Who REALLY invented the periodic table?

this video has been brought to you by Wix and will show you how they helped us make a new periodic table later in the episode everyone knows that Mendeleev invented the periodic table but did he really invent it we're here to find out we're here in some Catharines College Cambridge where the well-known chemist Peter waters has assembled a unique collection of early books about the periodic table including I believe some real treasures from Mendeleev's output let's go in and see what he's got well I think most people would expect us to begin with Mendel's first table so this features in volume one of his textbook a system of chemistry here and it was literally this is just added in at the beginning so this is the first published periodic table well which is really rather nice so how is your Russian then you can you can read this okay so it's based on their atomic weight and their chemical properties so this is a system of the elements chemical elements so of course the immediately noticeable first thing is it's the wrong way around from our modern periodic table Mendeleev has arranged his groups horizontally in this which is fine so for instance we see lithium sodium potassium rubidium cesium now he's got this wrong has he got any yes there is somewhere to die Miam we say doesn't exist but of course was resolved exactly why did he wait till the last minute for the best part he was writing a textbook of inorganic history and he'd already written volume 1 and this would actually already been printed and it was as he was beginning to write further parts of this he thought well where am I going to go next in there well we won't say the periodic table because there wasn't one but after discussing related elements you thought well which which which set of elements should I do next so he wanted to come up with a system and this is his system but the books were already printed this this first volume and so this a few leaves here were just sent in to literally be stuck in to be pasted in to the printed books which is remarkable this is rather a nice copy actually because was we think the first owner was a lady perhaps one of his students somebody's made notes yes I'm not quite sure what these are yet I'm gonna have to work through that it is quite a rare book or at least we don't know how many copies there are outside of Russia we think this is the only copy in the UK so I mentioned that the groups in this are arranged horizontally but in the second volume which came out two years later he's he's changed this he's rearranged his periodic table to be far more recognizable to our eyes now this one is is rather tricky and fragile it's some so this is in the beginning of Volume two of his book so now you see we have hydrogen lithium sodium potassium rubidium cesium going vertically down so this looks much more like our modern periodic table and what is this extra bit okay developed lots of different arrangements actually and so this is also quite good I mean it looks like a pure table so some of group to appear here and some over here and so magnesium is over here as opposed to in the group here similarly with sodium and so on he had Group 1a and 1b with the and there's some sense to this of course as you know I think the fact that this is now a rather more extensive fold-out chart just shows the importance that he attached to this to his system and obviously this is what he's absolutely famous for now what he's written here is the natural system of the elements and his book is named after it so I mean he's really gluing his name to the periodic table straight away he really did this actually so this is I think one of the reasons why Mendeleev is often cited as the discoverer of the periodic table he really promoted this he says it was his discovery the the the system the law the periodic law but there were other people as we shall see so this was his first textbook it came out in in to what is usually published in two volumes although it came out perhaps in four and this second volume was two years after the very first table that we saw but actually he did publish a more extensive Journal article where he really describes the periodic system of this apparently was only printed in 80 copies so now we really are quite lucky to have have one of these here so this is the very first volume of the Russian chemical society the Journal of the Russian Chemical Society so this then is Mendeleev's real first announcement of his periodic table and the system so this is the discovery of the periodic law as he called it and obviously he realized that there was something quite fundamental behind this and perhaps the reason why his table and system caught on more than others is because he was also predicting properties of the others very detailed predictions and that's perhaps some of the other discoverers didn't go into the same level of detail that he did but we see exactly the same table that we saw in the textbook yes now I think what's really fun is so we see this amazing discovery it's amazing announcement to see the first report of this in English okay and this was from from this this the same year and it's in the chemical news now this was a publication by William Crookes he was the editor yes the discoverer of family of of course and it was said that he just reported anything absolutely everything that was ever sort of anything chemical appeared in here and so in here we have this here is the very first announcement in English of Mendeleev system and you read it out yes it says atomic weights Mendeleev this paper contains a new plan of grouping the elements according to the numerical value of their atomic weights in the following manner now you have to listen carefully here so lithium 7 beryllium 9.4 boron 11 carbon 12 nitrogen 14 oxygen he's given the