The Author

Bill Griffith is an Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Imperial College, London. He has much experience with the platinum group metals, particularly ruthenium and osmium. He has published over 260 research papers, many describing complexes of these metals as catalysts for specific organic oxidations. He has written seven books on the platinum metals, and is currently writing another on oxidation catalysis by ruthenium complexes. He is the Secretary of the Historical Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

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The Periodic Table and the Platinum Group Metals

W. P. Griffith

Department of Chemistry, Imperial College, London SW7 2AZ, U.K.;

Platinum Metals Review

Volume 52 Issue 2 April 2008 Pages 114-119
DOI 10.1595/147106708X297486

Article Synopsis

The year 2007 marked the centenary of the death of Dmitri Mendeleev (1834–1907). This article discusses how he and some of his predecessors accommodated the platinum group metals (pgms) in the Periodic Table, and it considers the placing of their three transuranic congeners: hassium (108Hs), meitnerium (109Mt) and darmstadtium (110Ds). Over twenty-five years ago McDonald and Hunt (1) wrote an excellent account of the pgms in their periodic context. This account is indebted to that work. The present article introduces new perspectives and shows some of the relevant tables. There are good books on the history of the Periodic Table, e.g. (2, 3) and other texts (4, 5) which provide a fuller picture than it is possible to give here.

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