From the readily available copper to the noble gases hiding in the air we breathe, elements have been hiding in plain sight for eons.
Timeline dates show us, though, that the journey of figuring all of this out has been a bumpy one. For one thing, our modern table wasn’t systematized until 1869 by Dmitri Mendeleev, whose table even featured blank spots for elements that hadn’t been discovered yet!
Element discovery dates range from ancient times to the modern era. Due to the availability of many common metal elements, our history of working with and using elements like gold, copper, and lead far predates the history of the periodic table. The timeline of the history of periodic table is sporadic, with some “discoveries” happening via ancient artifacts and others happening during a wave of chemistry discoveries in the 17th century. We also saw a huge explosion of scientific discovery of elements, for better and for worse, during the mid-20th century while bigger and bigger atoms were being worked with as part of nuclear weapons research. Check out the history of chemical elements and when they were discovered to see how our journey to understanding these combinations of protons, neutrons, and electrons has changed over the centuries!
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