Dmitri Mendeleev
Unaware of the earlier work on periodic tables going on in the 1860s, he made the following table:
By adding additional elements following this pattern, Mendeleev developed his extended version of the periodic table. On 6 March 1869, he made a formal presentation to the Russian Chemical Society, titled "The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements", which described elements according to both atomic weight (now called "relative atomic mass") and valence. This presentation stated that
History of the periodic table
The history of the periodic table is also a history of the discovery of the chemical elements. The first person in history to discover a new element was Hennig Brand, a bankrupt German merchant. Brand tried to discover the Philosopher's Stone — a mythical object that was supposed to turn inexpensive base metals into gold. In 1669 (or later), his experiments with distilled human urine resulted in the production of a glowing white substance, which he called "cold fire" ("kaltes Feuer"). He kept his discovery secret until 1680, when Robert Boyle rediscovered phosphorus and published his findings. The discovery of phosphorus helped to raise the question of what it meant for a substance to be an element.