Who Devised The Periodic Table?

The periodic table evolved over time during the 19th century. An English chemist called John Newlands had the idea of putting elements into a systematic table and he realised that some chemical properties repeated every eighth element. His first table was called a Table of Octaves.

Ideas then progressed and various scientists made their contribution. However, the scientist that we most associate with the periodic table in its current form is Dmitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist who first had the idea of putting the elements in order of their atomic number.

He published his first periodic table in 1869, just ahead of one of his close rivals, Lothar Meyer. This table is more or less the structure of the one we use today, but he had left spaces for elements he thought should be there. He anticipated their discovery and predicted the existence of the Group VIII elements, the Noble gases.