Los Alamos National Laboratory’s interactive periodic table one of the web’s very first — ever!

On Periodic Table Day (Feb. 7), explore our ahead-of-its-time table, launched in 1992

February 4, 2022

2022-02-04

In 1992, when just a handful of webpages populated the newly established World Wide Web, a graduate student at Los Alamos National Laboratory did something extraordinary: he launched one of the web’s first-ever interactive periodic table of elements — and it still exists today.

The elements on the table are clickable, offering users — mostly elementary, middle and high school students working on chemistry assignments — the chance to deep-dive into everything there is to know about them, from their origins and properties to their electron configurations and boiling points.

Over the years, experts from the Laboratory’s Chemistry Division have spiffed up the periodic table a few times with facelifts and redesigns. The table was last updated in 2016 to include four new elements: nihonium (Nh, element 113), moscovium (Mc, element 115), tennessine (Ts, element 117) and oganesson (Og, element 118).

Some 30 years after its launch, the table still earns hundreds of thousands of views each year, proving it’s still an incredibly popular and valued resource in the world of chemistry.

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