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My reasons for making the physical Periodic Table Table were purely practical: We needed a new conference table for my office area, and I didn't want an ugly one from the office supply catalog. But my reasons for making and then greatly elaborating the website were more subtle, so subtle in fact that I didn't know what they were until the website was very far along.

For well over a hundred years the world has failed to take proper notice of the word "Table" clearly contained in the name of the famous Periodic Table of the Elements.
One evening while reading Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks, I became momentarily confused. He begins a chapter with a description of a periodic table display he loved to visit in the Kensington Science Museum, and in mis-reading the paragraph, I thought it was a table, not the wall display it actually is. While my confusion only lasted a few seconds, when I found out there wasn't a Periodic Table in the British Museum, it left a hole I felt I had to fill.

As part of the reorganization of the office space for the Mathematica user interface team at Wolfram Research, Inc. , we needed some conference tables.  Office supply catalogs are really quite depressing, and the fancy stuff is so insultingly overpriced I'd never consider it. There was just no choice: I had to make some tables for us.