The Genius of the Mendeleev's Periodic Table
A crush course on why though the elements had been categorized according to their properties before, it is Mendeleev's periodic table that survives to our days.
The Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev published the first widely recognized periodic table in 1869. He developed his table to illustrate periodic trends in the properties of the then-known elements. Mendeleev also predicted some properties of then-unknown elements that would be expected to fill gaps in this table. Most of his predictions were proved correct when the elements in question were subsequently discovered. Mendeleev's periodic table has since been expanded and refined with the discovery or synthesis of further new elements and the development of new theoretical models to explain chemical behaviour. - Source wikipedia