The periodic table of the elements that you know is largely due to the Russian chemist Mendeleev, who published his table in 1869 at the Russian Chemical Society. In it, he was concerned with ordering the elements according to atomic masses.
In 1871, Mendeleev published a lengthy article with an updated form of his table, with the elements arranged in columns. He even made predictions of elements that weren’t known in gaps he left. There are some errors in the table, but the appearance is the basis for the conventional periodic table.
Horace G. Deming used a periodic table similar to the current one in his General Chemistry textbook, which was widely distributed throughout the United States and became very popular since the 1930s.
After Mendeleev’s proposal, more elements were discovered, noble gases, rare earths and radioactive elements. It had to be expanded and updated. You will obviously have noticed that Mendeleev’s periodic table is not exactly the one we use today. The Russian one organized the atoms in increasing order of atomic mass, the current one does so according to the atomic number and places the elements in zones according to the orbitals of their last occupied electron shell (s, p, d and f). The latter refers to the electronic configuration and was taken into account by the Costa Rican chemist Gil Chaverri Rodríguez in an article published in the Journal of Chemical Education in 1953. It is very similar to the current one.
Until 1984 the designation of the groups by means of Arabic numerals was not approved by the Commission of Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry (CNIC) of the IUPAC. The most up-to-date periodic table of elements contains the latest elements added and named by the IUPAC in 2016: nihonium (Nh), moscovium (Mc), tenesium (Ts), and oganesson (Og).
Really the complete periodic table should be “longer”. The two rows below are separated from the table for easier reading. We would have a table with 32 columns if we insert these two rows in the corresponding positions, that is, 57 (lanthanum) and 89 (actinium). Something quite inconvenient to handle.
Throughout history, original tables have been proposed that have not had the luck of the path Mendeleyev began. One example is the periodic table racetrack , devised by chemist and science fiction author John Drury Clark. Clark’s original version was a black and white table, published in the article A new periodic table , published in 1933 in the Journal Chemical Education.
But John Clark’s table kept us an almost artistic secret. Life Magazine published a beautiful colored version in 1949.
Already in 1934, GN Quam and M. Battell Quam wrote an article with the different types of periodic tables that were developing. The current table is not the only one that has been proposed, many have been forgotten in articles and textbooks. On the first page of the article appears the spiral table that the German mineralogist Heinrich Baumhauer’s devised in 1870. He had many conceptual problems with it that forced him to put arrows that went from one place to another.
Another spiral table collected by Quam and Quam is the one proposed in 1902 by the Swedish geologist Axel Erdmann, in an arrangement similar to a spider’s web with hydrogen in the center.
Nodder did not advocate novel features for his spiral arrangement (1920), as stated in the Quam and Quam article, however the appearance is somewhat different and resembles a double interlocking spiral.
Another spiral, although less lustrous, included in the article is that of Partington, from 1920. It starts with hydrogen and the elements are arranged in order according to the direction opposite to the movement of the hands of a clock. There are eight radial lines “along which the elements of the families are arranged in order of increasing atomic weight.”
Continuing with the article by Quam and Quam, Janet’s helical classification (1929) is cited and it is the flat projection of a Courtines cylindrical arrangement.
In the case of Crookes (1898), “the elements are arranged in order of atomic weights in a line that traces a spiral in the form of eight”. Each loop is divided into eight equal parts, where an element or a whole group is placed. The blank spaces are reminiscent of Mendeleev’s spaces where he stated that there must be an element to discover.
Emerson’s 1911 helix is a helical arrangement based on the Crookes spiral.
Unlike Crookes, Harkins and Hall (1916) developed two concentric helices, where the central helix contained the long periods. Each vertical bar in the model represents a group.
If we continue with the models collected by Quam and Quam, we find the unusual table of Schaltenbrand (1920), an eccentric spiral with the elements arranged in order of atomic weights. On the first spin (from the top) is hydrogen, helium, and the rest of the inert elements. The elements of the same group are in the same plane that passes through the axis of the spiral.
In an attempt to include the rare earths without destroying symmetry, Friend arranged the elements on the surface of a sphere in 1925.
In 1911, British radiochemist Frederick Soddy, who discovered the existence of isotopes, arranged the elements in 3D teardrop loops to create an unusual periodic table. It is cited in the article by Quam and Quam, although the image does not appear.
In the 1960s, Theodor Benfey proposed a periodic table in the shape of a snail, which emphasized the continuity of the elements, against what he left marked as “periodic division”.
In 1975 the turn would come for the North American chemist James Franklin Hyde, with a quite attractive proposal: the curled ribbon periodic table. In this case, silicon appears right in the center (between two circles) and its relationship with other elements in the table is also shown (dashed lines).
In 2006 came the “perfect periodic table”, created by Valery Tsimmerman, based on Charles Janet’s model for his 1928 electron configuration model.
Jeff Moran’s most recent chart is a software version that attempts to better illustrate the relationship of hydrogen to the other elements.
Alternative arrangements of the periodic table are not just a thing of the 21st century. Muzzammil Qureshi proposed in 2021 the “discoid periodic table of the elements”. The author defends his disk-table by saying that periodicity is best represented by circular shapes.
Antropoff’s periodic table (1926) was out of use after World War II in most countries except Spain! This layout offers a more satisfying balance compared to other tables and was the most popular in Germany until Antropoff was singled out in 1945 for his Nazi activities.
Among the tables of Andreas von Antropoff that are preserved in Spain, those of Barcelona, Murcia and Valencia have occupied the media. The latter is from 1925 and was presented in November 2021 after its restoration. It had been kept at the IES Sant Vicent Ferrer in Valencia.
