DMITRY MENDELEEV PUBLISHED HIS PERIODIC TABLE 150 YEARS AGO
Russian chemistry professor Dmitri Mendeleev published his periodic table in 1869. Mendeleev’s table, dated March 1 1869, was his first published version. He constructed his tables by listing the elements in rows or columns in order of atomic weight and starting a new row or column when the characteristics of the elements began to repeat.
The recognition and acceptance afforded to Mendeleev’s table came from two decisions he made. The first was to leave gaps in the table when it seemed that the corresponding element had not yet been discovered. Mendeleev was not the first chemist to do so, but he was the first to be recognized as using the trends in his periodic table to predict the properties of those missing elements, such as gallium and germanium. The second decision was to occasionally ignore the order suggested by the atomic weights and switch adjacent elements, such as tellurium and iodine, to better classify them into chemical families.
Mendeleev published in 1869, using atomic weight to organize the elements, information determinable to fair precision in his time. Atomic weight worked well enough to allow Mendeleev to accurately predict the properties of missing elements.
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