CHEMISTS

The history of the Periodic Table reflects over two centuries of growth in the understanding of the chemical and physical properties of the elements, with major contributions made by hundreds to thousands of scientists.

The organization of the Periodic Table can be used to derive relationships between the various element properties, and also to predict chemical properties and behaviors of undiscovered or newly synthesized elements.

Ask most chemists who discovered the periodic table and you will almost certainly get the answer Dmitri Mendeleev. Certainly Mendeleev was the first to publish a version of the table that we would recognize today, but does he deserve all the credit?

A number of other chemists before Mendeleev were investigating patterns in the properties of the elements that were known at the time. The earliest attempt to classify the elements was in 1789, when Antoine Lavoisier grouped the elements based on their properties into gases, non-metals, metals and earths. Several other attempts were made to group elements together over the coming decades. In 1829, Johann Döbereiner recognized triads of elements with chemically similar properties, such as lithium, sodium and potassium, and showed that the properties of the middle element could be predicted from the properties of the other two.

It was not until a more accurate list of the atomic mass of the elements became available at a conference in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1860 that real progress was made towards the discovery of the modern periodic table.

This area of the website celebrates the work of many famous scientists whose quest to learn more about the world we live in and the atoms that make up the things around us led to the periodic table as we know it today.