<Li> lithium, sodium, and potassium </Li> <P> Alexandre - Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois, a French geologist, was the first person to notice the periodicity of the elements--similar elements occurring at regular intervals when they are ordered by their atomic weights . In 1862 he devised an early form of periodic table, which he named Vis tellurique (the' telluric helix'), after the element tellurium, which fell near the center of his diagram . With the elements arranged in a spiral on a cylinder by order of increasing atomic weight, de Chancourtois saw that elements with similar properties lined up vertically . His 1863 publication included a chart (which contained ions and compounds, in addition to elements), but his original paper in the Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences used geological rather than chemical terms and did not include a diagram . As a result, de Chancourtois' ideas received little attention until after the work of Dmitri Mendeleev had been publicised . </P> <P> In 1864, the English chemist John Newlands classified the sixty - two known elements into eight groups, based on their physical properties . </P> <P> Newlands noted that many pairs of similar elements existed, which differed by some multiple of eight in mass number, and was the first to assign them an atomic number . When his' law of octaves' was printed in Chemistry News, likening this periodicity of eights to the musical scale, it was ridiculed by some of his contemporaries . His lecture to the Chemistry Society on 1 March 1866 was not published, the Society defending their decision by saying that such' theoretical' topics might be controversial . </P>

Who invented a system of naming the elements