Meyer, Julius Lothar (1830-1895), a German chemist, showed the relation between the masses and the properties of the elements. An element’s mass is the amount of matter it contains. Meyer and the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev independently developed a periodic table, which grouped the elements by their masses and properties (see Element, Chemical [Periodic table]). Meyer also concluded that elements were composed of several kinds of smaller particles. This idea led other scientists to study the structure of atoms. In the modern periodic table, elements are grouped in the order of their atomic number (the number of protons in each nucleus).
Meyer was born in Tubingen on Aug. 19, 1830. He was a professor of chemistry at the University of Tubingen from 1876 until his death on April 11, 1895.
See also Chemistry (Formation of the periodic table) ; Mendeleev, Dmitri Ivanovich .
