John Alexander Reina Newlands

Who was John Alexander Reina Newlands?

John Alexander Reina Newlands was an English chemist who worked on the development of the periodic table.

Newlands was born in London and was the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister and his Italian wife. He was homeschooled by his father and went on to study at the Royal College of Chemistry. He was interested in social reform and in 1860 served as a volunteer with Giuseppe Garibaldi in his campaign to unify Italy. Returning to London, Newlands set up in practice as an analytical chemist in 1864, and in 1868 he became chief chemist in James Duncan's London sugar refinery, where he introduced a number of improvements in processing. Later he left the refinery and again set up as an analyst with his brother, Benjamin.

Newlands was the first person to devise a periodic table of elements arranged in order of their relative atomic weights. Continuing Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner’s work with triads and Jean-Baptiste Dumas' families of similar elements, he published in 1865 his 'Law of octaves', which stated that "any given element will exhibit analogues behaviour to the eighth element following it in the table." Newlands’ arranged all of the known elements into seven groups, which he likened to the octaves of music. In Newlands' table, the elements were ordered by the atomic weights that were known at the time and were numbered sequentially to show their order. Periods were shown going down the table, with groups going across – the opposite from the modern form of the periodic table.