Apparecchiando la Tavola: l’ordine degli elementi

Abstract

The periodic table of the chemical elements, published in 1869 by Dmitri Mendeleev, is actually the destination of an exciting journey that lasted over 3000 years, which will be broken down into key steps and briefly discussed herein. To this journey, driven mainly by the innate curiosity of scientists and philosophers to understand the structure and composition of the world around us, the greatest minds of chemistry and natural philosophy, from Empedocles, to Priestley, to Lavoisier, to Davy, have contributed with essential individual pieces that combined into the solution of such a majestic jigsaw puzzle by Mendeleev. Although the periodic table is a milestone of chemistry and one of the greatest triumphs of scientific knowledge, it is continuously evolving and it is still nowadays one of the most useful and versatile tools for the understanding and rationalizing a broad range of chemical and physical phenomena.