Since he first saw an article featuring an adaptation of the 1925 Courtine model in the November 6, 1946 issue of Popular Science magazine, Fernando Dufour, chemistry professor at the Collège Ahuntsic, Montréal, Québec, Canada (now emeritus), better known to his friends and aficionados as "Nando," has been fascinated and obsessed by the idea of developing a 3-D color model table of his own.

He has described the genesis of his lifelong passionate preoccupation: "When I discovered the periodic table, I was awed to the ultimate heaven in thinking that this was knowledge so infinite it would unravel all the mysteries of nature - the blueprint of the universe itself. It was Archimedes' grain of sand - "To understand a grain of sand is to understand the universe." Since then, for more than half a century, this septuagenarian, who humorously refers to himself as "an 80-year-old kid," has spent all his time developing version after version of a three-dimensional periodic table (first using cardboard and Styrofoam, and now plastic) designed for teachers, students, or for classroom use via an overhead projector, which makes one model sufficient for an entire class of students. In 1979 he received his M.Sc. degree from the Université Concordia in Montréal with the thesis topic, "An attempt to unravel atomic structure with a three dimensional model of the periodic table." In his opinion, "A third dimension [for the periodic table] is not an option but a necessity."