text: who deviced the periodic table of elements?   the periodic table of the chemical elements is a tabular method of displaying the chemical elements, first devised in 1869 by the russian chemist dmitri mendeleev. mendeleev intended the table to illustrate recurring ("periodic") trends in the properties of the elements. the layout of the table has been refined and extended over time, as many new elements have been discovered since mendeleev's time, and new theoretical models have been developed to explain chemical behavior. various layouts are possible to emphasize different aspects of behavior; the most common forms, however, are still quite similar to mendeleev's original design. the english chemist john newlands, who noticed in 1865 that the elements of similar type recurred at intervals of eight, which he likened to the octaves of music, though his law of octaves was ridiculed by his contemporaries. finally, in 1869 the russian chemistry professor dmitri ivanovich mendeleev and four months later the german julius lothar meyer independently developed the first periodic table, arranging the elements by mass. however, mendeleev plotted a few elements out of strict mass sequence in order to make a better match to the properties of their neighbors in the table, corrected mistakes in the values of several atomic masses, and predicted the existence and properties of a few new elements in the empty cells of his table. mendeleev was later vindicated by the discovery of the electronic structure of the elements in the late 19th and early 20th century.  in the 1940s glenn t. seaborg identified the transuranic lanthanides and the actinides, which may be placed within the table, or below (as shown above). element 106, seaborgium, is the only element that was named after a living person. (seaborg has since died.)