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the first element
Hennig Brand was the first recorded person to have discovered a new element. Brand was trying to discover the Philosopher's Stone — a mythical stone that was theorized to turn economical base metals into gold. He experimented with distilling human urine until in 1649 he finally obtained a glowing white substance which he named phosphorus. -
telluric screw
french geologist Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois listed the elements on paper tape and wound them, spiral like, around a cylinder. elements with similar came together down the cylinder. He called his model the ‘telluric screw’. -
element weight
chemist John Newlands discovered that, if the elements were arranged in order of their atomic weight, there was a periodic similarity every 8 elements. -
Dmitri Mendeleev
chemist Dmitri Mendeleev created a periodic table based on atomic weights but arranged ‘periodically’. he publised his periodic table with blank spaces for undiscovered elements. -
56 elements
Lothar Meyer collated a periodic table of 56 elements based on a regular repeating pattern of physical properties. -
noble gases
'William Ramsay discovered the noble gases and realised that they represented a new group in the periodic table.' -
Atomic number
Henry Moseley determined the atomic number of each of the known elements. he noticed that if the elements were ordered in the order of increasing atomic number rather than atomic weight, they gave a better fit within the ‘periodic table’ -
actinides
Glenn Seaborg synthetically produced heavy mass elements such as neptunium.These new elements were part of a new block of the periodic table called ‘actinides’.
