Look around. How many things can you see? How many things exist in the world? Consider that every single one of these objects, including yourself is composed from just a group of 118 elements.

People have known about some of these elements for thousands of years, such as gold, silver, copper and mercury. Potassium, iodine zinc and helium were only discovered in the 19th century. While newer elements like Ununseptium and Flerovium are manmade.

At 46% Oxygen is the most common element on earth, making up. Carbon is found in all living things: people, dogs, cats, plants, birds, trees.Every living thing on earth. At a total of 31 grams on earth, astatine is the rarest natural element.

The understanding of the elements is the basis of chemistry, biology, physics and all knowledge stemming from these building blocks.

In order to understand the elements we needed a means of organizing and categorizing each one. Man had struggled for millennia to devise such a system. In 1869, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, gave us the periodic table as we know it.

Mendeleev created a diagram that resembles a lopsided castle. Each row and column has it’s meaning. Each element appears in order according to its number of protons. So H (hydrogen) come first with 1 proton, He (helium) with 3 protons and so forth through to Og (oganesson) with 118 protons.

The vertical columns, or groups, tells us the number of electrons in the outer orbital and the rows, or periods, tell us the number of electron orbitals an elements has.

When the periodic table was first developed there were many gaps. In the 19th and 20th century scientists raced to discover and fill those gaps. Currently the entire table is filled in, although we may develop new elements over time.

The periodic table is so applicable and significant it is still in use today. This universally understood diagram can be found in every child’s science classroom and professional science laboratory.

In 2019 the world will celebrate 150 years of the ingenious periodic table.