History of the Periodic Table

You are now ready to begin your Periodic ADventure. First, you must begin by reviewing some historical information regarding a man named Dmitri Mendeleev, who created the first Periodic Table of the Elements. Once you have finished reading the information on this page regarding Mendeleev's life and work, follow the link at the bottom of the page. This link will take you to a creative writing assignment regarding Mendeleev's life and career.

Dmitri Mendeleev Dmitri Mendeleev, a Russian scientist born in Tobolsk, Siberia in 1834, is known as the father of the periodic table of the elements. The periodic table of the elements is an important tool used by students and chemists around the world to help them understand and simplify the often complex world of chemical reactions. Not only did Mendeleev arrange the periodic table of the elements, he also wrote and published a 2 volume chemistry book entitled Principles of Chemistry as there was no thorough chemistry textbook at the time. Mendeleev dedicated his life to research and education. Mendeleev made it his special responsibility to educate people wherever he went. When he traveled, Mendeleev would ride in the third class section of the train just to share findings with peasants over a cup of tea. Mendeleev died on January 20, 1907 at the age of 73.

The Big Task Mendeleev set out to identify a pattern in the elements. Mendeleev looked at many pieces of evidence and made an important observation that some elements have similar chemical and physical properties. Mendeleev's hunch was that these similarities were the key to unlocking the hidden pattern of the elements. Mendeleev then embarked on the tedious task of organizing all known information for every element to help him decipher the pattern.

To begin his task, Mendeleev wrote facts about the elements on individual paper cards. On these cards, Mendeleev wrote information such as the elements' melting points, densities, colors, atomic masses (the average mass of one atom of that element), and bonding powers (the number of chemical bonds an element can form). Once Mendeleev's cards were made, he tried arranging them in various ways. Finally, Mendeleev noticed that patterns appeared when the elements were arranged in order of increasing atomic mass. One of the trends that he noticed showed that the bonding power of the elements from lithium to fluorine change in an orderly way. For example, after fluorine, the next heaviest element Mendeleev knew was sodium, which has the same bonding power as lithium. Using this knowledge, Mendeleev placed the card for sodium below the card for lithium. This worked well -- as he laid out cards, each element had properties similar to the elements above and below it. Mendeleev's table was not perfect, however. Arranging the elements by increasing atomic mass left three blank spaces in the table. Despite this development, however, Mendeleev boldly proposed that these blank spaces would be filled by elements that had not yet been discovered. Mendeleev was even able to use the patterns in his table to predict the properties of these undiscovered elements. This first periodic table of the elements was published in 1869. Click here to see Mendeleev's first periodic table of the elements. The word "periodic" means that there is a repeating pattern -- that is, the properties of the elements repeat with each row -- or period -- of the table. Amazingly, within 16 years of Mendeleev's first periodic table, chemists had discovered all three of the missing elements (scandium, gallium, and germanium), and their properties were very close to what Mendeleev had predicted.

Last updated on 4/18/00

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Grade 8 Science Teacher at 
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