• Question: who made the periodic table

    Asked by anon-238827 to James, Hannah, Claire, Chris, binuraj, Alice on 18 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Hannah Blyth

      Hannah Blyth answered on 18 Mar 2020:

      Dmitri Mendeleev usually gets credit for inventing the modern periodic table in 1869 (and he was certainly important), another scientist Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois organised the elements by atomic weight five years earlier but was ignored because he was working in terms of geology!

      However, both arranged elements by atomic weight and the modern periodic tables are actually ordered by increasing atomic number! Which actually doesn’t change the order of the elements too much…

    • Photo: Binuraj Menon

      Binuraj Menon answered on 18 Mar 2020: last edited 18 Mar 2020 7:12 pm

      Hi name389gas,

      Hannah has given the correct answer. One additional thing I would like to add into that is about the contribution of Mendeleev. He was such a great scientist, he believed so much in his periodic table to such a degree that he actually changed (or predicted the actual) atomic mass of known elements so that they fit where they are currently belonged in his table. When he noted the gaps in the table, he also predicted that then-unknown elements existed with properties appropriate to fill those gaps. Both of those predictions were found scientifically true after his life time.

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