British chemist John Newlands organizes the known elements, listing them in a table determined by atomic weight according to what he provisionally calls his law of octaves. It is not an instant hit.
Newlands noticed, as he cataloged the elements sequentially, based on Stanislao Cannizzaro’s atomic-weight system, that elements with similar properties tended to appear in regular intervals of eight, reminding him of the perfect eighth, or octave, in music. He called his explanatory paper “The Law of Octaves, and the Causes of Numerical Relations Among the Atomic Weights.”
He arranged the elements by weight (like Cannizzaro) and by shared characteristics, grouping elements with similar properties on shared lines of his table. This required some fudging on Newlands’s part and ultimately resulted in some inaccuracies. Nevertheless, Newlands defended his org chart, saying that no other method for cataloging the elements was workable.
Newlands’s table was initially dismissed by the English Chemical Society as irrelevant. It wasn’t until the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev published his own periodic table of the elements, in 1869, that Newlands’s achievement began to be appreciated. Still, it would be another eighteen years before the Royal Society got around to awarding Newlands the Davy Medal in recognition of his work.
And it wasn’t until 1913 that Henry Moseley established that the properties of the elements varied periodically according to atomic number, not atomic weight.—TL