Oldest periodic table of the elements wall chart

The oldest periodic table of the elements wall chart dates from 1885, and was found at St Andrews University, St Andrews, UK in 2014.

The chart was made just 16 years after the Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev published the first periodic table in 1869.

This periodic table was found in St. Andrews University iin 2014. Scientists were able to establish the date the wall-chart was printed by studying the chemical elements present in the table, establishing who was the company that printed it, and the record of a purchase by the university from a scientific equipment supplier.

In this table, elements such as gallium and scandium are present, since they were discovered in 1875 and 1879; germanium, on the other hand, discovered in 1886, is not present. Moreover, the table has an inscription at the bottom left corner with the name of the publisher, Verlag v. Lenoir & Forster, a company specialised in scientific and teaching aids, which operated in Vienna, Austria since 1873. Entry of a purchase order for a periodic table to C. Gerhardt (Bonn) was found in the records of St Andrews University for the year 1888; the person responsible for the order was professor Thomas Purdie, who worked in St Andrews from 1884 to 1908. Matching these data, scientists came to the conclusion that the table dated back to 1885.

In 1869 the Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev announced the first systematic classification based in the periodic law (D. Mendelejeff, Über die Beziehungen der Eigenshaften zu den Atomgewichten der Elemente. Zeitschrift für Chemie 12: 405–406, 1869); he arranged the chemical elements in rows and columns according to their atomic weight, and according to their reccurring (periodic) properties. Scientists involved in the discovery of this old periodic table were Dr Alan Aitken, Ms. M. Pilar Gil and prof. David O'Hagan, all from St. Andrews University.