John Alexander Reina Newlands

A Chemist in London

John Alexander Reina Newlands was born on 26 November 1837 in London. He was the son of a Scottish clergyman and showed an early interest in chemistry. He studied at the Royal College of Chemistry and later worked in the family business while pursuing his chemical research.

Newlands’s mother, Mary Sarah Reina, was of Italian descent. He pursued much of his later chemical research outside a university position.

The Law of Octaves

In the 1860s, Newlands began arranging the known elements in order of increasing atomic weight. He noticed that elements with similar chemical properties seemed to recur at regular intervals — every eighth element shared characteristics with the first.

Newlands published his Law of Octaves in 1865 and presented the idea to the Chemical Society on 1 March 1866. The name was inspired by music: just as every eighth note in a musical scale is similar to the first, every eighth element in his arrangement resembled the one before the interval.

The reception was not encouraging. Some chemists thought the comparison to music was fanciful, and the idea that elements might follow a repeating pattern was not widely accepted at the time. Newlands’s system also had genuine limitations: it worked better for the lighter elements and became unreliable when extended to heavier ones. Unlike Mendeleev’s later system, Newlands did not deliberately leave predictive gaps for undiscovered elements.

Belated Recognition

Despite the initial dismissal, Newlands continued to defend his work. As other chemists — particularly Mendeleev and Lothar Meyer — developed more comprehensive periodic systems, the underlying idea that Newlands had grasped became widely accepted.

In 1887, the Royal Society awarded Newlands the Davy Medal for his work on the periodic law of the chemical elements. The recognition came more than two decades after his original presentation, and it acknowledged that his Law of Octaves had been a genuine, if incomplete, step towards the periodic table.

Newlands died on 29 July 1898 in London. He did not live to see the full integration of periodic classification into modern chemistry, but his contribution was no longer dismissed.