symbols here so Oh 16 then fe 19 and na 23 so they even get the order wrong there's a misprint where they put the symbol for iron instead of which i think is wonderful isn't it but that's it this tiny little paragraph here is is these the first announcement of that and it's completely overlooked really at the time nobody really took much notice of this and this was because I think well people really took notice when the first elements were discovered really this Bennigan's so he says at the end here the author points out that this grouping of the elements expresses the law according to which the elements can combine with oxygen as you see this publication then in the chemical news was in December the at the tenth 1869 so it's the same year yes it is took quite a long time in March to December yes but this is because they were picking up these entries in other foreign journals as they say as they described here but what I think is particularly nice so it says the author points out that this grouping of the elements well they don't actually show any grouping in this good they just give the first line at whose table which is ridiculous but but it also shows that more senior chemists notorious for not recognizing breakthroughs when they happen and things haven't changed so why we're on Mendeleev I thought I'd show you this this is rather nice so this has been described as his master's thesis this this tiny little pamphlet here there's evidence that he's thinking of atomic weights and organization of things in here we see lots of nice formula for different compounds and so on so it says here that it was chosen for the defense of the degree of Master of Chemistry uh-huh in some bibliographies you see this is described as his thesis but it turns out that this is just the synopsis and I'm delighted that we also have the whole thesis here which is really loud the noise and we haven't found another copy of this recorded in any library today there must be copies in Russia of course but we haven't found any others yet so I think he's looking for specific volume so these are essentially what we would now call molar volumes of compounds and again this is starting thinking about looking for trends and patterns here Mendel F went through 8 different editions of his textbook and of course he had to introduce a whole new group with the noble gases these don't feature in the first but I think this one is rather fun so I think this is his last it's not an edition of his textbook but it does contain his last periodic table published in a remarkable journal it's it's crazy in a serialized form in this journal with all sorts of strange articles in so this really this really is quite a odd thing to find this final periodic table in here and so this was I think his last version of the periodic table but he made a slight error here because he put the noble gases in as group zero which makes perfect sense it's the the valency is zero but this meant then he put helium just before lithium and then this therefore suggested with hydrogen above lithium that there might be another element above helium and one more above hydrogen so he has x and y as two unknown elements now one of these it was thought had been discovered in the Sun yeah this was caronian yes which it turns out to be a highly oxidized iron of iron but the other one he thought was undiscovered and he proposed a named Newtonian ah which i think is rather nice which brings us back to cambridge it well you could argue that the neutron should go there and i've got at least one periodic table that has neutron on it so you could pop in the neutron there if you wanted you could this is the fourth edition of his textbook where the first periodic table appeared but this is an amazing copy this is actually a presentation copy from Mendeleev this was presented to the Scottish chemist Alexander Crum Brown who was when the people who developed organic structures yes well yes that's a good question Mendeleev visited Crum Brown in Edinburgh yes yep to receive an honorary degree so this was at that time so it's dated there in 1884 which is really rather lovely isn't it how much is that worth I have no idea how much this would be worth now but it's really quite fun so this is the the version of the periodic table that appears in here interestingly enough this one page appeared at auction last week in Christie's it was also signed by Mendeleev like our bookies and it sold for over twenty thousand pounds twenty thousand pounds for one page so how many people don't think we could extrapolate like that but I think this this complete volume will be quite pricey now I want to go back to Mendel s first published periodic table so this is the one from 1869 and the reason want to do this is because I want you to see another one from an English chemist called William O tling so this is five years earlier so this is from 1864 so for instance we have sodium potassium rubidium cesium now he's put lithium wrong symbol up here and of course Mendeleev gets his includes lithium here but for group two we have glue psyllium so the old name for beryllium and lead here and then we have magnesium calcium strontium and barium and group - we have beryllium magnesium so they're separate from the other members calcium strontium barium and again and left what's LED in the same group understandably but when we go to compare some of the other groups in the main group the they get even closer the similarities so group 3 or 13 of the periodic table is a tricky one because of course they only had a couple of elements so Mendeleev only knew of boron and aluminium so we have boron aluminium unknown and uranium and gold from Mendeleev's and here we have boron aluminium space again where gallium will come and then again uranium there so they're really very very similar these tables when we go to