International Year of the Periodic Table – Lothar Meyer

June 3, 2019

Here we'll highlight some manufactures and posts most Julius Lothar Meyer, whose outset table of the elements was published five years before Mendeleev'southward. All the same information technology's Mendeleev's name that is most associated with the periodic table (and why the 150th ceremony is being celebrated this year and non 2014).

Meyer'due south article and vertically orientated table (updated from horizontal i he created for his 1864 textbook), was published inAnnalen der Chemie und Pharmacie in 1870, while Mendeleev's table was published as an abstruse inZeitschrift für Chemie in 1869. It is as well interesting to note, as mentioned in this Science History Institute contour on Meyer and Mendeleev, that both were writing textbooks when they created their starting time tables to organize the elements.

Meyer and Mendeleev were jointly awarded the Imperial Social club's Davy Medal in 1882 for "their discovery of the periodic relations of the atomic weights." From The politics of the periodic table – who gets the credit and why, by Kelling Donald in The Chat:

Indeed, the joint honor has been cited as evidence that what was seen by some to be especially valuable almost Mendeleev's tabular array was how it accommodated (every bit Meyer'south also did) the elements that were known, and non so much for Mendeleev'due south predictions of new elements.

Was the Royal Society hoping besides, through the articulation award, to muffle the disquiet about priority or credit for the increasingly indispensable tabular array? Perhaps. Simply if that were the intention, they failed. In science as in politics, the temptation to exist simple rather than authentic tin can be quite potent. Scientists nonetheless say, "Mendeleev discovered the periodic table."

Donald'due south commodity links out to some interesting sources, including a 1961 Periodical of Chemical Instruction paper on the 1860 Karlsruhe Congress.  Meyer and Mendeleev were both in attendance and found inspiration in Stanislao Cannizzaro's 1858 "Sketch of a Course of Chemical Philosophy," which another professor distributed at the meeting.

From Philip Ball's Whose periodic table is it anyway? in Chemical science Globe, where he writes about the "baggage of priority" which continues now with recent issues over the CRISPR-Cas9 patents:

Gordin'southward signal is not that it's difficult to say who discovered the periodic table outset, but that, more greatly, information technology is not clear what this notion of 'firstness' means. There are many ways to express the periodic organization (just every bit there are to draw the table itself). And Gordin highlights that, for these 19th century scientists, both issues depended on what they wanted to do with their system. Information technology was no coincidence that Lothar Meyer's table appeared in a textbook, because he was more than concerned with organising existing knowledge for pedagogy than with developing a predictive constabulary.

Michal Meyer's profile (An Element of Order) of both chemists in Distillations for the Science History Institute in 2013, based on an interview with Michael D. Gordin, goes into more than detail about the publishing of the various tables and the priority boxing. That includes how Mendeleev's table in the Russian chemical lodge periodical got translated and passed forth to get published in a German journal, how a translation fault impacted the disputes between the two, and how factors like the Soviet Spousal relationship's rise as a chemic research center after World State of war Ii helped settle that battle in Mendeleev'south favor.

Gordin reimagines the response and counter-response: "Mendeleev says, 'But I said information technology was periodic,' and Meyer says, 'No you didn't. You said information technology was stufenweise; you lot said information technology was gradual.' Mendeleev goes, 'Oh, that was the High german abstract. That wasn't the Russian original. You lot should accept looked at the original.' And Meyer says, 'I'm non supposed to read Russian. That'due south too much to look from me. I already take to read Italian and French and English and Swedish!'"

The one-give-and-take difference, the shift from "periodic" to "stepwise" triggered a heated dispute between the ii men that ran throughout much of the 1870s and which was extensively commented on in chemistry journals across Europe. Mendeleev knew he had to persuade the Germans, who by that time were preeminent in chemistry. In 1871 he published the full version of his work—with now detailed predictions of three new elements—in Liebigs Annalen.

More reading:

  • Scerri, Due east. The Discovery of the Periodic Table As a Case of Simultaneous Discovery. Philos. Trans. R. Soc., A 2015 , 373, 20140172. DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2014.0172
    • Besides highlights others who were working on their own ways to organize the elements, including de Chancourtois, Newlands, Odling, Hinrichs.
    • More than books in the library collection by Eric Scerri.
  • Van Spronsen, J.W. The Priority Disharmonize Between Mendeleev and Meyer. J. Chem. Educ. 1969, 46 (iii), 136-139. DOI: 10.1021/ed046p136
  • Scerri, E.R. The Evolution of the Periodic System. Scientific American. January 21, 2011. https://world wide web.scientificamerican.com/article/the-evolution-of-the-periodic-organization/
  • Gordin, M.D.A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table, rev. ed.; Princeton University Printing: Princeton, NJ, 2019. DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv39x6w3
  • Gordin, Thousand.D. The Textbook Case of a Priority Dispute: D. I. Mendeleev, Lothar Meyer, and the Periodic Organization. In Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present; Riskin, J., Biagioli, Thou., Eds.; Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2012; pp 59-82.