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.