Atomic number consistent with the modern practice of ordering the elements by proton number, "Z", but that number was not known or suspected at the time. A simple numbering based on periodic table position was never entirely satisfactory, however. Besides the case of iodine and tellurium, later several other pairs of elements (such as argon and potassium, cobalt and nickel) were known to have nearly identical or reversed atomic weights, thus requiring their placement in the periodic table to be determined by their chemical properties. However the gradual identification of more and more chemically similar lanthanide elements, whose atomic number was not
Effective atomic number Effective atomic number Effective atomic number has two different meanings: one that is the effective nuclear charge of an atom, and one that calculates the average atomic number for a compound or mixture of materials. Both are abbreviated Z. The effective atomic number Z, (sometimes referred to as the effective nuclear charge) of an atom is the number of protons that an electron in the element effectively 'sees' due to screening by inner-shell electrons. It is a measure of the electrostatic interaction between the negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons in the atom. One can view the electrons in