Thus, he was apprenticed to an apothecary, and began to read widely and to attend science lectures.

He eventually became a professor for the University of Jena in 1810 and also studied chemistry at Strasbourg.

In work published during 1829,[2] Döbereiner reported trends in certain properties of selected groups of elements.

A similar pattern was found with calcium, strontium, and barium; with sulfur, selenium, tellurium; and with chlorine, bromine, and iodine.

[6] By 1828 hundreds of thousands of these lighters had been mass produced by the German manufacturer Gottfried Piegler in Schleiz.