Charles Janet

Charles Janet (15 June 1849 – 7 February 1932) was a French engineer, company director, inventor and biologist.

Life and work

Janet graduated from the Ecole des Mines and worked for some years in munitions. He then married the daughter of the owner of a manufacturing company and worked for it for the rest of his life, finding time for research in various branches of science. His collection of 40,000 fossils and other specimens was unfortunately dispersed after his death.^[1] His studies of the morphology of the head of ants, wasps and bees, and his micrographs were of remarkable quality.^[2] He also worked on plant biology and finally wrote a series of papers on evolution. He was a prolific inventor and designed much of his own equipment, including a novel type of formicarium. In 1927 he turned his attention to the periodic table and wrote a series of six articles in French, which were privately printed and never widely circulated. His only article in English was poorly edited and gave a confused idea of his thinking.^[3]

Chemical ideas

Janet started from the fact that the series of chemical elements is a continuous sequence, which he represented as a helix traced on the surfaces of four nested cylinders. By various geometrical transformations he derived several striking designs, one of which is his "left-step Periodic Table", in which hydrogen and helium are placed above lithium and beryllium. It was only later that he realized that his arrangement concorded perfectly with quantum theory and the electronic structure of the atom. He placed the actinides under the lanthanides twenty years before Glenn Seaborg, and he continued the series to element 120.

Janet's table differs from the standard table in placing the s-block elements on the right, so that the blocks of the periodic table are arranged in the natural order s, p, d, f from right to left. There is then no need to divide the table or move the f block into a 'footnote'. He believed that no elements heavier than number 120 would be found, so he did not envisage a g block. In terms of atomic quantum numbers, each row corresponds to one value of the sum (n + ℓ) where n is the principal quantum number and ℓ the azimuthal quantum number. The table therefore corresponds to the Madelung rule, which states that atomic subshells are filled in order of increasing values of (n + ℓ).

Janet also envisaged an 'element zero' – whose 'atom' would consist of two neutrons, and he speculated that this would be the link to a mirror-image table of elements with negative atomic numbers – in effect anti-matter. He also conceived heavy hydrogen (deuterium). He died just before the discovery of the neutron, the positron and heavy hydrogen.^[5]

References

1. ↑ Casson, Loic (2008). "Notice biographique sur la vie et l'oeuvre de Charles Janet". Bulletin de la Societe Academique de l'Oise. 
2. ↑ Johan Bollin and Edward O. Wilson, 'Social insect histology from the 19th century: the magnificent pioneer sections of Charles Janet, (2008) Arthropod Structure and Development 37, 163–167
3. ↑ Janet, Charles (June 1929). "The helicoidal classification of the elements". Chemical News. 
4. ↑ WebElements : The Janet Periodic Table.
5. ↑ Stewart, Philip (April 2010). "Charles Janet:unrecognized genius of the Periodic System". Foundations of Chemistry 12: 5–15. doi:10.1007/s10698-008-9062-5. 

External links

• (French) Biographie synthétique de Charles Janet