![]() This area of the website celebrates the work of many famous scientists whose quest to learn more about the world we live in and the atoms that make up the things around us led to the periodic table as we know it today.Ĭan France claim the first periodic table? Probably not, but a French Geology Professor made a significant advance towards it, even though at the time few people were aware of it.Īlexandre Béguyer de Chancourtois was a geologist, but this was at a time when scientists specialised much less than they do today. It was not until a more accurate list of the atomic mass of the elements became available at a conference in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1860 that real progress was made towards the discovery of the modern periodic table. In 1829, Johann Döbereiner recognised triads of elements with chemically similar properties, such as lithium, sodium and potassium, and showed that the properties of the middle element could be predicted from the properties of the other two. Several other attempts were made to group elements together over the coming decades. ![]() The earliest attempt to classify the elements was in 1789, when Antoine Lavoisier grouped the elements based on their properties into gases, non-metals, metals and earths. Certainly Mendeleev was the first to publish a version of the table that we would recognise today, but does he deserve all the credit?Ī number of other chemists before Mendeleev were investigating patterns in the properties of the elements that were known at the time. Meyer's graph, or the Lothar Meyer arrangement, can be seen behind the scientist in today's Google Doodle.Ask most chemists who discovered the periodic table and you will almost certainly get the answer Dmitri Mendeleev. "Nevertheless, a perusal of the controversy between Mendeleev and Meyer shows, I think, that Meyer arrived at the fundamental conception of the periodic law independently of Mendeleev." Pattison Muir that discussed the controversy between Meyer's and Mendeleev's independent discoveries: "The clear enunciation, and the application in detail, of the most far-reaching generalization that has been made in chemistry since the work of Dalton, must, undoubtedly, be credited to that great chemist Mendeleev In 1895, a few months after Meyer died, the Scientific American published an article by the chemist M. Masks Could Be Turned Into Biofuel as Billions Could End up in Ocean.BPA, Chemical Used to Make Plastic Bottles, Linked to Increased Death Risk.Bricks That Store Energy Created by Scientists That Could Power Electronics.However, they were not aware of each other's independent studies into the elements and the eventual development of the periodic table. Meyer and Mendeleev both studied at Heidelberg University under Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff, so they would likely have known each other. ![]() However, at the same time, Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev was independently developing similar ideas of his own. In 1864, Meyer published the textbook Die modernen Theorien der Chemie ( Modern Chemical Theory), which included a system for organizing 28 elements based on atomic weight a precursor to the modern periodic table. Meyer initially studied medicine but then focused on physiological chemistry, earning his doctorate in 1858 and becoming a science teacher a year later. Meyer was born into a medical family in Varel, modern-day Germany, on August 19, 1830. The German chemist, professor and author was one of two scientists to independently discover the periodic law of chemical elements and pioneer the earliest periodic tables. Julius Lothar Meyer is celebrated in today's Google Doodle, on what would have been the scientist's 190th birthday. ![]()
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