Döbereiner’s Triads In the year 1817, Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner, a German chemist, tried to arrange the elements with similar properties into groups. He identified some groups having three elements each. So he called these groups ‘triads’. Döbereiner showed that when the three elements in a triad were written in the order of increasing atomic masses;…

MAKING ORDER OUT OF CHAOS – EARLY ATTEMPTS AT THE CLASSIFICATION OF ELEMENTS We have been learning how various things or living beings can be classified on the basis of their properties. Even in other situations, we come across instances of organisation based on some properties. For example, in a shop, soaps are kept together…