Yesterday we celebrated the restoration of Victorian chemist John Newlands’s grave in West Norwood Cemetery. Newlands (1837 – 1898) was the first to identify the patterns in elements that later became the Periodic Table. His ‘Law of Octaves’ was ridiculed by contemporaries but he published his work in a series of articles from 1864 in Chemical News five years before the Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev (1834-1907) announced what we know as the Periodic Table. The Royal Society awarded Newlands the Davy Medal in 1887.
The location of John Newlands’s grave had been lost and the lettering on his grave was barely legible but it has been entirely restored and re-leaded, with over 400 local schoolchildren learning about Newlands and the Periodic Table as part of our Proud Places programme.
The ceremony included Peter, Usha and Tamsin Newlands, the descendants of John Newlands, who had led the campaign to locate and restore his grave, the Royal Society of Chemistry, clinical scientist Professor Bob Flanagan as well as Friends of West Norwood Cemetery. The transformed grave stone was barely recognisable!
See below for a video of the stone masons working to restore the lettering:
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