Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev; 8 February 1834 – 2 February 1907 O.S. 27 January 1834
– 20 January 1907) was a Russian chemist and inventor. He formulated the Periodic Law,
created his own version of the periodic table of elements, and used it to correct the properties
of some already discovered elements and also to predict the properties of eight elements
yet to be discovered.
Early life Mendeleev was born in the village of Verkhnie
Aremzyani, near Tobolsk in Siberia, to Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev and Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva.
His grandfather was Pavel Maximovich Sokolov, a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church from
the Tver region. Ivan, along with his brothers and sisters, obtained new family names while
attending the theological seminary. Mendeleev was raised as an Orthodox Christian, his mother
encouraging him to "patiently search divine and scientific truth." His son would later
inform that he departed from the Church and embraced a form of deism.
Mendeleev is thought to be the youngest of either 11, 13, 14 or 17 siblings; the exact
number differs among sources. His father was a teacher of fine arts, politics and philosophy.
Unfortunately for the family's financial well being, his father became blind and lost his
teaching position. His mother was forced to work and she restarted her family's abandoned
glass factory. At the age of 13, after the passing of his father and the destruction
of his mother's factory by fire, Mendeleev attended the Gymnasium in Tobolsk.
In 1849, his mother took Mendeleev across the entire state of Russia from Siberia to
Moscow with the aim of getting Mendeleev a higher education. The university in Moscow
did not accept him. The mother and son continued to St. Petersburg to the father’s alma mater.
The now poor Mendeleev family relocated to Saint Petersburg, where he entered the Main
Pedagogical Institute in 1850. After graduation, he contracted tuberculosis, causing him to
move to the Crimean Peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea in 1855. While there
he became a science master of the Simferopol gymnasium №1. He returned with fully restored
health to Saint Petersburg in 1857. Later life
Between 1859 and 1861, he worked on the capillarity of liquids and the workings of the spectroscope
in Heidelberg. In late August 1861 he wrote his first book on the spectroscope. On 4 April
1862 he became engaged to Feozva Nikitichna Leshcheva, and they married on 27 April 1862
at Nikolaev Engineering Institute's church in Saint Petersburg. Mendeleev became a professor
at the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute and Saint Petersburg State University in 1864
and 1865, respectively. In 1865 he became Doctor of Science for his dissertation "On
the Combinations of Water with Alcohol". He achieved tenure in 1867, and by 1871 had transformed
Saint Petersburg into an internationally recognized center for chemistry research. In 1876, he
became obsessed with Anna Ivanova Popova and began courting her; in 1881 he proposed to
her and threatened suicide if she refused. His divorce from Leshcheva was finalized one
month after he had married Popova in early 1882. Even after the divorce, Mendeleev was
technically a bigamist; the Russian Orthodox Church required at least seven years before
lawful re-marriage. His divorce and the surrounding controversy contributed to his failure to
be admitted to the Russian Academy of Sciences. His daughter from his second marriage, Lyubov,
became the wife of the famous Russian poet Alexander Blok. His other children were son
Vladimir and daughter Olga, from his first marriage to Feozva, and son Ivan and twins
from Anna. Though Mendeleev was widely honored by scientific
organizations all over Europe, including the Davy Medal from the Royal Society of London,
he resigned from Saint Petersburg University on 17 August 1890.
Mendeleev also investigated the composition of petroleum, and helped to found the first
oil refinery in Russia. He recognized the importance of petroleum as a feedstock for
petrochemicals. He is credited with a remark that burning petroleum as a fuel "would be
akin to firing up a kitchen stove with bank notes."
In 1905, Mendeleev was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The
following year the Nobel Committee for Chemistry recommended to the Swedish Academy to award
the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1906 to Mendeleev for his discovery of the periodic system.
The Chemistry Section of the Swedish Academy supported this recommendation. The Academy
was then supposed to approve the Committee choice as it has done in almost every case.
Unexpectedly, at the full meeting of the Academy, a dissenting member of the Nobel Committee,
Peter Klason, proposed the candidacy of Henri Moissan whom he favored. Svante Arrhenius,
although not a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, had a great deal of influence
in the Academy and also pressed for the rejection of Mendeleev, arguing that the periodic system
was too old to acknowledge its discovery in 1906. According to the contemporaries, Arrhenius
was motivated by the grudge he held against Mendeleev for his critique of Arrhenius's
dissociation theory. After heated arguments, the majority of the Academy voted for Moissan.
The attempts to nominate Mendeleev in 1907 were again frustrated by the absolute opposition
of Arrhenius. In 1907, Mendeleev died at the age of 72 in
Saint Petersburg from influenza. The crater Mendeleev on the Moon, as well as element
number 101, the radioactive mendelevium, are named after him.
Periodic table
In 1863 there were 56 known elements with a new element being discovered at a rate of
approximately one per year. Other scientists had previously identified periodicity of elements.
