Periodic table
Russian chemistry professor Dmitri Mendeleev and German chemist Julius Lothar Meyer independently published their periodic tables in 1869 and 1870, respectively. Mendeleev's table was his first published version; that of Meyer was an expanded version of his (Meyer's) table of 1864. They both constructed their tables by listing the elements in rows or columns in order of atomic weight and starting a new row or column when the characteristics of the elements began to repeat.
Alternative periodic tables
In Theodor Benfey's periodic table (1964), the elements form a two-dimensional spiral, starting from hydrogen, and folding their way around two peninsulars, the transition metals, and lanthanides and actinides. A superactinide island is already slotted in. The Chemical Galaxy (2004) is organized in a similar way.