group 15 or 5 nitrogen phosphorus arsenic antimony bismuth completely right in hotelling's table and completely right in Mendeley nitrogen phosphorus arsenic antimony bismuth so where did he publish this so this is in a journal with it's not to chemical journal so this is the Journal of science so there are many different articles in this from related subjects but he didn't really push this in the same way the Mendeleev did later and he didn't really produce such accurate predictions for the properties of the missing elements and that was the thing that really caught people's attention from End Alliance version and what did he call his article I think I think it's just an arrangement so the the title of his article is on the proportional numbers of the elements but so he was quite an eminent scientist he was a fellow of the Royal Society yes it shows that you've not only got to discover something or propose something but other people have to find out about it and if you publish it somewhere when nobody else sees it then you might as well not publish it at all so what's his name William o dling well you must say that earthling does not have the sound of Mendeleev's name does is interesting that the groups also are going horizontally as well like Mendeleev's first version well I I knew that there were some previous ones but I'd never realized how similar it was don't you think that perhaps the reason they go horizontally because it's easier from the point of view putting it in a book you don't have to change to landscape format of the page well but then again of course I mean the city arrangement by mass is now going vertically downwards so something's gonna go down so they could go across if this was five years before isn't it conceivable that Mendeleev saw this and it inspired his arrangement it is possible that Mendeleev may have seen this it was I think this was translated into Russian not by him he says he wasn't aware of it but then this is not the only British chemist who developed a perhaps more famous is Newlands and his law of octaves now eventually Newlands really wanted to try to establish some claim to the periodic table so he published this lovely little book where all of his collected journal articles were assembled together now i have one of the original ones to show you in a moment but this is a nice copy so this is two Grenville williams he was one of the people that worked with crooks in the discovery of thallium so crooks mentions him at the end of his paper which is rather nice so this shows his attempts at coming up with a periodic table but these were initially published in the chemical news and so this is the first version of Newlands announcement when he's looked beginning to look for relationships between the atomic masses so this is in here our relations among the equivalents in this version he's looking for relationships between the what we would now call atomic weights and some of them are out by a factor of two and this is because there just were not known at the time so many of these look wrong to us so they are halved so magnesium 12 oxygen 8 and so on but some of them are correct so lithium 7 fluorine 19 yes and nitrogen 14 so his first table though we see comes a little bit later here are some of his early tables so again this one is going across so we have hydrogen fluorine chlorine and bromine and iodine so this is very similar to Mendeleev's version and this is from this one particularly from 1865 did Mendeleev was he also asked about Newlands work Mendeleev just said that his version was was very different and that he really discovered the periodic law so interestingly most of the copies of this that I've seen are signed by the author so absolutely one of those books where it's the very rare copy that isn't signed by the author but this is because he was trying to promote his system to show that he had a sense of priority for the discovery what is this table here take it out in case I damaged it so the elements in order of atomic weight horizontal arrangement so again this is this is fairly similar to Mendeleev's what sir Newlands noticed of course is that when the elements are arranged when we come to the by order of their atomic weights as they were known at the time when you come to the 8th element in the order we have something with similar properties and so this was his his his discovery and why he called it the law of octaves because of course it's similar with the notes on the piano it's when you go 8 up you get to a similar related note but of course also missing from this because they were not discovered at the time of the noble gases yes and this means when you include those it will be every ninth element so then it would be the law of non-use this is really very so these are all quite fun but actually what I'm going to show you now is regarded as perhaps the very first periodic table and you know who this is by no no this is a French mineralogist called Alexandre Emile big weird a shank or and that one definitely doesn't roll off the tongue now before I show you his table I shall show you a we are fortunate enough to have this this is a collection of his off prints and this was given to one of his colleagues and he included a photograph so this is actually a photograph of big rio de sheng court well and signed by him which is rather nice his arrangement this nobody knows of him and it really didn't catch on but this was seven years before Mendeleev's version the reason this did not catch on is because well for starters he was a mineralogist so he wasn't really been read by the chemists of the day but the main reason is he publishes in a journal with no diagram so there is no there was no table in the original journal version however he also had some offerings made as he did in the day in those days so these were separate printings of