History of the Periodic Table

Paper Summary:

This paper is an in-depth examination of the periodic table. The author begins with some background on atomic knowledge, and then looks at the ancient Greek scholars who influenced the early table. Early atomic theory, and the discovery of distinct weights are discussed in detail. The author pays specific attention to Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, whose scientific work in the late 1880s provided the breakthrough in the construction of this table and remains the basis for the model used today.

From the Paper:

"Mendeleev completed the table in 1869, when 63 known elements existed. As Mendeleev said, "if all the elements can be arranged in order of their atomic weights a periodic repetition of properties is obtained." (Leichester, 1965) Mendeleev arranged the elements according to weight, and then proceeded to group them into clusters of elements that possessed similar properties. These groupings, together with the consideration of variance from strict atomic weight order, left spaces in the table that Mendeleev predicted would encompass elements that had not yet been discovered. Mendeleev left these spaces open in order to accommodate future discoveries. He himself accurately predicted three of these missing elements- Scandium (ekaboron), galluim (ekaaluminum), and germanium (ekasilicon). By 1886, only seventeen years after the creation of the table, all of the elements previously predicted by Mendeleev had been isolated."

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