Not the Nobel prize in 1916

Atomic number

Early in the twentieth century Henry Moseley carried out ground-breaking work that revolutionised our knowledge of atomic structure, and would surely have earned him a Nobel prize had he not died so young

Peter Main

Figure 1 The modern periodic table

Each year PHYSICS REVIEW publishes an article on the Nobel prize for physics awarded 100 years ago. In 1916, however, no physics Nobel prize was awarded. So, instead, here is an account of some research carried out just over 100 years ago that revolutionised our knowledge of atomic structure and certainly deserved a Nobel prize.

This is the story of the search for a pattern relating the chemical elements, 63 of which had been discovered by the end of the 1860s. About this time, Dmitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist, searched for a pattern by ordering the elements according to their atomic mass. He noticed that their chemical properties repeated in a periodic way, so he arranged them in a table.