Essay On The Periodic Table

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The periodic table is an identifiable scientific resource that is used to display the elements that make up all matter. Elements are the simplest matter and cannot be broken down into purer substances using chemical methods . The periodic table shows all elements and there are over 100. The discovery of the periodic table was a pinnacle in science as it categorizes the elements by their various chemical and physical properties.

Even in ancient times, people had always been aware of elements like gold, silver and copper. In 350 BCE, Aristotle had a theory that all matter was made up of the elements of earth, fire, air and water . He believed that lighter objects had less earth than heaver objects. He even spoke of a 5th substance, aether, a weightless and incorruptible substance that makes up the sun, moon, planet and stars .

Much Later, in 1649, Hennig Brand discovered the first element, phosphorus, as he tried to make a philosopher’s stone while experimenting with distilled human urine. This got people thinking about which substances are elements. In 1661, Boyle defined an element as "a substance that cannot be broken down into a simpler substance by a chemical reaction". This definition was used until subatomic particles were discovered .

In the 1700’s, Antoine Lavoiser wrote the first extensive list of elements and categorized them into metals and non-metals . Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner and Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois also tried to classify the elements in the mid 1800’s but were not extremely successful. Döbereiner classified elements into triads with elements with similar properties while Béguyer de Chancourtoiswas the first to notice that when elements are arranged by their atomic weights, groups of elements ...

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...he same regardless of the type of atom. He then concluded that atoms consist of tiny, negatively charged particles. He, like Chadwick, received a Nobel prize for his work in 1906 .

John Dalton was another English scientist to make significant contributions to science. Dalton was born in 1766 and spent a lot of his life studying the air and gases. This led him to make discover that chemical combinations consist of the interaction of atoms. He published his thoughts on atoms in 1805 . Dalton’s atomic theory states that all matter is made of atoms, atoms are indivisible and indestructible, all atoms of a given element are identical is mass and properties, compounds are formed by a combination of two or more different kinds of atoms and that a chemical reaction is a rearrangement of atoms . This atomic theory is known as a foundation for many discoveries in chemistry.

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