the days of mendeleev, and actually extending into the 1930s, the heaviest elements, thorium, protactinium, and uranium were put into the periodic table up in the body of the periodic table under hafnium and tantalum and tungsten, and it was my idea in 1944, while i was working on the... at the metallurgical laboratory in chicago on the manhattan atomic bomb project, that these might be misplaced and that they might be the first three members of the actinide series. and then i boldly and against the advice of some of my eminent inorganic chemist friends, plucked those out of the body of the periodic table and put them in the row below and then continued that with 93, 94, and so forth, up to 103. the idea to rearrange the table occurred to seaborg one friday afternoon. he was drafting a classified report for a seminar on monday. he decided to include this idea in his report. i presented this at that monday seminar, and it went over like a lead balloon. the idea that one would be brash enough to change the periodic table after all these years, in this fashion, when everybody felt that thoriu