9781422279519

Understanding the Periodic Table: CHAPTER 1

History of the Periodic Table

O pen the front cover of any chemistry textbook and there it is: the Periodic Table of Elements. It includes all the elements known to humankind arranged in numerical order from1 to 118. Elements have been known to science for much longer than the table has existed. To help understand the elements and how they worked together, the table was created as a guide understand- able across the barriers of language and time. Many, many sci- entists contributed to the arrangement of the elements in this chart, but it was a long process. When only a few elements were identified, it was more of a challenge to arrange them in some meaningful way. For example, in 1750, there were only 16 elements that had been

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