Things are very different from each other, and can be broken down into small groups inside itself, which was then noticed early by people, and Greek thinkers, about 400BC. Which just happened to use words like “element’, and ‘atom’ to describe the many different parts and even the smallest parts of matter. These ideas were around for over 2000 years while ideas such as ‘Elements’ of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water to explain ‘world stuff’ came and went.
Much later, Boyle, an experimenter like Galileo and Bacon, was influenced much by Democritus, Gassendi, and Descartes, which lent much important weight to the atomic theory of matter in the 1600s. Although it was Lavoisier who had divided the very few elements known in the 1700’s into four different classes, and then John Dalton made atoms even more believable, telling everyone that the mass of an atom was it’s most important property. Then in the early 1800’s Dobereiner noted that the similar elements often had relative atomic masses, and DeChancourtois made a cylindrical table of elements to display the periodic reoccurrence of properties.
Cannizaro then determined atomic weights for the 60 or so elements known in the 1860s, and then a table was arranged by Newlands, with the many elements given a serial number in order of their atomic weights, of course beginning with Hydrogen. That made it clear that “the eighth element, starting from a given one, is a kind of a repeat of the first”, which Newlands called the Law of Octaves. Then both Meyer and Mendeleyev built periodic tables alone, Meyer more impressed by the periodicity of physical properties, while Mendeleyev was more interested in the chemical properties.
Then Mendeleyev had published his periodic table and his law in 1869 and forecasted the properties of the missing elements, and chemists then began to be grateful for it when the discovery of elements was predicted by the table that had taken place. Although, periodic tables have always been related to the way scientists thought about the shape and structure of the atom, and has changed over the years exactly for that reason. The modern periodic table is very much like a later table by Meyer, but arranged, by Mendeleev’s, but it had to be according to the size of the atomic weight.
The only thing though that was made by Mendeleev’s was Group 0, which was then added by Ramsay. Later, the table was redone by Mosely, and he made it according to the atomic numbers, the nuclear charge, rather than by their weight. On the other hand the periodic law discovered important likeness among the 94 naturally occurring elements, and moved and reopened interest in Inorganic Chemistry in the nineteenth century which has been carried into the present day, with the creation of the artificially produced, short lived elements of atom smashes and supercollider’s of high energy physics.
Later in life Harry D. Hubbard, of the United States National Bureau of Standards, updated Mendeleev’s periodic table, and his first work was published in 1924. This was known as the “Periodic Chart of the Atoms”. Into the 1930s the heaviest elements were being put up in the body of the periodic table, and Glenn Seaborg took those out while working with Fermi in Chicago, naming them the Actinide series, which later allowed the proper placement of later created elements like the Transactinides, which had to change the periodic table yet again. Although those elements were shown separate from the main body of the table.
When he had examined the Alexander Arrangement, he said that it was correct, and later told a photographer that it was his favorite periodic table. Later it need much improvement, so therefore it was provided by the Alexander Arrangement of the Elements, which is location of all the element data blocks in a permanent series according to the atomic numbers while keeping all the accepted property interrelationships. This eased the use and understanding of the enormous power of the periodic chart in teaching, learning, and working with chemistry.
