Monday 10 September 2012

John Newlands Law of Octaves

John Newlands was an English chemist who in 1865 classified the 56 elements that had been discovered at the time into eleven groups which were based on similar physical properties.

Newlands noted that many pairs of similar elements existed which differed by some multiple of eight in atomic number. However, his law of octaves, likening this periodicity of eights to the musical scale, was ridiculed by his contemporaries. It was not until the following century, with Gilbert N. Lewis' valence bond theory (1916) and Irving Langmuir's octet theory of chemical bonding (1919) that the importance of the periodicity of eight would be accepted.


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