the article and with this he did have a an illustration made and this one I need to have some space here so let's open this out and this is the reason that it nobody knew of it because it couldn't be included in the publication because this is so large so you can see why the the publishers were reluctant to include this in the journal article so this is printed on card in in it's got red black and green colors in it and it's about five foot long but now what we're looking at here so what do we need for a periodic table we need all of the then-known elements to be arranged in order of their well in this case atomic weights because of course nobody had any idea of atomic number at this time and so these are all the elements arranged according to their atomic weight and we need to look for the repeating patterns and this is the way he's done this is these are arranged this should be a cylinder so at the top here we have a view from above of a cylinder again we're going round 16 units around here and so this would be 16 atomic weight units atomic mass units and then we come to an element with a similar property so this is going to be arranged on a on at this little former helix so this has been wound round the the cylinder here so for instance we have here is lithium and then he found that elements with similar properties are aligned in the vertical column so we have lithium here sodium potassium and then if we go bit further down rubidium that is amazing I've never had not heard of him I've never seen anything like this and so extraordinary well this this is really rather rare because this was only in the off prints not in the journal so this is actually a signed copy again so this was a presentation copy from Bogoria here and it's the survival of these charts and he also changed these so this we think is the very very first version so it says at the top in the 7th of April 1862 and there are slightly later versions where he modified this and so added a later date underneath we're just tweak things because the real problem with this is is what were the atomic weights of the elements and this is where the the problem came and so actually we see on the table silicon and silicon is also here and it's on here a third time as well somewhere so it's mentioned three times and this is because he wasn't entirely sure what the mass the atomic weight of silicon should be and this was because they understood that a certain mass of one element combined with a certain mass of another but they didn't know what the formula for the product was so we now know that when you combine silicon and oxygen you have silicon dioxide but they didn't know this they knew that a certain mass is combined and so depending on what the formula for silicon oxide is silicon silica and this would give rise to different masses but include Mallen which is great do you think Mendeleev gets too much credit is history written wrong is history right what does this make you feel I don't know what to walk away thinking well I think you all to history because sometimes two people or more discover something but one of them has a more profound influence than the others and so you can't it's not enough to say I discovered this first you've got to look and see what if influence you had on people that came after you and sadly sometimes it's not the first person that has the real influence particularly because the second person may get a bit more momentum from knowing that something else has had a similar idea so there first of all putting their idea harder but they also have a bit more confidence in their idea I think it's it's no coincidence that actually six different scientists from around the world all independently came up with their versions of what we would now call the periodic table I'm all in the 1860s and perhaps it's not surprising that one of them is going to be much more famous than the others I think deservedly so I mean Mendeleev did push things slightly further with his very accurate predictions of missing elements and that's really what caught people's attention okay so I want to show you another periodic table this is when we've put online it's at periodic videos dotnet and we've built it using Wix which is the sponsor of today's episode Wix is a powerful elegant tool that can help people are all levels even me make amazing websites whether it's business or a personal site or maybe just something in between get on Wix get creating it's free highly customizable as you can see here as I tweak our site you can start with the template and then just take it in whatever direction you want it's drag-and-drop really intuitive and there are loads of options you can just change everything get it just how you want if you do want to check them out go to the URL wix.com slash go slash periodic videos it's on the screen they don't let them know you came from here and that helps us as well and once you've got your own site up and running why not drop us an email so we can see what you did that address again wix.com slash go slash periodic videos there's also a link in the description spit and saliva is actually used in conservation all the time it's a really gentle cleaning agent it's 99% water 1% enzymes and it's the enzymes that break down the dirt so wow you weren't joking under the tongue is this like a known like technique let's do a little section here this is kind of gross

Channel: Periodic Videos

Views: 206,011

Rating: 4.9205599 out of 5

Keywords: periodic, videos, chemistry, mendeleev, periodic table, Dmitri Mendeleev, William Odling, Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois, John Newlands, Julius Lothar Meyer, Gustavus Hinrichs

Id: 83RSwczyyRY

Length: 24min 45sec (1485 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2019

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Dmitri Mendeleev