How the Periodic Table Almost Wasn't Mendeleev's

By WonderBooks · Aug 20, 2026

Mendeleev was not the first chemist to notice that elements repeat in patterns. Here is why his 1869 table won out over at least three earlier attempts.

On March 6, 1869, Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev presented a paper to the Russian Chemical Society titled "The Dependence Between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements." He had arranged the sixty-three known chemical elements by atomic weight into rows, breaking each row so that elements with similar chemical behavior lined up in the same columns. Where the pattern called for an element nobody had yet found, he did not force the row to close up — he left the space blank and described, in advance, what should eventually fill it.

That table is the one still hanging in classrooms today. But Mendeleev was not the first chemist to notice that elements repeat their properties at regular intervals, and he was not even the only person publishing a periodic arrangement in his own decade. At least three other chemists had gotten there first, or nearly at the same time — and history remembers only one of their tables.

The chemists who saw the pattern before he did

As early as 1862, French geologist Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois plotted the known elements on a spiral by increasing atomic weight and noticed that similar elements lined up along the same vertical line — an early hint of periodicity that went largely unnoticed outside France. In 1865, English chemist John Newlands arranged elements in order of atomic weight and observed that every eighth element shared similar properties, a pattern he called the "law of octaves." Newlands even predicted an undiscovered element with an atomic weight of about 73 — six years before Mendeleev made a nearly identical prediction for the same gap. But Newlands left no blank spaces in his table for missing elements, and his idea was mocked by chemists of the day, one of whom reportedly asked, in a Chemical Society meeting, whether he had tried arranging the elements alphabetically instead.

What made Mendeleev's version different

The difference was not that Mendeleev saw a pattern nobody else had seen. It was that he trusted the pattern enough to bet against the existing inventory of known elements and say, in print, exactly where and by how much it was incomplete. He named the gaps in his table after the known element just above them — eka-aluminium, eka-boron, eka-silicon — and predicted their atomic weights and chemical behavior in specific, checkable detail. Within seventeen years, all three were found almost exactly where he said they would be: gallium in 1875, scandium in 1879, and germanium in 1886. Each discovery matched Mendeleev's predicted properties closely enough that his table went from a proposal to, effectively, settled science.

A rival table, and two very different receptions

German chemist Julius Lothar Meyer had been building his own versions of a periodic table since 1864 and published one strikingly similar to Mendeleev's in 1870, a year after Mendeleev's. Meyer's table also left gaps for undiscovered elements, but he did not predict what would fill them. The Royal Society of London eventually judged the two men's contributions close enough in importance to award its 1882 Davy Medal to both jointly. Newlands had to wait far longer for recognition: the Chemical Society dismissed his 1865 paper outright, and it was not until 1887 — twenty-two years later — that the Royal Society awarded him a Davy Medal of his own, and not until 1998 that his birthplace received an official commemorative plaque.

Told as an illustrated story