Chemistry’s eye-catching arrangement of elements has undergone many changes since its inception in the mid 1800s. To this day, scientists seek to improve it. Read more about it by clicking the link below.
Anyone who attended a high school science class can probably conjure an image of the periodic table of elements, an imposing array of multicolored rows and columns that sorts all the known chemical elements. This familiar way of displaying the building blocks of the universe is by far the most widespread, but it’s just one of countless possible arrangements. And in their quest for the ideal, chemists have suggested well over 1,000 others.
In 1869, when Mendeleev published the first of his many tables, he organized it in such a way that these relationships between elements shone through. The progression is akin to moving upward through the octaves on a piano, where every key bears a resemblance to others at fixed intervals. “Of course, these notes are not identical,” says Eric Scerri, a chemist and philosopher of chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles.
A Russian stamp, circa 2009, depicts Dmitri Mendeleev in celebration of the 175th anniversary of his birth. But Mendeleev was neither the first nor the last word in representing periodicity. Just a few years earlier, the French geologist Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois had published his own interpretation: an intricate model, in which the elements were arranged along a screw-like line that wound around a cylinder.
Thanks to Danish physicist Neils Bohr, we now know that these sequences are in fact governed by the number of electrons in a single atom of each element. The configuration of these electrons within the atom’s outermost layer, its valence shell, explains the mind-blowing diversity of chemical reactions that can occur when they mingle with those from another element’s atoms.
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