Julius Lothar Meyer

Julius Lothar Meyer was born 19 August 1830 in Germany and trained as a chemist, working alongside Robert Bunsen, the man behind the burner. He developed one of the earliest versions of the periodic table of the chemical elements, racing in parallel with Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist who also worked with Bunsen and who became his chief rival. The two men arrived at similar frameworks nearly simultaneously, but Mendeleev's name stuck harder in the textbooks. Meyer went by Lothar his entire life, never using Julius. He died 11 April 1895, his table a monument to pattern recognition — and…