f all the many useful and interesting periodic tables on the Internet—the periodic tables of the animals, vegetables, and minerals—and U.S. Presidents, Vienna® Chicago-style hot dog condiments, SQL server dynamic management objects, and paleo food—the original Periodic Table of the Elements remains my favorite.

It’s not mine alone. While the multiplication table and tables of logarithms are pretty much forgotten, the meme of choice for purveyors of hot dog condiments or SQL-DMOs, is the Periodic Table of the Elements!
NIST’s involvement with the Periodic Table began in the early days of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), the name by which, aside from a brief period when we were just the Bureau of Standards, NIST was known as from 1901 to 1988. Nonetheless, the first secretary of NBS, Henry D. Hubbard, had a personal interest in the subject and devised a representation of “The Periodic Chart of the Atoms.” After being revised by pioneering NIST spectroscopist William Meggers, Hubbard’s table was later widely distributed by the Welch Scientific Company and can still be found in university lecture halls and laboratories around the world.
Over the years a number of element names have changed, new elements have been added, and occasionally retracted. (What do you mean you never heard of masurium, columbium, illinium, alabamine or virginium?)

The elements most recently named by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) are flerovium (114) and livermorium (116). The big winners overall seem to be the San Francisco Bay Area—berkelium, californium, lawrencium, seaborgium and livermorium—and Sweden—yttrium, nobelium and a whole bunch of the rare earths.
Another tabular arrangement of the elements—the Chart of the Radionuclides—has its own impressive monument on the NIST Gaithersburg campus. Similar in shape to Long Island, the Chart has to be cut into three pieces to be conveniently displayed on even a large page (the photo just shows the Brooklyn end of it).
Maybe that—or the fact that most of its entries are radioactive—is why it hasn’t yet captured the public imagination like the Periodic Table.
And before I forget, happy (belated) National Periodic Table Day to all!
3 Comments
John Aikman on March 03, 2016 1:59 PM
ron kolotylo on March 13, 2016 4:50 PM
Divyanka Beniwal on October 18, 2016 3:46 AM
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