History of the periodic table managed to get thallium, lead, mercury and platinum into the right groups, which is something that Mendeleev failed to do at his first attempt. Odling failed to achieve recognition, however, since it is suspected that he, as Secretary of the Chemical Society of London, was instrumental in discrediting Newlands' earlier work on the periodic table. By 1912 almost 50 different radioactive elements had been found, too many for the periodic table. Frederick Soddy in 1913 found that although they emitted different radiation, many elements were alike in their chemical characteristics so shared the same place on the table. They became
Extended periodic table International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) defines an element to exist if its lifetime is longer than 10 seconds, which is the time it takes for the nucleus to form an electron cloud. As early as 1940, it was noted that a simplistic interpretation of the relativistic Dirac equation runs into problems with electron orbitals at "Z" > 1/α ≈ 137, suggesting that neutral atoms cannot exist beyond element 137, and that a periodic table of elements based on electron orbitals therefore breaks down at this point. On the other hand, a more rigorous analysis calculates the analogous