Periodic Table History and Arrangement
Name______________________________________________ Date_________________ Pd.__ Periodic Table History and Arrangement Arranging the Elements Suppose you went to the video store and all the videos were mixed together. How could you tell the comedies from the action movies? If the videos were not arranged in a pattern, it would be difficult to find the movie you wanted! Scientists in the early 1800s had a similar problem. At that time, scientists knew some of the properties of more than 60 elements. However, no one had organized the elements according to these properties. Organizing the elements according to their properties would help scientists understand how elements interact with each other. Scientists recognized similarities and patterns in the properties of elements, and some scientists proposed classification schemes. In 1817, Johann Döbereiner (1780-1849) realized that calcium, strontium, and barium have similar properties and that the atomic weight of strontium is about halfway between the other two elements. He called this the “law of triads.” He discovered other sets of three elements that followed this law, such as sulfur, selenium, and tellurium, and chlorine, bromine, and iodine. Between 1829 and 1858, several scientists worked on the idea of triads. They discovered that the chemical relationship extended beyond groups of three. Fluorine was added to the halogen group; oxygen, sulfur, selenium, and tellurium were grouped into a family; and nitrogen, phosphorous, arsenic, antimony, and bismuth were grouped into a family. The first comprehensive arrangement of the elements showing the repetition of chemical and physical properties was published in 1862 by French geologist A.E. Beguyer de Chancourtois.
[Show full text]