Who developed the periodic table?
Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev (1834-1907) developed the periodic table. (A chemist is a scientist specializing in the composition, structure, properties, and reactions of matter.) The periodic table is the table in which chemical elements are arranged by their atomic numbers. (Elements are pure substances that cannot be broken down into anything simpler by ordinary chemical means. An atomic number is the number of protons in an atomic nucleus.) Mendeleyev was the first to illustrate the similarities and trends in the properties of chemical elements. His nomination for the 1906 Nobel Prize for chemistry failed by one vote. However, his contribution to the field of chemistry was acknowledged fifty years later when the one-hundred-first element was named mendelevium. Mendeleyev’s periodic table originally ordered the elements according to their atomic weights (the…
