Periodic Table Quizzes & Trivia

You may remember the Periodic Table of the Elements as a dreary chart on your classroom wall. If so, you never guessed its real purpose: it’s a giant cheat sheet. The table has served chemistry students since 1869, when it was created by Dmitry Mendeleyev, a cranky professor at the University of St. Petersburg. With a publisher’s deadline looming, Mendeleyev didn’t have time to describe all 63 then-known elements.

So he turned to a data set of atomic weights meticulously gathered by others. Fond of card games, he sorted these elements as in solitaire. If you are fond of this old friend, take these quizzes and answer to: “What element is named after Copenhagen?”, “What element is found in diamonds?”, and “What was the first element to be produced artificially?”