John Newlands (chemist)

John Alexander Reina Newlands was a British chemist born on November 26, 1837, and passed away on July 29, 1898. He made important discoveries about how the properties of elements repeat in a pattern, which is called periodicity.

Newlands noticed that when elements are arranged by their weight, certain properties repeat every eighth element, similar to how musical notes create a repeating pattern. This idea was an early step toward what we now call the periodic table of elements.

His work helped scientists understand how elements are related and paved the way for later chemists to organize all the known elements into the table we use today. Though he didn’t receive much recognition at the time, Newlands’ insights were very important for the development of modern chemistry.

Biography

John Newlands was born in London, England, in a place called West Square in Southwark. His father was a Scottish Presbyterian minister, and his mother was from Italy.

He was taught at home by his father and later studied at the Royal College of Chemistry, now part of Imperial College London. Newlands helped in social reform and joined Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1860 to help unify Italy. After returning to London, he became an analytical chemist in 1864. In 1868, he worked as the chief chemist at James Duncan's London sugar refinery, where he made improvements in how sugar was processed. He later worked with his brother, Benjamin, as an analyst.

Newlands was the first to create a periodic table of chemical elements arranged by their atomic masses. He shared his idea in Chemical News in February 1863. Building on the work of Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner with triads and Jean-Baptiste Dumas, he published the "Law of Octaves" in 1865. This law said that elements show similar behavior to the element eight places after them in the table. Newlands arranged all known elements, from hydrogen to thorium, into eight groups of seven, like the octaves of music. His table showed groups across and periods down, which is different from how we arrange the periodic table today.

At the time, some of his peers did not accept his Law of Octaves, and the Society of Chemists would not publish his work. Later, after Dmitri Mendeleev and Lothar Meyer received the Davy Medal in 1882 for their work on the periodic table, Newlands worked hard to get recognition for his earlier ideas. He finally received the Davy Medal in 1887.

Works

John Newlands wrote a book called "On the discovery of the periodic law, and on relations among the atomic weights". It was published in London in 1884.