Search engine giant Google on Monday celebrated the 182 nd birth anniversary of Dmitri Mendeleev, the man who is credited with the formulation of the periodic table.
Mendeleev not only placed the elements in their correct positions in the table, accounting for existing errors in valency and atomic weights, but also predicted correctly, leaving spaces for elements that were then undiscovered. He didn’t stop just there, but went on to predict the properties of five of these elements and their compounds.
"Mendeleev used the logic of his table to argue for the existence of yet-to-be discovered elements (like gallium and germanium), and even to predict their behaviors. Some of these predictions were wrong, but the basic principles behind his periodic organization continue to stand at the foundation of modern chemistry," Google said.
Others like John Newlands, Alexandre Beguyer de Chancourtois and Julius Lothar Meyer also made significant contributions towards the first periodic table, but the main credit is often given to Mendeleev.
The greatest unifier of chemistry
It was he who proposed the sense of order and logic that underlies the behaviour of chemical elements. Based largely on what was known at that time as their properties, he organised the then known forty or so elements into seven groups. Thus was born the periodic table of chemical elements. > More...
