Dobereiner's Periodic Table

A German scientist called Johann Dobereiner put forward his law of triads in 1817. Each of Dobereiner's triads was a group of three elements. The appearance and reactions of the elements in a triad were similar to each other.

Atomic masses At this time, scientists had begun to find out the relative atomic masses of the elements. Dobereiner discovered that the relative atomic mass of the middle element in each triad was close to the average of the relative atomic masses of the other two elements. This gave other scientists a clue that relative atomic masses were important when arranging the elements.