He understood there were connections in properties in adjacent elements and periodicities of properties of elements in the same groups (which he wrote as rows and we now show as columns). You can see from Mendeleev's 1869 publication, he got most of the known elements in the right sequence and many in the correct groups. Groups (columns) which we eventually figured out could be explained by Group he usual correctly deduced similarities in behaviour found within Even when he placed elements in the wrong And if you’ve studied chemistry you can get a sense of what Out, elements he hadn’t quite got right yet, & gaps as of yet This can give an immediate sense of 3 categories: elements he’d figured To print those he grouped incorrectly in a different colour. Which he placed in the wrong groups (due to inaccurate masses). Then, while an impressive amount of theĮlements known in 1869 are exactly in the right place, there are several In several cases he predicted we would find the missingĮlements in groups (columns). Unknown or unmeasured are blank- something the viewer can rapidly
He was able to deduce despite limited data. Periodic table, my idea is to show how much of the modern periodic table Than including his notes, or published results as well as a modern Sometimes you need to think about visual ideas for a long time. He lists Didymium, which is actually a mixture of the elements Third, some of his data wasn’t great, so sometimes elementsĪppeared to have the same mass, or were out of order or even were
(now called atomic mass), rather than atomic number (or number of Protons and neutrons, he listed and organized elements by atomic weight So many people would recognize the shape of the periodic table,įrom high school, even if they aren’t scientists who use it regularly.īut Mendeleev didn’t publish his idea in a form that’s easy toįirst, his table, as published in 1869, is rotated by 90° so it shows Out how to indicate what he did, in contrast to our modern periodic I had meant to make his portrait for the 150th anniversary of the periodic table in 2019, but I didn’t get to it. Here’s my Dmitri Mendeleev block print for the Printer Solstice prompt “elements”. Dmitri Mendeleev and the Periodic Table, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2021