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RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:

150 Years ago on February 17th, 1869, Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev published his first draft [livescience.com] of the period table of the elements.

Mendeleev honed this "periodic system," as he called it, by writing down the names, masses and properties of each known element on a set of cards. According to science historian Mike Sutton of Chemistry World, Mendeleev then laid these cards down before him — solitaire-like — and started shuffling them around until he found an order that made sense.

The final working arrangement reportedly came to him in a dream. That first draft only had 63 elements and looks quite different than the honed versions of today.

Mendeleev was so confident in his system that he left gaps for undiscovered elements, and even predicted (correctly) the properties of three of those elements.

Those three elements were gallium, scandium and germanium.

They were discovered within three years and their properties matched Mendeleev's predictions, helping solidify the table's place in history and chemistry to the present day.

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