In 1869, Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev

created the framework that became the modern periodic table, leaving gaps for elements that were yet to be discovered. While arranging the elements according to their atomic weight, if he found that they did not fit into the group he would rearrange them.

Did the periodic table come from a dream?

As one story has it, Mendeleev, exhausted from his three-day effort, fell asleep. He later recalled, “I saw in a dream, a table, where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.” (Strathern, 2000) He named his discovery the “periodic table of the elements.”

When was the periodic table developed and who created it?

Yet historians typically consider one event as marking the formal birth of the modern periodic table: on February 17, 1869, a Russian professor of chemistry, Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, completed the first of his numerous periodic charts.