Mendeleev first challenged the world and then led us to confront how prepared were our minds to recognize an advance of sheer brilliance-a genuine seminal advance-which, quite simply, changed our world the day after its appearance in 1869.īesides the discovery of the periodic law of the chemical elements, Mendeleev also made other critical contributions to chemical problems of broad scope. It is not limited to such and such a group of elements, but embraces all of the elementary bodies of chemistry …thus dealing with the most varied and the most profound questions of science…in a word, regard the facts of chemistry from a lofty and comprehensive point of view. The latter are a function of the atomic weight, which function is periodic. The work of Mendeleev has lately thrown a new light upon the relations existing between the atomic weights of the elements and their properties. To highlight the cascading impact of Mendeleev's 1869 advance, we reproduce here simply a single commentary, taken from a standard scientific text of that time this is ‘Atomic Theory' by Ad Wurtz, published just over a decade after the first publication of this advance: Reznick in this volume highlights the parallels-and also a significant difference-between the discovery and subsequent development of the periodic table and Darwin's discovery of evolution and the subsequent development of evolutionary biology. Aside from providing a natural order to the chemical elements known at that time, Mendeleev's underpinning periodic law allowed for the prediction of the existence and remarkably the atomic order of chemical elements not then known, but discovered soon after.Įven today, nothing quite like the periodic table exists in any other disciplines of science. This single representation, over one and a half centuries after its first appearance, still consolidates and represents so much of our modern knowledge of the world around us. Mendeleev's 1870 original version of the periodic system. Not only did Mendeleev show that a remarkable, natural periodicity existed in the chemical properties of the elements then known, but he also had the courage and the vision to state that this method of classification constituted a fundamental law of nature and identified gaps in the classification as then-undiscovered elements ( figure 2).įigure 2. With this epoch-making advance, the resulting periodic law of the chemical elements was born. Thus, in 1869, Mendeleev's advance, unlike many attempts of his many predecessors, used two sets of data for a complete classification of the chemical elements, namely, elements' atomic weights and their inherent similarities in chemical properties. Chemistry is not merely an immense collection of facts, but more an exact science that teaches us to classify and arrange these facts, and that classification must begin with the chemical elements themselves.
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