John Newlands is the first person to…

John Newlands is the first person to devise a Periodic Table of elements arranged in order of their relative atomic weights.

The incompleteness of a table he draws up in 1864 alludes to the possible existence of additional, undiscovered elements.

For example, he predicts the existence of germanium.

Born in London, John Alexander Reina Newlands is the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister and his Italian wife.

Home schooled by his father, rather than going to a normal school, he had gone on to study at the Royal College of Chemistry but is also interested in social reform, and in 1860, had served as a volunteer with Giuseppe Garibaldi in his campaign to unify Italy.

Returning to London, he had set up in practice as an analytical chemist in 1864.