It is widely agreed upon that Dmitri Mendeleev is the father of the periodic table of elements that we are all familiar with today. That is at least debatable considering Lothar Meyer came up with a very similar table to Mendeleev’s. The crucial difference between these two is Dmitri’s was to get his widely published before Meyer, thus earning him the credit for developing the table. Before they were able to even assemble elements into an orderly manner, some important things had to happen first. Before it would be possible to even group elements together in an organized way, there, of course, had to be enough elements discovered to populate such a table. Many elemts have been known since thousands of years ago. The first scientific discovery of an element was the discovery of phosphorous in 1649 by Henning Brand. For 200 years following his discovery, science acquired a vast knowledge of elements and their properties. There were so many different elements, it was determined there must be a way to separate them into groups, if only for the sake of convenience. The earliest attempt to divide elements into gases, metals, non-metals, and earths was made by Antoine Lavoisier. For many years after his organization attempt, scientists all over the world began to learn about elements and how certain ones were similar to others. They used this information to make their own version of how they should be grouped together. It was eventually recognized that there should be a universal table for grouping elements together. As stated earlier Dmitri Mendeleev is considering the father of the periodic table of elements. Although he did develop what is essentially the foundation of the table we use today, it was actually Glenn Seaborg who finished his work and made the table that everyone uses today. Seaborg and his colleagues discovered the final elements on the table and