-of-the-art lattice of colorful glass-mounted cubes, that represent elements.

When @MAstronomers shared a photo of the intricate wall in a tweet, Bill Gates himself reposted the tweet with his response, “The periodic table reminds me of how one discovery can lead to countless others.” “When you walk into my office, one of the first things you see is a huge version of the periodic table. It includes examples or representations of all 118 elements,” Gates further wrote in Gates Notes. When students from Radboud University visited Gates’ office for a tour, they noticed that the periodic table featured eye-catching displays of elements, each encased inside a glass cube in the lattice. Each cube was labeled with a two-letter symbol that described the element name, like Au for gold and Pt for platinum.

The scintillating display also depicts how the elements on the table look in real life through objects including a platinum razor blade, a tiny radium-painted alarm clock that glows in the dark, shimmering flakes of gold, and a bottle of Pepto Bismol to show bismuth. Each case also features the element’s atomic number. For uranium, a dish is kept behind lead glass to prevent the impact of radiation. Whereas, potassium and sodium are dipped in oil in hermetically sealed capsules to prevent them from igniting.

When Will Smith visited Microsoft Office for a press tour of his movie “Gemini Man” in 2019, he too posted a video expressing his fascination for the wall-mounted periodic table on Instagram. "His office is ridiculous," Smith said in the video. When Gates told him that the table also had samples of each element, Smith’s expression was that of disbelief. "That's fantastic," he said, and added, "I might be stealing that. In old-school hip-hop, they call it bitin'." After seeing the periodic table, Smith declared that he was going to enter the computer biz.

In Gates Notes, the billionaire explained that the periodic table was first proposed by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev. He emphasized how important this chart has been for science. “All the complexity of the universe comes from the properties on that chart. Because we understand atoms, we can make chips, and therefore we can make software, and therefore we can make AI. Everything goes back to the periodic table.”

“The history of chemistry tells us as much about the evolution of human thinking as it does about the science of matter,” Gates wrote, adding that anyone desiring to learn more about the periodic table should read “Mendeleyev’s Dream,” which, he says, is the best book he has ever read on the periodic table.