Sleek Periodic Table of Elements

It was between Mendeleev’s first and final drafts that element-arranging really took off. Following in the footsteps of de Chancourtois, many chemists attempted to perfect the spiral configuration. According to Peter Wothers, director of studies in chemistry at St Catharine’s College in Cambridge, UK, it’s ‘particularly pleasing’ for a chemist to see the elements in a spiral conformation because it keeps their atomic numbers in order, in one long, unbroken string. Though in Mendeleev’s day, there was only atomic weight to go by.

Today, we rarely see the elements so well-ordered as they are in a spiral because, besides having to read from left to right and back again across the periodic table, modern chemistry textbooks generally condense it to an 18-column form, which relocates the lanthanides and actinides to a floating box at the bottom. According to Scerri, the 32-column version that leaves them between the transition metals is a definite improvement. ‘There, every element is in its rightful place in terms of atomic number,’ he says. ‘It’s more philosophically sound.’ But for textbooks and wall displays, he concedes, the 18-column one is more practical.

A printable periodic table is an essential tool for students and chemists. You can place it where you need it while solving problems, mark it up, and print a new one whenever you like. This is a collection of free printable periodic tables in PDF file or PNG image format to save, print, and use. These periodic tables use accurate data for name, atomic number, element symbol, atomic weight, and electron configuration, obtained from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry or IUPAC.

Its conception is, of course, attributed to Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist whose moment of genius 150 years ago we are celebrating with the International Year of the Periodic Table. But over the last century and a half, it has seen some bizarre and occasionally beautiful reimaginings. Even before Mendeleev scribbled his first draft in 1868, the French geologist, Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois, formulated his vis tellurique, or ‘telluric screw’, a graph of the elements with tellurium at its centre that he displayed on a cylinder. The graph looked more like a nautical chart than a table of elements, but it had a lot in common with Mendeleev’s version. De Chancourtois arranged the elements in order of their atomic weights and recognised that certain properties recurred in regular intervals – mirroring the periodicity that Mendeleev displayed in the rows of his table. Wrapping it around a cylinder produced vertical lists of similar elements akin to Mendeleev’s groups. Sadly for de Chancourtois, the need to view his system in 3D and being published in a geology journal meant it never caught on among chemists.

Earlier still, German chemist Johann Döbereiner had grouped the elements into threes, based on their atomic weights. In each group of three, the weight of the middle element was approximately the average of the other two. As Scerri explains, using atomic weight meant these ‘triads’ weren’t exact, but Döbereiner was still able to place bromine between chlorine and iodine, and sodium between lithium and potassium as early as 1829. ‘With atomic number, which is now the ordering principle, those triads are exact,’ says Scerri. Atomic numbers weren’t discovered until after Mendeleev’s death, though, so his first tables showed some elements in the wrong order based on atomic weights. He did correct these, but only based on the patterns he saw in their properties.

What we’ve done is list the tables, along with links, so you can get detailed info about each one. The HD periodic tables make great screen savers or reference tables on mobile devices. They are sized to fit on a sheet of paper and you don’t need to worry about marking them up because you can always print more for working homework problems or performing lab calculations. The tables re-size cleanly, so you can view or print at any size or aspect ratio, from tiny to poster-sized.

To download a table, click the image to right-click and save or use the provided links for image or PDF downloads (if available).

• Periodic Table is a handy, free program also available for Mac, that is part of the category Science & education software with subcategory Physics & Chemistry and has been published by Freshney.org.
• It’s available for users with the operating system Windows 2000 and former versions, and you can download it only in English. Its current version is 3.8.1 and was updated on 11/16/2009.
• Since we added this program to our catalog in 2006, it has managed to obtain 300.452 installations, and last week it gained 418 installations.
• About the download, Periodic Table is a slick program that takes up less space than the average program in the category Science & education software. It’s very heavily used in India, Pakistan, and Philippines.