It may not look like it but this is the first
periodic table. It was conceived by a little
known French man called Alexandre-Emile de
Chancourtois in 1862. This was 7 years before
Dmitri Mendeleev's first periodic table which
is the ancestor of the one we all know today.
The clever thing about de Chancourtois is
that vertically down the cylinder is that
vertically down the cylinder the chemical
elements fall into groupings. So here we have
lithium, sodium and potassium which we know
today is all part of group 1 or the alkali
metals and de Chancourtois would have known
that these share similar chemical properties
such as there all soft metals, they can be
cut easily with a knife, they also react massively
with water. The is a feature common to all
periodic tables but de Chancourtois was the
first to do it. So why isn't de Chancourtois
better known and why didn't he get the credit
for coming up with the first periodic table?
Well it's mostly due to a publication problem,
the publisher didn't actually include a diagram
of his 3 dimensional spiral periodic system.
Which as you can imagine would be very difficult
to describe in words and it made the paper
rather obscure and difficult to understand
as a result. So it's not surprising it took
30 years for his contribution to be discovered.
de Chancourtois was one of 6 people to come up with in the 1860's and the
key event which
paved the way for these ideas was in 1860
when all the worlds leading chemist came together
to come up with standard barriers of all of
the chemical elements. This model of the system
was actually made by the Science Museum in
1925, ahead of their earliest display on the
periodic table. And it's probably the very
first physical realisation of de Chancourtois
system. The Science Museum changed a few details
from the original system. For example here
they've anglicised one of the elements we
know it as N for nitrogen but in de Chancourtois
original system he had it as AZ for azote
which as the term introduced by his country
man the famous Antoine Lavoisier.
Another difference is that it only includes the top
third of the system, it stops down here at
zinc so the original would have be three times
the hight. The original system would have
had tuluriam at it's half way point. And it
was for this element that de Chancourtois
named the whole system. This object and it's
history makes you wonder that if de Chancourtois
contribution hd been recognised at the time
perhaps he would have been a house hold name
like Mendeleev.
