How the Design of the Periodic Table Changed Throughout the Years

Ever wonder why the periodic table of elements looks the way it does now? Well, it didn't really start that way and through the years there have been changes in its design. We credit Dmitri Medeleev as the one to present the known elements in his time on a table with rows and columns.

But the periodic table didn’t actually start with Mendeleev. Many had tinkered with arranging the elements. Decades before, chemist John Dalton tried to create a table as well as some rather interesting symbols for the elements (they didn’t catch on). And just a few years before Mendeleev sat down with his deck of homemade cards, John Newlands also created a table sorting the elements by their properties.