Fact of the Day: 12/10/2020

Dmitri Mendeleev is often credited with developing the modern periodic table. However, did you know that there was actually a scientist after him who contributed something very important to our modern classification of the elements? Mendeleev, of course, made many important contributions (in fact, the element mendeleevium is named in his honor). He organized elements by their chemical properties, and structured the table using the repeating patterns he noticed, even leaving blanks for yet-to-be-discovered elements. However, he, like previous scientists, ordered the elements by increasing atomic mass rather than by atomic number.

 In 1909, Henry Moseley, an English chemist, noticed that some properties of elements corresponded to their atomic number, rather than the atomic mass, so he revised the table to order the elements by increasing atomic number. This is the arrangement that we keep to this day, and it has worked wonderfully well for us so far.

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