What made Mendeleev’s periodic table more widely accepted than others?
1 Answer
Mendeleev’s periodic table became widely accepted because it correctly predicted the properties of elements that had not yet been discovered.
Explanation:
What he did
Mendeleev arranged the elements in order of increasing atomic mass and placed elements with similar properties below each other.
What his table did
1. Grouping elements according to their properties corrected some wrongly assigned atomic masses.
2. The arrangement of elements according to their properties left some blank spaces in the table.
Why the table was accepted
Mendeleev assumed that the blank spaces represented elements that had not yet been discovered.
He used his table to predict the chemical and physical properties of five of the missing elements.
Three of these elements were discovered in the next 15 years, and their properties closely matched Mendeleev's predictions.
Chemists then accepted Mendeleev's Periodic Table.
