Mendeleev was a teacher as well as a chemist. He was writing a chemistry textbook and needed a way to organize the elements so it would be easier for students to learn about them. He made a set of cards of the elements, similar to a deck of playing cards, with one element per card. On the card, he wrote the elements name, atomic mass, and known properties. He arranged and rearranged the cards in many different ways, looking for a pattern. He finally found it when he placed the elements in order by atomic mass. You can see how Mendeleev organized the elements in Figure 6.2. From left to right across each row, elements are arranged by increasing atomic mass. Mendeleev discovered that if he placed eight elements in each row and then continued on to the next row, the columns of the table would contain elements with similar properties. He called the columns groups. They are sometimes called families, because elements within a group are similar but not identical to one another, like people in a family. Mendeleevs table of the elements is called a periodic table because of its repeating pattern. Anything that keeps repeating is referred to as periodic. Other examples of things that are periodic include the monthly phases of the moon and the daily cycle of night and day. The term period refers to the interval between repetitions. In a periodic table, the periods are the rows of the table. In Mendeleevs table, each period contains eight elements, and then the pattern repeats in the next row. Did you notice the blanks in Mendeleevs table (Figure 6.2)? They are spaces that Mendeleev left for elements that had not yet been discovered when he created his table. He predicted that these missing elements would eventually be discovered. Based on their position in the table, he could even predict their properties. For example, he predicted a missing element in row 5 of his group 3. He said it would have an atomic mass of about 68 and be a soft metal like other group 3 elements. Scientists searched for the missing element. They found it a few years later and named it gallium. Scientists searched for the other missing elements. Eventually, all of them were found. An important measure of a good model is its ability to make accurate predictions. This makes it a useful model. Clearly, Mendeleevs periodic table was a useful model. It helped scientists discover new elements and make sense of those that were already known. A periodic table is still used today to classify the elements. Figure 6.3 shows the modern periodic table. You can see an interactive version at this URL: . In the modern periodic table, elements are organized by atomic number. The atomic number is the number of protons in an atom of an element. This number is unique for each element, so it seems like an obvious way to organize the elements. (Mendeleev used atomic mass instead of atomic number because protons had not yet been discovered when he made his table.) In the modern table, atomic number increases from left to right across each period. It also increases from top to bottom within each group. How is this like Mendeleevs table? Besides atomic number, the periodic table includes each elements chemical symbol and class. Some tables include other information as well. The chemical symbol consists of one or two letters that come from the chemicals name in English or another language. The first letter is always written in upper case. The second letter, if there is one, is always written in lower case. For example, the symbol for lead is Pb. It comes from the Latin word plumbum, which means "lead." Find lead in Figure 6.3. What is its atomic number? You can access videos about lead and other elements in the modern periodic table at this URL: . The classes of elements are metals, metalloids, and nonmetals. They are color-coded in the table. Blue stands for metals, orange for metalloids, and green for nonmetals. You can read about each of these three classes of elements later in the chapter, in the lesson "Classes of Elements.
Output: amount of matter in an atom