PERIODIC TABLES AND THE DIFFERENET WAYS OF REPRESENTING THEM

Elements have been one of the most salient discoveries in the periodic table. During the era of Hennig brand, he made the first discovery of an element which he called phosphorus (1649). 200 years later a vast body of knowledge concerning the properties of elements and their compounds was acquired by chemists. By 1863, a total number of 63 elements were discovered. Subsequently, a lot of elements were discovered

which finally lead to the idea of classifying them based on a certain properties such as, their valency electrons, physical and chemical properties. There has been some disagreement about who deserves credit for being the "father" of the periodic table, the German Lothar Meyer or the Russian Dmitri Mendeleev. Both chemists produced remarkably similar results at the same time working independently of one another. Meyer's 1864 textbook included a rather abbreviated version of a periodic table used to classify the elements. This consisted of about half of the known elements listed in order of their atomic weight and demonstrated periodic valence changes as a function of atomic weight. In 1868, Meyer constructed an extended table which he gave to a colleague for evaluation. Unfortunately for Meyer, Mendeleev's table became available to the scientific community via publication (1869) before Meyer's appeared (1870).  In the post, we will be seeing different ways in which the periodic table can be arranged based on different concepts.