History of Natural Science

The vacancies in Mendeleev periodic table and the exclamation from Chinese envoy

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  • Department of the History of Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Received date: 2019-05-27

  Online published: 2019-09-12

Abstract

Mendeleev completed the first periodic table of chemical elements in the world in 1869, including all 63 known elements at that time arranged into different families in accordance with atomic weight. In addition, he reserved some vacancies and predicted
the existence of some unknown elements and their characters. In the following decades, these vacancies had been successively filled up by newfound elements. In 1877, Guo Songtao, the first Chinese envoy to Britain, heard the story about Mendeleev’s prediction and
the discovery of element Gallium, associating with the course of discovery of Neptune, he unfeignedly praised the western sciences in
terms of delicacy and efficacy.

Cite this article

LIU Dun . The vacancies in Mendeleev periodic table and the exclamation from Chinese envoy[J]. Chinese Journal of Nature, 2019 , 41(4) : 294 -298 . DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.0253-9608.2019.04.009

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