Mendeleyev
NAME:Mendeleyev, Dmitry Ivanovich.
ACHIEVEMENT(S): The Periodic Table (of the elements)
NICKNAME/ALIAS: Also spelled Mendeleev.
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 8th February 1834, at Tobolsk, Siberia, Russia.
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 2nd February 1907, St. Petersburg, Russia. Aged 72.
DISCIPLINE: Chemist.
FIELD: Chemistry.
EDUCATION: Tobolsk Gymnasium, 1841-49; Main Pedagogical Institute, St. Petersburg, 1850-55.
MAJOR WORK: 'Attempt at a System of Elements Based on Their Atomic Weight and Chemical Affinity', 1869.
LIFE AND TIMES:
In 1847, Mendeleyev’s father died and, that same year, a fire destroyed the family glass factory. For the next three years, his mother struggled on in Tobolsk, then she moved to Moscow, to try to fix her son a place at the university. Despite her good connections, she failed, due to the inflexible regulations that restricted admission according to place of birth.
Already seriously ill with tuberculosis, she moved on to St. Petersburg, but the university there, too, was closed to her son. Dmitry was also refused admission to the medical school, but, just weeks before her death in 1850, his mother finally got him a place in the Main Pedagogic Institute, in which his father had trained. Mendeleyev's sister also died of tuberculosis soon afterwards, leaving him alone in St. Petersburg, himself suffering from tuberculosis.
He enrolled in the faculty of physics and mathematics. During his five years at the institute, Mendeleyev excelled as a student, his interest in chemistry greatly stimulated by a teacher who had studied with the great German chemist Liebig, Justus.*
Mendeleyev graduated, with a gold medal for academic achievement, in 1855. Because of his poor health, he asked to be transferred to the Odessa Gymnasium in the Crimea, where he continued his chemical studies.
His health improved, he returned to St. Petersburg in 1856 to take an advanced degree in chemistry and the following year got his first university appointment as lecturer at St. Petersburg.
In 1859 he received a government grant for two years' further study at the University of Heidelberg, where he first collaborated with German chemists Bunsen* and Kirchhoff* and then established his own laboratory, in order to work on the problems of capillarity and surface tension.
This work stimulated Mendeleyev's interest in atoms and molecules and the forces that act between them. In the course of his studies at Heidelberg he noticed that for every liquid, there was a temperature above which it could not be condensed from gas to liquid form. He called this the absolute boiling point.
At Heidelberg, Mendeleyev became very friendly with a group of young Russian academics, one of whom was the composer and professor of chemistry, Borodin(https://app.thebrain.com/brain/f3e16344-7cd9-4fa3-ae1d-59876e128474/eb82411a-4247-5bed-ad2e-ef6dcd0110ea)*. Borodin and Mendeleyev both attended the famous Chemical Congress at Karlsruhe in 1860, called to standardize basic chemical concepts like atomic, molecular and equivalent weights.
At the Congress, Mendeleyev met a number of famous chemists, including JBA Dumas* and in particular the Italian chemist Cannizzaro*, whose paper on the need for a proper distinction between atomic and molecular weights was highly influential on Mendeleyev's future chemical work.
From January 1864 to December 1866, he was professor of chemistry at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute. In 1865, he bought the estate of Boblovo, near Klin, in order to show how agriculture could be put on a rational scientific basis. He joined the Free Economic Society, where he lectured on experimental agriculture, cooperative cheesemaking, and experiments with fertilizers. In 1865 he was given the Chair of Technology at the University of St. Petersburg.
Two years later, Mendeleyev was appointed Professor of General Chemistry at the University of St. Petersburg. It was here that he wrote the classic textbook, ‘The Principles of Chemistry,’ between 1868 and 1870. During his research for the book, he was influenced by the work of the English physicist Dalton*, who had developed the idea of atomic weights.
Other chemists such as Dobereiner* had tried to classify atomic weights but it was Mendeleyev who succeeded in developing the law which stated that, when elements were arranged according to weight, it was easier to observe the different types of chemical relationship.
It was clear to the chemical fraternity that the table contained gaps, but Mendeleyev predicted that this was because there were elements not yet recognised, which would be found some time in the future. During the next 20 years, he was proved right, with the discovery of three new elements possessing exactly the properties that he had predicted. These were gallium, scandium and germanium, the last one being discovered by Winkler* in 1886.
In Mendeleyev’s first periodic table, he listed all of the 63 elements then known and altered those that would not fit properly, using the atomic weights of the time with great accuracy. He changed the weight of indium from 76 to 114 and beryllium from 13.8 to 9.2. Modern science vindicates his thinking by placing these, respectively, at 114.8 and 9.013.
In 1871, he produced a revision, made internationally known in an article by English chemist Crookes* in the 'Quarterly Journal of Science' in 1877, titled 'The Chemistry of the Future', and showing the correct repositioning of 17 other elements.
In the 1870s and 1880s, he acted as a friend and guide to many chemists, including Tsiolkovsky*, who sent his work to Mendeleyev for comments. During this same period, he also made some important political enemies.
The reactionary Minister of Public Education, Tolstoy*, disliked a chemist with progressive views on social reforms and, in 1880, made sure Mendeleyev was denied advancement until his death from pneumonia in St. Petersburg on 20th January 1907.
ASSESSMENT: Discovered the relationship between chemical elements, which underlies most of chemistry and unifies a great deal of modern physics.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: In 1902 he visited the Paris laboratories of Marie Curie* and Becquerel* to study radioactivity.
ONELINER: Dmitry Mendeleyev, who wrote the Periodic Tables
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Leicester, Henry M., "Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev", in ‘Great Chemists’, edited by Eduard Farber, New York & London: Interscience Publishers, 1966.
Multimedia: RadioLab
LANGUAGE: Russian.
PARENTS: Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleyev (d. 1847) and Maria Dmitrievna Kornileva(d. 1851).
SIBLINGS: 16 older siblings.
SPOUSE: Feozva Nikitichna Leshcheva, married 1863, divorced 1876; Anna Ivanovna Popova, married 1876.
CHILDREN: Vladimir and Olga, by Feozva Leshcheva. Lyubova, Ivan, and twins
Marya and Vasilii, by Anna Popova.