Periodic Table Timeline
Sir Francis Bacon
1605 published "The Proficience and Advancement of Learning" which contained a description of what would later be known as the scientific method
Robert Boyle
1661 published "The Sceptical Chymist" which was a treatise on the distinction between chemistry and alchemy. It also contained some of the earliest ideas of atoms, molecules, and chemical reaction marking the beginning of the history of modern chemistry.
Joseph Black
1754 isolated carbon dioxide, which he called "fixed air".
Henry Cavendish
1766 discovered hydrogen as colorless, odorless gas that burns and can form an explosive mixture with air.
Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestly
1773-1774 independently isolated oxygen
Antoine Lavoisier
1778 wrote the first extensive list of elements containing 33 elements and distinguished between metals and non-metals
John Dalton
1803 proposed "__________'s Law" describing the relationship between the components in a mixture of gases.
Jakob Berzelius
1828 developed a table of atomic weights and introduced letters to symbolize elements.
Johann Dobereiner
1828 developed groups of 3 elements with similar properties.
John Newlands
1864 arranged the known elements in order of atomic weights and observed similarities between some elements.
Lothar Meyer
1864 develops an early version of the periodic table, with 28 elements organized by valence.
Dmitri Mendeleev
1864 produced a table based on atomic weights but arranged 'periodically' with elements with similar properties under each other. His periodic table included the 66 known elements organized by atomic weights.
William Ramsay
1894 discovered the noble gases.
Marie and Pierre Curie
1898 isolated radium and polonium from pitchblende.
Ernest Rutherford
1900 discovered the source of radioactivity in decaying atoms.
Henry Moseley
1913 determined the atomic number of each of the elements and modified the 'Periodic Law'.
Edwin McMillan and Philip H. Abelson
1940 identify neptunium, the lightest and first synthesized transuranium element, found in the products of uranium fission.
Glenn Seaborg
1940 synthesized transuranic elements (the elements after uranium in the periodic table).
Aristotle
330 BC proposes the four element theory (earth, wind, fire, air)
Plato
360 BC coins the term elements (stoicheia)
Democritus and Leucippus
440 BC propose the idea of the atom, an invisible particle that all matter is made of.