John Newlands described a Law of Octaves, noting their periodicity according to relative
atomic weight in 1864, publishing it in 1865. His proposal identified the potential for
new elements such as germanium. The concept was criticized and his innovation was not
recognized by the Society of Chemists until 1887. Another person to propose a periodic
table was Lothar Meyer, who published a paper in 1864 describing 28 elements classified
by their valence, but with no prediction of new elements. Meyer, who is often credited
with the discovery of the periodic system, opposed and criticized the Periodic Law.
After becoming a teacher, Mendeleev wrote the definitive textbook of his time: Principles
of Chemistry. As he attempted to classify the elements according to their chemical properties,
he noticed patterns that led him to postulate his periodic table; he claimed to have envisioned
the complete arrangement of the elements in a dream:
"I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I
immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem
necessary."
Unaware of the earlier work on periodic tables going on in the 1860s, he made the following
table: By adding additional elements following this
pattern, Dmitri developed his extended version of the periodic table. On 6 March 1869, Mendeleev
made a formal presentation to the Russian Chemical Society, entitled The Dependence
between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements, which described elements
according to both atomic weight and valence. This presentation stated that
The elements, if arranged according to their atomic weight, exhibit an apparent periodicity
of properties. Elements which are similar regarding their
chemical properties have atomic weights which are either of nearly the same value or which
increase regularly. The arrangement of the elements in groups
of elements in the order of their atomic weights corresponds to their so-called valencies,
as well as, to some extent, to their distinctive chemical properties; as is apparent among
other series in that of Li, Be, B, C, N, O, and F.
The elements which are the most widely diffused have small atomic weights.
The magnitude of the atomic weight determines the character of the element, just as the
magnitude of the molecule determines the character of a compound body.
We must expect the discovery of many yet unknown elements–for example, two elements, analogous
to aluminium and silicon, whose atomic weights would be between 65 and 75.
The atomic weight of an element may sometimes be amended by a knowledge of those of its
contiguous elements. Thus the atomic weight of tellurium must lie between 123 and 126,
and cannot be 128. Here Mendeleev seems to be wrong as the "atomic mass" of tellurium
remains higher than that of iodine as displayed on modern periodic tables, but this is due
to the way atomic masses are calculated, based on a weighted average of all of an element's
common isotopes, not just the one-to-one proton/neutron-ratio version of the element to which Mendeleev
was referring. Certain characteristic properties of elements
can be foretold from their atomic weights. Mendeleev published his periodic table of
all known elements and predicted several new elements to complete the table. Only a few
months after, Meyer published a virtually identical table. Some consider Meyer and Mendeleev
the co-creators of the periodic table, but virtually everybody agrees that Mendeleev's
accurate prediction of the qualities of what he called ekasilicon, ekaaluminium and ekaboron
qualifies him for the majority of the credit for the table.
For his predicted eight elements, he used the prefixes of eka, dvi, and tri in their
naming. Mendeleev questioned some of the currently accepted atomic weights, pointing out that
they did not correspond to those suggested by his Periodic Law. He noted that tellurium
has a higher atomic weight than iodine, but he placed them in the right order, incorrectly
predicting that the accepted atomic weights at the time were at fault. He was puzzled
about where to put the known lanthanides, and predicted the existence of another row
to the table which were the actinides which were some of the heaviest in atomic mass.
Some people dismissed Mendeleev for predicting that there would be more elements, but he
was proven to be correct when Ga and Ge were found in 1875 and 1886 respectively, fitting
perfectly into the two missing spaces.
By giving Sanskrit names to his "missing" elements, Mendeleev showed his appreciation
and debt to the Sanskrit grammarians of ancient India, who had created sophisticated theories
of language based on their discovery of the two-dimensional patterns in basic sounds.
Mendeleev was a friend and colleague of the Sanskritist Böhtlingk, who was preparing
the second edition of his book on Pāṇini at about this time, and Mendeleev wished to
honor Pāṇini with his nomenclature. Noting that there are striking similarities between
the periodic table and the introductory Śiva Sūtras in Pāṇini's grammar, Prof. Kiparsky
says:
"The analogies between the two systems are striking. Just as Panini found that the phonological
patterning of sounds in the language is a function of their articulatory properties,
so Mendeleev found that the chemical properties of elements are a function of their atomic
weights. Like Panini, Mendeleev arrived at his discovery through a search for the "grammar"
of the elements..."
The original draft made by Mendeleev would be found years later and published under the
name Tentative System of Elements. Other achievements
Mendeleev made other important contributions to chemistry. The Russian chemist and science
historian Lev Chugaev has characterized him as "a chemist of genius, first-class physicist,
a fruitful researcher in the fields of hydrodynamics, meteorology, geology, certain branches of
chemical technology and other disciplines adjacent to chemistry and physics, a thorough
expert of chemical industry and industry in general, and an original thinker in the field
of economy." Mendeleev was one of the founders, in 1869, of the Russian Chemical Society.
