The periodic table stares down from the walls of just about every chemistry lab. The credit for its creation generally goes to Dimitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist who in 1869 wrote out the known ...

At the middle of the 19th century, 63 chemical elements were known to science. Before Mendeleev’s discovery, attempts at arranging them in some logical way were made by Johann Doebereiner (1829), ...