Free Web Site - Free Web Space and Site Hosting - Web Hosting - Internet Store and Ecommerce Solution Provider - High Speed Internet
Search the Web

        John Alexander Reina Newlands was a British chemist who contributed significantly to the periodic table of elements.  He was born on November 26, 1837 to an English father and an Italian mother in London, England.  He studied there, at the Royal College of Chemistry. In 1860 he served as a volunteer under Giuseppe Garibaldi in his campaign to unify Italy. When he was done serving for Garibaldi, he set up his practice as an analytical chemist.  It was not until then, in 1864, that he made his contribution to the periodic table.  He formulated the "Law of Octaves".   The Law of Octaves was a slightly more developed idea of Dobereiner's triads.  Newlands arranged sixty-two known elements in order of increasing atomic masses and discovered that after each interval of eight elements similar physical and chemical properties reappeared.  This enabled him to divide the elements into families and periods.  He said "the eighth element starting from a given one is a kind of repetition of the first, like the eighth note of an octave in music".  He tried to publish his paper on it in the Journal of Chemical Society, a very prestigious journal, but they rejected it.  His idea was not well received at the time, but five years later a Russian chemist by the name of Dmitri Mendeleyev published a more developed form of the table that was also based on atomic masses, which is similar to the one that we use today.  During this time, he also published several of his communications in Chemical News.  In 1868 he  became the chief chemist in a sugar refinery, where he introduced a number of improvements in processing.  He worked there until 1886.  After that he became an analyst again.  He worked there until his death on July 29, 1898.  John Newlands was a great chemist who made a huge contribution to the periodic table and science in general.

here is a link to page 1
here is a link to page 3
Here is a link to page 4
Here is a link to page 5
Click here to return to my home page