Alexandre-Émile-Beguyer de Chancourtois

French chemist

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June 24, 2026

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Alexandre-Émile-Béguyer de Chancourtois was a French geologist who, in 1862, proposed a periodic table of the elements. His arrangement plotted atomic weights on a cylinder with a circumference of 16 units, the atomic weight of oxygen. This was an early attempt to classify elements before Dmitri Mendeleev's more widely recognized periodic table in 1869. De Chancourtois's work, along with that of other chemists like Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner and John Newlands, contributed to the eventual development of the modern periodic table, which is now organized by atomic number.1

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periodic table
History of the periodic law
…arithmetic function, and in 1862 Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois proposed a classification of the elements based on the new values of atomic weights given by Stanislao Cannizzaro’s system of 1858. De Chancourtois plotted the atomic weights on the surface of a cylinder with a circumference of 16 units, corresponding to…
Read More
…arithmetic function, and in 1862 Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois proposed a classification of the elements based on the new values of atomic weights given by Stanislao Cannizzaro’s system of 1858. De Chancourtois plotted the atomic weights on the surface of a cylinder with a circumference of 16 units, corresponding to…
Read More