I loooooove the history of science and I did a deep dive on the periodic table recently for my novel wip (the magic system is "what if alchemy, but real" and is set in a very specific time period so knowing the exact year we figured out and also isolated various chemical elements is actually very important lol). The one immediately above is great because it's so fucking awkward looking but the organization is sound. People kinda forget that the lanthanides and actanides are actually in the middle of the table and not just kinda living on the bottom (like how you forget how big/small and farway alaska/hawai'i are from the lower 48/mainland)
Anyways this one is probably my favorite
This one was made by Mendeleev in 1904.
Some interesting bits:
- All the noble gases are on the left in the "zero('th) group." It took us a really long time to discover them, mostly because they're not really hanging around on earth much (there was a belief for a hot minute that they could only exist in space)
- They aren't "numbered" (via protons) like our current tables
- There's some gaps that make perfect sense (like for #43) but there's no way I can count spaces/marks for the gap between Cerium (#58) and Ytterbium (#70) to make sense
- You'll also notice the gaps between Argon and Krypton and Krypton and Xenon...but there aren't any noble gases that exist for those. But that's because Magnesium to Aluminum has a big gulf between them on the modern table (if you have to use other properties/general weights to organize elements and not their proton counts then yeah you'll run into issues like this)
But now you are probably wondering something. Why is there a spot in the group of noble gases to the left of Hydrogen? And why does it have a symbol? And, hey, wait a minute, why is there even a series # 0????
'cause we had no fucking idea how space worked lol. "Coronium" was a theoretical element that can be viewed via spectroscopy in the solar corona during an eclipse (specific green color). This is the element to the left of hydrogen, with a proposed atomic weight of 0.4 (Hydrogen is ~1, in comparison)
And then there's element x, aka "maybe let's call it Newtonium" aka ~Luminiferous aether~
So you know how light is a wave? A wave is a thing that is wiggling back/forth/up/down, like sound through air. But if space is full of nothing, how can a wave wiggle through it....? It's actually quite simple! Space is not empty, uh, space, it's full of aether! It is sooooooo light that it doesn't have mass really and also doesn't interact with any other objects and also maybe has to theoretically exist infinitely since space is theoretically infinitely big.
Yes, people by the time of this periodic table being made were like "uh this doesn't sound right" but no one could really prove anything else was right, hence why it's on this table from 1904. The thing that really proved luminerfous aether wasn't a thing was Einstein's whole thing about special relativity.
Which was 1905.
so yeah this specific periodic table could only have existed for a very tiny window of time and it is so on point and also so fundamentally incorrect it is very funny that's why it's my favorite
(the green thing in the corona was actually a really juiced up ion of iron they just didn't have a way to make that shit in a lab back then didnt stop some guys from swearing they found it in some gases off mt vesuvius tho lol)
