MCQ Detailed View

The Telluric Helix was one of the earliest attempts to arrange chemical elements in a systematic way. This concept was introduced in 1862 by the French geologist A.E. de Chancourtois. He arranged the known elements in order of increasing atomic weight and plotted them on a cylinder in a spiral, or helical, form. When elements were positioned in this way, those with similar chemical properties aligned vertically.

The arrangement was called the Telluric Helix because the element tellurium appeared near the center of the chart. It was also known as the vis tellurique. De Chancourtois’ work was revolutionary because it demonstrated that the chemical properties of elements repeat at regular intervals when organized by atomic weight. This was one of the first clear expressions of the idea of periodicity, which later became the foundation of the modern periodic table.

However, his contribution did not gain immediate recognition. The main reason was that his work was published in a geological journal rather than a chemical one, and the diagram of the helix was not included in the original publication. This limited its visibility among chemists of the time.

Despite this, historians of chemistry acknowledge de Chancourtois as the first to propose a periodic arrangement of elements, several years before John Newlands’ Law of Octaves (1864) and Dmitri Mendeleev’s more refined Periodic Table (1869). While Newlands and Mendeleev presented their ideas in ways that reached the chemistry community more effectively, de Chancourtois laid an important foundation.

Therefore, the concept of the Telluric Helix in periodic classification is credited to A.E. de Chancourtois, marking a significant early step in the development of periodic law and the classification of elements.