The Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (his chief rival) and he had both worked with Robert Bunsen.

After graduating as a Doctor of Medicine from Würzburg in 1854, he went to Heidelberg University, where Robert Bunsen held the chair of chemistry.

In 1866, Meyer accepted a post at the Eberswalde Forestry Academy at Neustadt-Eberswalde but two years later was appointed to a professorship at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic.

In 1876, Meyer became Professor of Chemistry at the University of Tübingen, where he served until his death from a stroke on 11 April 1895 at the age of 64.

He noted, as John A. R. Newlands did in England, that if the elements were arranged in the order of their atomic weights, they fell into groups of similar chemical and physical properties repeated at periodic intervals.

[3] His book, Die modernen Theorien der Chemie, which he began writing in Breslau in 1862 and published two years later, contained an early version of the periodic table.

[8] In 1882, both Meyer and Mendeleev received the Davy Medal from the Royal Society in recognition of their work on the Periodic Law.