Who discovered the periodic table of elements, the fundamental materials of which all matter is composed?
There is no simple answer. The story begins with the ancient Greek philosophers. Aristotle, among others, identified four elements: earth, water, fire and air. Some elements – such as iron, copper, gold and other metals – have been known since antiquity. Today, the periodic table has 116 elements, the most recent of which was added just last month – an element that for now is known as element 118 for the number of protons in its nucleus, more than in any other element. (Two other elements are predicted from the existence of spaces in the periodic table, but have not yet been synthesized.) The modern periodic table dates to the 1860s, when six scientists – most of them obscure – independently produced different versions of the table, writes Scerri, whose book is a history of modern chemistry and physics. A French geologist named Alexandre Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois essentially discovered the periodic system, but his publisher was unable to publish the complex diagram of the periodic
