Mendeleev presents the periodic table
- Date
- 6 March 1869 (O.S.)
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Russian Empire (St Petersburg)
- Era
- Modern
- Significance
On 6 March 1869 (Old Style; 18 March by the Gregorian calendar) a paper by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev on 'The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements' was read to the Russian Chemical Society in St Petersburg, Mendeleev himself being ill and the report delivered by his colleague Nikolai Menshutkin.
Arranging the known elements by increasing atomic weight, Mendeleev showed that their chemical and physical properties recurred at periodic intervals, allowing them to be grouped in a table by family. Crucially, he left gaps for undiscovered elements and predicted the properties of several, such as 'eka-silicon' (germanium), with striking accuracy; the discovery of these elements over the following years confirmed his system. The periodic law revealed a deep order underlying the chemical elements and became one of the most powerful organising principles in science. Refined after the discovery of atomic number and the noble gases, the periodic table remains a central tool of chemistry and a defining achievement of nineteenth-century science.
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Empires active in 6 March 1869 (O.S.)
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- Empire of Japan1868 CE – 1947 CE
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Opening of the Suez Canal17 November 1869
- Maxwell formulates the theory of electromagnetism1865–1873
- Bell Patents the Telephone1876
- Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species24 November 1859
- Edison's Electric Light and Central Power1879 (Pearl Street 1882)
- Germ Theory of Disease Established by Pasteur and Koch1882 (Koch's tuberculosis bacillus, 24 March)
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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