Döbereiner, Johann Wolfgang (Germany, 1780-1849)

Döbereiner's triads
Groups of three elements
A German scientist called Johann Döbereiner put forward his law of triads in 1817. Each of Döbereiner's triads
was a group of three elements. The appearance and reactions of the elements in a triad were similar to each
other.
Atomic masses
At this time, scientists had begun to find out the relative atomic masses of the elements. Döbereiner discovered
that the relative atomic mass of the middle element in each triad was close to the average of the relative atomic
masses of the other two elements. This gave other scientists a clue that relative atomic masses were important
when arranging the elements.
 John Alexander Reina Newlands (November 26, 1837 - July 29, 1898, London)

Newlands studied at the Royal College of Chemistry and worked as an analytical chemist. Continuing
the work of Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner with triads and the work of Jean-Baptiste Dumas families of similar
elements, he published in 1865 his 'Law of Octaves', an innovative concept proposing the periodicity of the
chemical elements arranged in order of atomic weight. He pointed out that every eighth element in this grouping
shared a resemblance and suggested an analogy with the intervals of the musical scale. John Newlands put
forward his law of octaves in 1864 in which he arranged all the elements known at the time into a table in order
of relative atomic mass. When he did this, he found that each element was similar to the element eight places
further on. For example, starting at Li, Be is the second element, B is the third and Na is the eighth element.
 Julius Lothar Meyer (19 August 1830 – 11 April 1895)

Meyer is best known for his part in the periodic classification of the elements. He noted, as J. A. R.
Newlands did in England, if each element is arranged in the order of their atomic weights, they fall into groups
of similar chemical and physical properties repeated at periodic intervals. According to him, if the atomic
weights were plotted as ordinates and the atomic volumes as abscissae the curve obtained a series of maxima
and minima the most electro-positive elements appearing at the peaks of the curve in the order of their atomic
weights.
His first table contained just 28 elements, organised by their valency (how many other atoms they can
combine with). These elements were almost entirely main group elements, but in 1868 he incorporated the
transition metals in a much more developed table
 Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev- February 1834 – 2 February 1907

Mendeleev discovered the periodic table (or Periodic System, as he called it) while attempting
to organise the elements in February of 1869. He did so by writing the properties of the elements on pieces of
card and arranging and rearranging them until he realised that, by putting them in order of increasing atomic
weight, certain types of element regularly occurred. For example, a reactive non-metal was directly followed by
a very reactive light metal and then a less reactive light metal. Initially, the table had similar elements in
horizontal rows, but he soon changed them to fit in vertical columns, as we see today.
Not only did Mendeleev arrange the elements in the correct way, but if an element appeared to be in the wrong
place due to its atomic weight, he moved it to where it fitted with the pattern he had discovered. For example,
iodine and tellurium should be the other way around, based on atomic weights, but Mendeleev saw that iodine
was very similar to the rest of the halogens (fluorine, chlorine, bromine), and tellurium similar to the group 6
elements (oxygen, sulphur, selenium), so he swapped them over.
The real genius of Mendeleev’s achievement was to leave gaps for undiscovered elements. He even predicted
the properties of five of these elements and their compounds. And over the next 15 years, three of these
elements were discovered and Mendeleev’s predictions shown to be incredibly accurate. The table below shows
the example of Gallium, which Mendeleev called eka-aluminium, because it was the element after aluminium.
Scandium and Germanium were the other two elements discovered by 1886, and helped to cement the
reputation of Mendeleev’s periodic table.
The final triumph of Mendeleev’s work was slightly unexpected. The discovery of the noble gases during the
1890s by William Ramsay initially seemed to contradict Mendeleev’s work, until he realised that actually they
were further proof of his system, fitting in as the final group on his table. This gave the table the periodicity of 8
which we know, rather than 7 as it had previously been. Mendeleev never received a Nobel Prize for his work,
but element 101 was named Mendelevium after him, an even rarer distinction.

Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley (/ˈmoʊzli/; 23 November 1887 – 10 August 1915)

Mendeleev's table was nine tenths of the way there, but needed one important modification before it became
the modern periodic table - the use of atomic number as the organizing principle for the periods. According to
Moseley, similar properties recur periodically when elements are arranged according to increasing atomic number.
Atomic numbers, not weights, determine the factor of chemical properties.
 Mendeleev ordered his elements in order of their relative atomic mass, and this gave him some problems.
For example, iodine has a lower relative atomic mass than tellurium, so it should come before tellurium in
Mendeleev's table - but in order to get iodine in the same group as other elements with similar properties such as
fluorine, chlorine and bromine, he had to put it after tellurium, so breaking his own rules. In his invention of the
Periodic Table of the Elements, Mendeleev had interchanged the orders of a few pairs of elements in order to put
them in more appropriate places in this table of the elements. For example, the metals cobalt and nickel had been
assigned the atomic numbers 27 and 28, respectively, based on their known chemical and physical properties, even
though they have nearly the same atomic masses. In fact, the atomic mass of cobalt is slightly larger than that of
nickel, which would have placed them in backwards order if they had been placed in the Periodic Table blindly
according to atomic mass.

Moseley's experiments in X-ray spectroscopy showed directly from their physics that cobalt and nickel have
the different atomic numbers, 27 and 28, and that they are placed in the Periodic Table correctly by Moseley's
objective measurements of their atomic numbers. Using atomic number instead of atomic mass as the organizing
principle was first proposed by the British chemist Henry Moseley in 1913, and it solved anomalies like this one.
Iodine has a higher atomic number than tellurium - so, even though he didn't know why, Mendeleev was right to
place it after tellurium after all!