Discoverers of the Periodic System

Abstract

The periodic system was not discovered by Dmitri Mendeleev alone, as is commonly thought, or even just by Mendeleev and Julius Lothar Meyer. It was discovered by as many as five or six individuals at about the same time, in the decade of the 1860s, following the rationalization of atomic weights at the Karlsruhe conference. It became apparent by the middle of the nineteenth century that something needed to be done to resolve the widespread confusion over equivalent and atomic weights. Amedeo Avogadro had already proposed a solution to Gay-Lussac’s law that preserved John Dalton’s indivisible elemental particles. Recall that Gay-Lussac had observed that volumes of gases entering into chemical combination and their gaseous products are in a ratio of small integers. Dalton had refused to accept this viewpoint because it implied that atoms appeared to divide in some instances, such as the combination of hydrogen and oxygen to create steam. Avogadro had suggested that such “atoms” must be diatomic; that is, in their most elemental form they must be double. Thus, the oxygen atom was not dividing; rather, it was an oxygen molecule, which consisted of two oxygen atoms, that was coming apart. Unfortunately, the terms in which Avogadro expressed his views were rather obscure and failed to make much impression on the chemists of the day. Two exceptions were the French physicist and chemist André Ampère and the Alsatian chemist Charles Gerhardt, both of whom adopted the view that elemental gases were composed of diatomic molecules. One consequence of the general refusal to recognize the existence of diatomic molecules as the ultimate “atoms” of gaseous elements was that, as mentioned in chapter 2, the confusion between equivalent weights and atomic weights continued to reign. Although the relative weights of oxygen to hydrogen in water are approximately 8 to 1, the relative weight of the oxygen atom to the hydrogen atom takes on values of 8 or 16 depending on what one considers the correct formula for water to be.