Edward G. Mazurs Collection of Periodic Systems Images

Edward G. Mazurs (1894-1983) was born in Latvia and received his Master’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Riga, where he served as a professor from 1919 to 1940. Following the 1944 Soviet occupation of Latvia, Mazurs and his family fled to a refugee camp in Regensberg, Germany and emigrated to the United States in 1949. The family settled in Chicago, where Mazurs initially worked as a janitor at Argo Corn Products before assuming the position of chemist at the company. Mazurs retired from Argo Corn in 1959 and relocated to Santa Barbara, where he returned to teaching as a chemistry professor at Westmont College.

Mazurs self-published his seminal work, Types of Graphic Representation of the Periodic System of Chemical Elements , in 1957; a revised “centenary” edition was published by the University of Alabama Press under the title Graphic Representations of the Periodic System During One Hundred Years in 1974. In these works, Mazurs provided a definitive review of the many versions of the periodic table in world literature, including illustrations and references for over 700 tables and classifications of approximately 140 types. In addition, Mazurs’ work notably re-asserted the idea of the eight-period table, also known as the left-step table, originated by Charles Janet in 1928 and promoted as the model that best expressed the relationships among the elements.