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Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine Lavoisier was a French chemist who was born on August the 26th 1774 and died on 1794 on May the 8th.
He showed that oxygen played a major role in combustion.
He established the Law of Conservation of Mass which is one of the most important and basic laws of modern chemistry.
He named the element hydrogen.
He discovered that water was a compound made of hydrogen and oxygen.
He wrote the first ever chemistry textbook that contained a list of the known elements. -
Johann Dobereiner
Johann Döbereiner was a German chemist who was born in 1780 and died in 1849. He is best known for his work on the law of triads that he put forward in 1817. Each of his triads was a group of three elements. He found out that the relative atomic mass of the 2nd element in a triad was close to the average of the relative atomic masses of the other elements. This showed that relative atomic masses were important when ordering the elements.
One discovered triad included:
Sodium, Lithium, Potassium -
John Newands
John Newlands was an English chemist who lived from the 26th November 1837 to the 29th July 1898.
He created the first periodic table, which was arranged in order of atomic masses. He published his 'Law of Octaves' in 1865 , which says that 'any given element will show similar traits to the eighth element after it.'. In his table, the elements were ordered by their atomic weights. Periods were shown going down the table, with groups going across – the opposite of the new periodic table. -
Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Mendeleev was a Russian chemist who lived from the 8th February 1834 to the 2nd February 1907. He is most credited with the development and creation of the periodic table in 1869, a system that places the elements in order of atomic number in rows, so that elements with similar atomic structure and properties appeared in columns.. Using the table, he could predict the existence and properties of undiscovered elements. -
Julius Meyer
Julius Meyer was a German chemist and pioneer of the periodic table. He was born on August 19th 1830, and died on the 11th of April 1895. Meyer wrote a book illustrating the fundamental aspects of chemistry, called Die modernen Theorien der Chemie (or Modern Chemical Theory) in 1864. Meyer began working on a Periodic Table in 1868, and he released his research in 1870, one year after Mendeleev's Table was released. -
Glenn Seaborg
Glenn Seaborg was an American chemist who was born on born the 19th of April 1912, and died on the 25th of February 1999.He he co-discovered plutonium and all further transuranium elements through Nobelium. Through his works, it was possible to predict the radioactive characteristics of many isotopic elements yet to be found. His work on the table earnt him the honour of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951.