He worked on the theory and practice of protectionist trade and on agriculture.
In an attempt at a chemical conception of the Aether, he put forward a hypothesis that
there existed two inert chemical elements of lesser atomic weight than hydrogen. Of
these two proposed elements, he thought the lighter to be an all-penetrating, all-pervasive
gas, and the slightly heavier one to be a proposed element, coronium.
Mendeleev devoted much study and made important contributions to the determination of the
nature of such indefinite compounds as solutions.
In another department of physical chemistry, he investigated the expansion of liquids with
heat, and devised a formula similar to Gay-Lussac's law of the uniformity of the expansion of
gases, while in 1861 he anticipated Thomas Andrews' conception of the critical temperature
of gases by defining the absolute boiling-point of a substance as the temperature at which
cohesion and heat of vaporization become equal to zero and the liquid changes to vapor, irrespective
of the pressure and volume. Mendeleev is given credit for the introduction
of the metric system to the Russian Empire. He invented pyrocollodion, a kind of smokeless
powder based on nitrocellulose. This work had been commissioned by the Russian Navy,
which however did not adopt its use. In 1892 Mendeleev organized its manufacture.
Mendeleev studied petroleum origin and concluded hydrocarbons are abiogenic and form deep within
the earth – see Abiogenic petroleum origin. He wrote: "The capital fact to note is that
petroleum was born in the depths of the earth, and it is only there that we must seek its
origin." The vodka myth
A very popular Russian story is that it was Mendeleev who came up with the 40% standard
strength of vodka in 1894, after having been appointed Director of the Bureau of Weights
and Measures with the assignment to formulate new state standards for the production of
vodka. This story has, for instance, been used in marketing claims by the Russian Standard
vodka brand that, "In 1894, Dmitri Mendeleev, the greatest scientist in all Russia, received
the decree to set the Imperial quality standard for Russian vodka and the 'Russian Standard'
was born", or that the vodka is "compliant with the highest quality of Russian vodka
approved by the royal government commission headed by Mendeleev in 1894."
While it's true that Mendeleev in 1892 became head of the Archive of Weights and Measures
in St Petersburg, and evolved it into a government bureau the following year, that institution
was never involved in setting any production quality standards, but was issued with standardising
Russian trade weights and measuring instruments. Furthermore, the 40% standard strength was
introduced by the Russian government already in 1843, when Mendeleev was nine years old.
The basis for the whole story is a popular myth that Mendeleev's 1865 doctoral dissertation
"A Discourse on the combination of alcohol and water" contained a statement that 38%
is the ideal strength of vodka, and that this number was later rounded to 40% to simplify
the calculation of alcohol tax. However, Mendeleev's dissertation was about alcohol concentrations
over 70% and he never wrote anything about vodka.
Commemoration A number of places and objects are associated
with the name and achievements of the scientist. In Saint Petersburg his name was given to
the National Metrology Institute dealing with establishing and supporting national and worldwide
standards for precise measurements. Next to it there is a monument to him pictured above
that consists of his sitting statue and a depiction of his periodic table on the wall
of the establishment. In the Twelve Collegia building, now being
the centre of Saint Petersburg State University and in Mendeleev's time – Head Pedagogical
Institute – there is Dmitry Mendeleev's Memorial Museum Apartment with his archives.
The street in front of these is named after him as Mendeleevskaya liniya.
In Moscow, there is the D. Mendeleyev University of Chemical Technology of Russia.
After him was also named mendelevium, which is a synthetic chemical element with the symbol
Md and the atomic number 101. It is a metallic radioactive transuranic element in the actinide
series, usually synthesized by bombarding einsteinium with alpha particles.
A large lunar impact crater Mendeleev that is located on the far side of the Moon, as
seen from the Earth, also bears the name of the scientist.
Russian Academy of Sciences yearly awards since 1998 Mendeleev Golden Medal for achievements
in chemical science and technology. See also
List of Russian chemists Mendeleev's predicted elements
Periodic Systems of Small Molecules References
Further reading Gordin, Michael. A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii
Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02775-X.
Mendeleyev, Dmitry Ivanovich; Jensen, William B.. Mendeleev on the Periodic Law: Selected
Writings, 1869–1905. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-44571-2.
Strathern, Paul. Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest For the Elements. New York: St Martins Press.
ISBN 0-241-14065-X. Mendeleev, Dmitrii Ivanovich. Principles of
Chemistry. New York: Collier. External links
Original Periodic Table, annotated. Mendeleev's first draft version of the Periodic
Table, 17 February 1869. "Everything in its Place", essay by Oliver
Sacks Works by or about Dmitri Mendeleev in libraries