The German chemist Julius Lothar Meyer, b. Aug. 19, 1830, d. Apr. 11, 1895, established, independent of Dmitry Mendeleyev, the principles underlying the periodic table of the elements. The first edition of his influential Die modernen Theorien der Chemie (1864; Modern Chemical Theory) contained a preliminary tabulation of 28 elements that indicated the stepwise, integral valence change that occurs as atomic weight increases. An expanded table of 57 elements, prepared about 1868 but not published until after Mendeleyev's work, clearly indicated for the first time the A- and B-subgroups of the chemical families.
Craig B. Waff
Bibliography: Freund, Ida, The Study of Chemical Composition (1904; repr. 1968); Spronsen, J. W. van, The Periodic System of Chemical Elements: A History of the First Hundred Years (1969).
Last modified on: Monday, October 20, 1997.