Long before Dmitri Mendeleev became immortalized for his periodic table, the Russian chemist was busy pondering a less glamorous scientific challenge: the looming “manure crisis.” In the late 19th century, as cities ballooned and horse-drawn transportation flooded streets with waste, Mendeleev reportedly warned that managing animal excrement would become the defining technical problem of the 20th century. While history took a different turn, his concern highlighted a very real, very smelly predicament of his era—one that urban planners once likened to “building cities atop a ticking dung bomb.”
In Mendeleev’s time, horses were the engines of industry and transport. A single horse produces up to 35 pounds of manure daily, and cities like London and New York hosted hundreds of thousands of them. Streets became clogged with waste, emitting foul odors and spreading disease. Mendeleev, ever the pragmatist, saw this as a sustainability nightmare. He advocated for recycling manure into fertilizer to avert ecological disaster, envisioning a circular economy where waste fueled agriculture. His ideas were visionary but, as it turned out, unnecessary—thanks to the automobile’s rise. Henry Ford’s Model T, not compost science, ultimately “solved” the manure crisis by replacing horses with cars.
Mendeleev’s focus on manure wasn’t as outlandish as it seems today. Pre-1900, engineers genuinely feared cities would drown in waste. The Times of London infamously predicted in 1894 that by the 1950s, horse manure would pile up to third-story windows. Mendeleev’s proposals, including chemical processing of manure into ammonia, echoed his broader interest in resource efficiency. He even dabbled in agricultural chemistry, calculating optimal fertilizer ratios to boost crop yields—a practice that later shaped industrial farming.
The humor here is steeped in irony. Mendeleev, the man who mapped the elements, fretted over dung while unknowingly paving the way for synthetic fertilizers (derived from his beloved periodic table). His “manure crisis” became obsolete, but his legacy lived on in unexpected ways: the Haber-Bosch process, which synthesizes ammonia from nitrogen, owes a nod to his advocacy for chemical innovation. Meanwhile, the 20th century’s real crises—plastic waste, nuclear fallout, and fossil fuels—would’ve baffled him.
Today, Mendeleev’s manure musings serve as a reminder that even geniuses can’t predict the future. The 20th century swapped one environmental headache for another, trading manure piles for smog and microplastics. Yet his push for sustainability feels eerily modern, as composting and circular economies regain traction. Perhaps if he’d lived to see electric cars, he’d have quipped, “Where’s the manure?”—before side-eyeing our lithium mines.
So, while history remembers Mendeleev for his table, let’s also toast his failed prophecy. After all, few scientists would dare stake their reputation on dung. Then again, few had his knack for turning the mundane into the monumental—even if the monument in question is a compost heap.
