Mendeleev's periodic table
Dmitri Mendeleev
Like many scientists working at the end of the 19th-century the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907) was looking for ways to organise the known elements. Mendeleev published his first periodic table of the elements in 1869.
Features of Mendeleev's tables
Mendeleev arranged the elements in order of increasing relative atomic mass. When he did this he noted that the chemical properties of the elements and their compounds showed a periodic trend. He then arranged the elements by putting those with similar properties below each other into groups. To make his classification work Mendeleev made a few changes to his order:
he left gaps for yet to be discovered elements
he switched the order of a few elements to keep the groups consistent