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>> For example, the myth of a dreamed table Mendeleev.
The first attempt to arrange the elements in order of increasing atomic weights was made by Alexander Émile Szancourtua (1862), who created the Tellurov screw, placing the elements on a screw line and noted the frequent cyclical repetition of chemical properties vertically. These models did not attract the attention of the scientific community.
In 1866, the chemist and musician John Alexander Newlands proposed his version of the periodic system, whose model (the “law of octaves”) resembled Mendeleev’s, but was compromised by the author’s persistent attempts to find mystical musical harmony in the table. In the same decade, several more attempts were made to systematize the chemical elements, and Julius Lothar Meyer (1864) came closest to the final version. However, the main difference of his model was that the basis of periodicity was taken valence, which is not the only and constant for a single element, and therefore such a table could not claim a full description of the physics of the elements and did not reflect the periodic law.
According to legend, the idea of a system of chemical elements came to Mendeleev in a dream, but it is known that one day, when asked how he discovered the periodic system, the scientist answered: “I may have been thinking over it for twenty years, and you think: I sat and suddenly... ready”[2].