Gustavus Hinrichs and His Charts of the Elements

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the efforts of the German-American chemist Gustavus Detlef Hinrichs (1836–1923) to construct a periodic system between 1867 and 1869. Included is a transcription and translation into English of major sections of his Programme der Atomechanik (1867), and a discussion of Hinrichs’s “pantatom” theory of matter. My principal conclusions are: (1) Hinrichs’s chart of 1867 is actually a double spiral that begins in a clockwise fashion but then reverses direction and continues in a counterclockwise direction, (2) the nitrogen and oxygen groups are swapped because Hinrichs felt that that order resulted in more consistent trends in the stoichiometries of the highest oxides, (3) in his chart the trigonoids and tetragonoids each subtend one-third of a circle, and the spokes are arranged so that the maximal valences of the elements increase from right to left, (4) Hinrichs devised an ingenious theory to account for isomorphism, (5) the transition elements in Hinrichs’s 1869 table are listed in reverse order for the same reason that the spiral in his 1867 chart reverses direction, (6) the transition elements in the 1869 system are arranged in a slanted fashion to reflect their relative atomic weights, whereas other elements are not arranged in this way, possibly owing to a printer’s omission, (7) Hinrichs was the first to point out that one advantage of the “long” form periodic tables is that the metals and non-metals can be separated by a single line, and (8) simultaneously with Meyer and Mendeleev, Hinrichs also pointed out the periodic relationship of atomic volume to atomic weight, but only in his oral presentation to the AAAS meeting of August 1869.