Jons Jacob Berzelius was born on 20 August 1779 near Linkoping, Sweden, and became one of the most influential chemists of the early nineteenth century, determining the atomic weights of a large number of elements with unusually careful precision and helping establish the atomic theory of chemistry on firmer experimental ground. Before Berzelius, chemists and, before them, alchemists had represented substances using an inconsistent mix of pictographic and planetary symbols, marks originally devised in part to keep alchemical work obscure to outsiders unfamiliar with a given practitioner's private notation, a system Berzelius judged actively harmful to clear scientific communication as chemistry professionalized.
In his 1813 paper Essay on the Cause of Chemical Proportions, published in the Annals of Philosophy, Berzelius proposed replacing that older symbolic system with a simple, standardized notation: one or two letters, generally taken from an element's Latin name, so that hydrogen became H, iron became Fe from ferrum, and gold became Au from aurum. The new system spread rapidly across European chemistry within a generation, and it remains, essentially unchanged in its basic logic, the notation the periodic table and modern chemistry use today.