Search results
John Newlands (born November 26, 1837, London, England—died July 29, 1898, London) was an English chemist whose “law of octaves” noted a pattern in the atomic structure of elements with similar chemical properties and contributed in a significant way to the development of the periodic law.
Newlands was the first person to devise a periodic table of chemical elements arranged in order of their relative atomic masses published in Chemical News in February 1863.
John Newlands put forward his law of octaves in 1864 in which he arranged all the elements known at the time into a table in order of relative atomic mass. When he did this, he found that each element was similar to the element eight places further on.
Newlands found that when he listed the elements in order of increasing atomic weight, they seemed to fall into seven families that contained elements with similar chemical properties. His table listed these families in horizontal rows, as shown in Table 7.2.
The modern periodic table has evolved through a long history of attempts by chemists to arrange the elements according to their properties as an aid in predicting chemical behavior.
English chemist John Newlands noticed that, if the elements were arranged in order of atomic weight, there was a periodic similarity every 7 elements. He proposed his ‘law of octaves’ – similar to the octaves of music.
Feb 6, 2018 · February 7, 1863, was the day John Newlands published a paper outlining what would be known as “The Law of Octaves”. Newlands discovered if he ordered the known elements by increasing atomic weight, the chemical properties of the elements would be similar for every eighth group.
