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What is the history of the periodic table of elements?

Updated: 8/16/2019
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hi! i will give u the answer later in my science book!

Or...Here's something I put together for a chemistry homework I did the other day:

A History of the Periodic Table

The History of the Periodic Table has been one of constant evolution and development. Arguably beginning with Antoine Lavoisier, who wrote the first extensive list of some 33 elements in 1789, the Periodic Table's history then stretches all the way to the 1940s with Glenn Seaborg's contributions. It has even been estimated that there are still a few more elements to be discovered and added to the table.

The actual idea of elements which the world consists of was thought of by Aristotle around 330 BC. He came up with the theory that there were four elements or "roots" as they were known: Earth, Air, Water and Fire. While the idea of there being a limited number of chemical elements from which everything in the world is composed of is a more modern idea, people from as far back as ancient times have been aware of certain, easier to mine, chemical elements such as gold, silver and copper.

The first chemical element to be discovered and recorded was phosphorus, the finding of which was entirely coincidental. It was in pursuit of the "philosopher's stone" - a mythical object - that the bankrupt German merchant stumbled across a glowing substance when distilling urine in 1649. He kept his discovery secret until it was rediscovered in 1680 and made public by Robert Boyle. Boyle decided that an element was a subject that cannot be broken down into a simpler form by a chemical reaction. This tangible definition remained official for almost 300 years.

Lavoisier's list in 1789 was the next major landmark in the Table's development. Although the list classified elements into two categories (metals and non-metals), it included light which he believed to be a material substance.

The Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius then created a table of atomic weights, introducing letters to symbolise elements, as well as identifying a few of his own, including silicon and cerium. Much of his work was done in around 1828.

Also around this time, Johann Döbereiner, began to classify the known elements further, realising that some of them could be placed in groups of 3 which had related properties. He called these groups "triads", an example being lithium, sodium and potassium.

Later, in 1865, the Englishman John Newlands put the 56 elements discovered at the time into 11 groups, again based on similar physical properties. He suggested the "law of octaves", and was a forerunner to the notion of periods.

Shortly after, a Siberian-born chemist by the name of Dmitri Mendeleev, made another considerable change to the Periodic Table. He produced a table based on atomic weights, although arranged them "periodically", placing elements with similar properties underneath each other. He allowed space for elements that were unknown at the time and their predicted properties. He re-arrange the order of elements if their properties required it, eg, tellurium is heavier than iodine but comes before it in the Periodic Table.

William Ramsay discovered the noble gases towards the end of the 19th century. He removed oxygen, nitrogen, water and carbon dioxide from a sample of air, which left him with a gas 19 times heavier than hydrogen, very unreactive and with an unknown emission spectrum. He named it Argon. Going on to discover helium, krypton, xenon and neon he revealed a new group of elements in the Periodic Table and won a Nobel Prize in 1904.

In 1914, Henry Moseley altered the 'Periodic Law' so that the properties of the elements varied periodically with their atomic numbers.

The last major contribution to the periodic table was Glenn Seaborg's synthesising of the transuranic elements (the elements after uranium in the periodic table) in 1940.

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