Whose periodic table is it anyway?
Dmitri Mendeleev’s table was not the first – but it’s the one that matters
This year we will be celebrating Dmitri Mendeleev’s discovery of the periodic table, 150 years ago. Or will we?
There’s a discussion to be had about whether it was discovery or invention, but that’s not what I mean. It might be more accurate to say we are celebrating the fact that Mendeleev first wrote down an early draft of the table in 1869. But that’s not quite right either, because the German chemist Julius Lothar Meyer wrote down a very similar periodic system of elements a year earlier, with all the familiar groupings: the halogens, alkali metals, chalcogens and so on. It’s just that he didn’t publish it, and it didn’t come to light until after his death in 1895.