-
Period: to
How The Periodic Table Was Made
-
Antoine Lavoisier 1743-1794
Antoine Lavoisier was a French chemist who determined that oxygen as the key substance to the processes of combustion and respiration. He gave oxygen its name. Lavoisier developed the modern system for naming chemical substances, in which most are still used and heard of today. The terms he has developed for the elements express the meaning behind them. He did attempt to group the elements a few times where once he grouped them according to their gas, non-metals, metals, and earth properties. -
John Newlands 1837-1898
John Newlands was an English chemist whose 'Law of Octaves' identified a pattern behind the atomic structure of elements which had similar chemical properties. He was the first to recognize and identify the pattern by arranging the known elements into a table in order of the increasing atomic mass. The 'Law of Octaves' derived from how every eight elements had similar chemical properties and he arranged all the elements into eight groups, leaving no gaps for possibly new discovered elements. -
Dmitri Mendeleev 1834-1907
Dmitri Mendeleev was a Russian chemist, teacher and inventor who organised elements in rows based on their atomic weights and in columns based on their chemical and physical properties. This became the periodic classification we know of today. He predicted the existence of some elements through estimating their properties and left spaces for them, eg: gallium. Mendeleev's periodic table suggested that some elements must have been measured incorrectly since they didn't fit into his predictions. -
Henry Moseley 1887-1915
Henry Moseley was an English physicist who used x-rays to correlate the wavelengths of elements to their atomic numbers. This allowed a clearer understanding and more accurate organisation of the periodic table. From the data of a graph he plotted, the data made sense if the positive charge in a nucleus increased by one unit between every element. This meant that the basic difference between every element is the number of protons they have.