Contributions of Scientists on the Periodic Table

Ancient times
Greek philosopher Aristotle proposed that everything is made up of a mixture of one or more roots,
an idea that had originally been suggested by the Sicilian philosopher Empedocles. The four roots,
which were later renamed as elements by Plato, were earth, water, air and fire. While Aristotle and
Plato introduced the concept of an element, their ideas did nothing to advance the understanding of
the nature of matter.

Age of Enlightenment

Hennig Brand
In 1649, his experiments with distilled human urine resulted in the production of a glowing white
substance, which he named phosphorus.

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier
His book Trait lmentaire de Chimi, contained a list of "simple substances" that Lavoisier
believed could not be broken down further, which
included oxygen, nitrogen,hydrogen, phosphorus, mercury, zinc and sulfur, which formed the basis
for the modern list of elements.

19th century

Johann Wolfgang Dbereiner

classified by Dbereiner are:
1. chlorine, bromine, and iodine
2. calcium, strontium, and barium
3. sulfur, selenium, and tellurium
4. lithium, sodium, and potassium

Alexandre-Emile Bguyer de Chancourtois

In 1862 he devised an early form of periodic table, which he named Vis tellurique (the 'telluric helix'),
after the element tellurium, which fell near the center of his diagram.

John Newlands
In 1864, the English chemist John Newlands classified the sixty-two known elements into eight
groups, based on their physical properties.

Dmitri Mendeleev
The Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev was the first scientist to make a periodic table similar to the
one used today. Mendeleev arranged the elements by atomic mass, corresponding to relative molar
mass.

Lothar Meyer
his work was published in 1864, and was done independently of Mendeleev, few historians regard
him as an equal co-creator of the periodic table. Meyer's table only included twenty-eight elements,
which were not classified by atomic weight, but by valence, and he never reached the idea of
predicting new elements and correcting atomic weights.

William Odling
drew up a table that was remarkably similar to the table produced by Mendeleev. Odling overcame
the tellurium-iodine problem and even managed to get thallium, lead, mercury and platinum into the
right groups, which is something that Mendeleev failed to do at his first attempt.

20th century

Henry Moseley
In 1914, a year before he was killed in action at Gallipoli, the English physicist Henry Moseley found
a relationship between the X-ray wavelength of an element and its atomic number. He was then able
to re-sequence the periodic table by nuclear charge, rather than by atomic weight.

Glenn T. Seaborg
Seaborg's actinide concept of heavy element electronic structure, predicting that the actinides form
a transition series analogous to the rare earth series of lanthanide elements, is now well accepted
and included in the periodic table.