Chemical element native solid elements occur in alloys, such as that of iron and nickel. The history of the discovery and use of the elements began with primitive human societies that found native elements like carbon, sulfur, copper and gold. Later civilizations extracted elemental copper, tin, lead and iron from their ores by smelting, using charcoal. Alchemists and chemists subsequently identified many more; all of the naturally occurring elements were known by 1950. The properties of the chemical elements are summarized in the periodic table, which organizes the elements by increasing atomic number into rows ("periods") in which the columns ("groups") share
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