I recently heard about an English scientist called John Newlands who, in 1864, put forward his “Law Of Octaves”.  Using the relative atomic mass of all the elements known to scientists at the time, he arranged them into an ordered table.  He found that each element was similar to the element 8 places further on in the table.  His table showed a repeating or “periodic” pattern of properties, but it was unfortunately fraught with problems.  E.g. His table placed iron (a metal) in the same group as oxygen and sulphur, which are both non-metals, and thus his table was not accepted by other scientists.  I saw “Awwww!” to that!

Here is a youtube video that runs through a rather silent explanation of this table (images and writing only, with an occasional mysterious scale played on guitar now and then.)

Warning: This video contains science and scientific terms.

John Newlands’ Law of Octaves and how it contributed to the development of the Periodic Table