The Chemical Table: An Open Dialog between Visualization and Design

January 22, 2019 10:48 AM

A classroom chart bearing an early version of the periodic table of elements has been discovered in a University of St. Andrews chemistry lab. Printed in 1885, the chart is thought to be the the world’s oldest classroom periodic table, before the discovery of germanium in 1886. This is not the oldest table of elements, but one of the oldest in a form most commonly recognizable.

Key milestones in charting elements:

• Étienne François Geoffroy was best known for his 1718 affinity tables (tables des rapports), which he designed as a tool in order to show a chemist how to go about selecting specific chemical procedures. He also recognized that there were more elements to be added, as identified by the blanks on the table
• Torbern Bergman expanded upon Geoffroy's table, but turned in into an ungainly, multi-page document, Dissertation on Elective Attractions (1817 edition on Archive.org; first published in 1783)
• Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (also Antoine Lavoisier, after the French Revolution) was central to the 18th-century chemical revolution, who recognized and named oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783), and in 1789, published a list of 33 chemical elements, grouping them into gases, metals, nonmetals, and earths, in Traité élémentaire de chimie (Elementary Treatise on Chemistry; Archive.org), which could be considered the first modern chemistry textbook.
• Circa 1817, Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner observed that strontium had properties that were intermediate to those of calcium and barium, and he identified four more "Triads". Attempts to discover other atomic weight averages or “triads” were later made by Leopold Gmelin (1827, 1843), Jean-Baptiste Dumas (1851), Michael Faraday (1852), Ernst Lenssen (1857), William Odling (1857), and Paul Kremers (1858), but the approach remained highly speculative and had no impact on either the textbook or research literature (citation, PDF)
• Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois was the first person to make use of atomic weights to produce a classification of periodicity. He drew the elements as a continuous spiral around a metal cylinder divided into 16 parts, published in 1862 as the Telluric Helix or Screw
• Julius Lothar Meyer, called by some the inventor of the Periodic Law, published a table with 28 elements in Die modernen Theorien der Chemie und ihre Bedeutung für die chemische Statistik (Bayerische StaatsBibliothek digital, 1864). Six years later, he proposed a valence-based classification of the elements, but at this point, he was behind the times.
• John Newlands produced a series of papers from 1863 to 1866 noting that when the elements were listed in order of increasing atomic weight, similar physical and chemical properties recurred at intervals of eight; he likened such periodicity to the octaves of music, and his observation was termed the Law of Octaves, though it was ridiculed upon publishing. The Chemical Society only acknowledged the significance of his discoveries five years after ...
• Dmitri Mendeleev was recognized as creator of what is almost recognized as the periodic table, which he formally presented and published in 1869, as An experiment on a system of elements based on their atomic weights and chemical similarities (Wikipedia, reproduction)

Mendeleev published his periodic table of all known elements and predicted several new elements to complete the table in a Russian-language journal. Only a few months after, Meyer published a virtually identical table in a German-language journal. Mendeleev has the distinction of accurately predicting the qualities of what he called ekasilicon, ekaaluminium and ekaboron (germanium, gallium and scandium, respectively).

The 18 column modern format is a variation on Mendeleev's table that is attributable to Horace Groves Deming, who included it in the text book General Chemistry (Archive.org, 2nd edition, 1923).

There are various variations on this table format, and a number of alternative periodic tables that look nothing like what Mendeleev created, including James Franklin Hyde's 2D Curled Ribbon Periodic Table, George Gamow's 3D Wound Ribbon Periodic Table. In total, The INTERNET Database of Periodic Tables includes 945 entries, though this includes discoveries of all the elements, as well as cheeky tables of things other than actual elements or chemicals (Simpson's Periodic Table, courtesy of Oscar Meyer, and Adult Periodic Table, for two random examples). But it also tracks new attempts to update the Periodic Table structure, such as the 2019 Empirical Periodic Table, and the UCLA Periodic Table (proposed by students in 2019).

Title via the academic paper The Chemical Table: An Open Dialog between Visualization and Design, by Francis T. Marchese.

posted by filthy light thief (10 comments total)

Thanks so much for this wonderful clickhole!
posted by ouke at 10:53 AM on January 22, 2019

And is this one at the Mendeleev museum in St Petersburg the biggest one?
posted by ouke at 11:04 AM on January 22, 2019

Outstanding post, FLT — flagged as fantastic!
posted by darkstar at 11:46 AM on January 22, 2019

Thanks!

Bonus web resources: Periodic Table dot com, which has a LOT of information in various forms; and the fancy, dynamic ptable dot com.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:44 PM on January 22, 2019 [2 favorites]

I love that ribbon table! I now finally understand the Lanthanides.

flt, Theodore Gray, in addition to the website, has also made an actual table
posted by q*ben at 12:59 PM on January 22, 2019 [2 favorites]

Ah, good call on that!

As seen previously ... almost 12 and a half years ago (I feel so old ;))
posted by filthy light thief at 1:36 PM on January 22, 2019

I'm reminded of a Kim Stanley Robinson novel where Indian scientists produce a mandala-shaped periodic table.
posted by doctornemo at 1:57 PM on January 22, 2019

As seen previously ... almost 12 and a half years ago (I feel so old ;))

Ahem
posted by vacapinta at 2:05 PM on January 22, 2019 [4 favorites]

This is not the oldest table of elements, but one of the oldest in a form most commonly recognizable.

Decades ago I saw a cartoon of two guys in togas, one of whom is motioning to a nearby wall on which is written:

EARTH
AIR
FIRE
WATER

The explaining dude says, "I call it the periodic table of elements."
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:15 PM on January 22, 2019 [2 favorites]

This is wonderful, thank you!

Since 2019 marks the 150th anniversary of Mendeleev's periodic table, it has also been declared the International Year of the Periodic Table of Elements. Woo-hoo!
posted by invokeuse at 9:15 PM on January 22, 2019 [1 favorite]