Lothar meyer periodic table12/29/2023 ![]() ![]() Newlands went so far as to predict the existence of new elements waiting to be discovered corresponding to vacant places in his table. He called the empirical rule he discovered the “law of octaves,” after the musical scale. Three years later, in 1865, John Newlands (1837–1898) published work demonstrating that any given element in de Chancourtois’s graph will be qualitatively similar in its properties and behavior to the eighth element higher in the series. The first attempt to create a single comprehensive system emerged in 1862, when Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois (1820–1886) published a graph exhibiting all the known chemical elements arranged in ascending order by atomic weight. However, no one had yet found a way to combine all the known elements into a single rational system. A little later, in 1843, Leopold Gmelin (1788–1853) expanded upon Döbereiner’s system, developing a table of 55 elements exhibiting similar relationships, while in 1857 Jean-Baptiste Dumas (1800–1884) published a table of the metals which exhibited similar patterns. In the wake of this work, many scientists began independently to suspect that the chemical elements so far discovered might be arranged into some sort of rational order or pattern on the basis of their various physical and chemical properties.įor example, in 1829 Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner (1780–1849) showed that many of the elements could be arranged into similar groups of three, or “triads,” on the basis of their masses and densities. ![]() To explain why and how this has happened, it is necessary to enter into some detail.ĭuring the first decades of the twentieth century, the atomic theory of matter was being applied to the concept of a chemical element by several important thinkers, notably John Dalton (1766–1844), whose pioneering A New System of Chemical Philosophy was published in 1808. Meyer is best known for his work on the periodic table of the elements, although his role in the development of that concept has frequently been overlooked in popular histories of science, which have a strong tendency to simplify the messy reality of science history. How did Julius Lothar Meyer contribute to the periodic table? In 1876 Meyer finally attained a permanent position as Professor of Chemistry at the University of Tübingen, where he remained until his retirement. After several years there, he worked in several other short-term positions, including at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic, where he was based in a hospital and helped care for wounded soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). Related articleĪfter studying mathematics at the University of Königsberg, Meyer took up a position as Privatdozent in physics and chemistry at the University of Breslau. Meyer eventually received his PhD in chemistry from the University of Breslau (now University of Wrocław), where he wrote a dissertation on the role of carbon dioxide in the physiology of the blood. Intriguingly, Dmitri Mendeleev had studied with Bunsen only a few years earlier, but the two great chemists’ stays in Heidelberg did not overlap. In 1854, Meyer transferred to the University of Heidelberg, where he studied chemistry with Robert Bunsen (of Bunsen burner fame). After graduating from Gymnasium (secondary school) in Oldenburg, the young Lothar (he never used his first given name) studied medicine at the University of Zurich with Carl Ludwig and at the University of Würzburg with Rudolf Virchow. He was born in Varel, a small town in the Duchy of Oldenburg, the son of a physician. Meyer was a distinguished German chemist who some historians feel deserves credit for the invention of the periodic table of the elements. By James Barham, PhD Julius Lothar Meyer (1830–1895)
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