Bayley, Thomas

A particularly interesting classification was the one with horizontal groups and vertical periods proposed by the Danish thermochemist Hans Peter j0rgen Julius Thomsen (1826-1909) in 1895 (Figure 23) (Thomsen, 1895). Such a pyramidal/ladder form representation had already been proposed by the English scientist Thomas Bayley in 1882 (Figure 24), but... 

To return to Thomsen, in a memoir of 1894 published by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, he offered a detailed examination of the atomic weights and their significance. His purpose was to establish that they, if only properly interpreted, revealed that the so-called atoms of our elements have evolved out of combination of particles of a common basic substance. He did not on this occasion discuss the relation to the periodic system, but this is what he did the following year, in a paper in which he proposed a new classification of the elements (Figure 8.1). From a formal point of view, Thomsen s innovation was merely to reverse periods and groups, which was not entirely original since versions of this kind had been proposed earlier, first by Thomas Bayley in 1882 and again by Carnelley in 1886. ° However, in 1894 Thomsen was unaware of these two systems, such as he stated in a letter to the American chemist Francis Venable (1856-1934), who in a book of 1896 described Thomsen s system in some detail. ... 

Thomas Bayley, On the Connexion between the Atomic Weight and the Chemical and Physical Properties of Elements, Philosophical Magazine 13 (1882) 26-37. Carnelley, Suggestions (note 24). 

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