Dmitri Mendeleev - Biography on 182nd Birth Day

Who was Dmitri Mendeleev and how did he construct the periodic table of elements?

Each element within the periodic table contains its atomic number, which is equal to the number of protons/electrons within the element, its atomic weight and its element symbol, consisting of one or two letters. Some versions of the table, as above, colour the elemental blocks depending on their type; noble gases, alkali metals, solid, liquid, gas etc. 

Mendeleev categorised the elements in order of relative atomic mass which he noticed was related to their chemical and physical properties, and was able to predict the atomic mass of the as-yet-undiscovered elements which belonged in the gaps of the table.

The chemist was born in Siberia and studied at the Main Pedagogical Institute, before writing a book on the inner workings of the spectroscope, an instrument designed for measuring light's properties across the electromagnetic spectrum.

 He later worked as a professor at both the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute and the Saint Petersburg State University. His textbook Principles of Chemistry, regarded as a milestone study, was published in two volumes in 1868 and 1860.

Mendeleev died in 1907 aged 72. Element 101,  mendelevium, is named after him.

Dmitri Mendeleev: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

Google is honoring Dmitri Mendeleev with a Google Doodle on the Russian chemist’s 182nd birthday. (Robinson Wood/Google)

Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist and inventor, would have turned 182 on February 8, and Google is celebrating his birthday with a Google Doodle.
Mendeleev is best known for discovering periodic law in 1869.

Here’s what you need to know about Mendeleev:

1. Mendeleev Was Born in Siberia & Moved Across the Entire Russian Continent When He Was a Child to Get a Better Education

(Getty)

Dmitri Mendeleev was born February 8, 1834, in Tobolsk, Siberia. He died February 2, 1907, in Saint Petersburg.

Mendeleev’s father, a professor who taught fine arts, politics and philosophy, went blind around the time of his birth and died in 1847, according to Biography.com. His mother worked as the manager of her family’s glass company to support them, until it burned down in 1848. They then moved across the Russian continent, first to Moscow and then to St. Petersburg so Dmitri and his siblings could receive a better education.

He was the youngest of his several siblings, but the exact number isn’t known, ranging from, 11 to 17.

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2. He Studied at Saint Petersburg University & Became a Professor

Mendeleev studied at the University of Saint Petersburg, according to FamousScientists.org.
“By the time he was 20, Mendeleev was showing his promise and publishing original research papers. Suffering from tuberculosis, he often had to work from bed. He graduated as the top student in his year, despite the fact that his uncontrollable temper had made him unpopular with some of his teachers and fellow students,” the website explains.

He became a teacher in Crimea in 1855, before returning to Saint Petersburg, where he completed his master’s degree in chemistry in 1856.

“It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order,” Mendeleev wrote. “And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man – social and political – and to the entire universe as a whole.”

3. He Invented His Version of the Periodic Table in 1869

Mendeleev’s periodic table. (Wikipedia Commons)

Mendeleev is best known as the father of the Periodic Table, which he invented in 1869. He organized the then 56 elements by showing how they were related to each other in a distinct pattern, letting them fall into periods, according to atomic mass and valence, Google says.

According to FamousScientists.org:

He wrote the names of the 65 known elements on cards – much like playing cards – one element on each card. He then wrote the fundamental properties of every element on its own card, including atomic weight. He saw that atomic weight was important in some way – the behavior of the elements seemed to repeat as their atomic weights increased – but he could not see the pattern. Convinced that he was close to discovering something significant, Mendeleev moved the cards about for hour after hour until finally he fell asleep at his desk. When he awoke, he found that his subconscious mind had done his work for him! He now knew the pattern the elements followed.

Mendeleev later said, “In a dream I saw a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.”

“Scholars had attempted to organize the elements into a table before, but Mendeleev’s work extended beyond mere chart-making. Mendeleev used the logic of his table to argue for the existence of yet-to-be discovered elements (like gallium and germanium), and even to predict their behaviors,” Google explains. “Some of these predictions were wrong, but the basic principles behind his periodic organization continue to stand at the foundation of modern chemistry. The periodic table of the elements (now with 118 elements and counting) adorns science classrooms worldwide.”

4. He Was Married Twice & Had 6 Children

Mendeleev, circa 1984. (Getty)

Mendeleev was married twice, first to Feozva Leshcheva from 1862 to 1871 and then to Anna Ivanova Popova.

He had six children, including a son, Vladimir, and a daughter, Olga, with Feozva, and a son, Ivan, twins and a daughter, Lyubov, with Anna. His son Vladimir was a sailor who took part in Nicholas II’s Eastern journey and his daughter, Lyubov, married the famed Russian poet Alexander Blok.
Mendeleev died of influenza in 1907 at the age of 72.

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5. The Element Mendelevium & a Crater on the Moon Bear His Name, Along With Many Other Memorials

Mendeleev in 1897. (Wikpedia Commons)

The synthetic chemical element mendelevium is named for him. A crater of the moon is also named for him. The large lunar impact crater is located on the far side of the moon, as seen from Earth.
His name is memorialized in many other places, including the National Metrology Institute in Saint Petersburg, a building at Saint Petersburg State University and the Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia in Moscow.

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Dmitri Mendeleev - Biography, Facts and Pictures

Lived 1834 – 1907.

Who was Dmitri Mendeleev?

Dmitri Mendeleev was passionate about chemistry. His deepest wish was to find a better way of organizing the subject.

Mendeleev’s wish led to his discovery of the periodic law and his creation of the periodic table – one of the most iconic symbols ever seen in science: almost everyone recognizes it instantly: science has few other creations as well-known as the periodic table.

Using his periodic table, Mendeleev predicted the existence and properties of new chemical elements. When these elements were discovered, his place in the history of science was assured.
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Early Life and Education

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was born February 8, 1834 in Verkhnie Aremzyani, in the Russian province of Siberia. His family was unusually large: he may have had as many as 16 brothers and sisters, although the exact number is uncertain.

His father was a teacher who had graduated at Saint Petersburg’s Main Pedalogical Institute – a teacher training institution.

When his father went blind, his mother re-opened a glass factory which had originally been started by his father and then closed. His father died when Mendeleev was just 13 and the glass factory burned down when he was 15.

Aged 16, he moved to Saint Petersburg, which was then Russia’s capital city. He won a place at his father’s old college, in part because the head of the college had known his father. There, Mendeleev trained to be a teacher.

By the time he was 20, Mendeleev was showing his promise and publishing original research papers. Suffering from tuberculosis, he often had to work from bed. He graduated as the top student in his year, despite the fact that his uncontrollable temper had made him unpopular with some of his teachers and fellow students.

In 1855, aged 21, he got a job teaching science in Simferopol, Crimea, but soon returned to St. Petersburg. There he studied for a master’s degree in chemistry at the University of St. Petersburg. He was awarded his degree in 1856.

Mendeleev Chemistry

Mendeleev had trained as both a teacher and an academic chemist. He spent time doing both before he won an award to go to Western Europe to pursue chemical research.

He spent most of the years 1859 and 1860 in Heidelberg, Germany, where he had the good fortune to work for a short time with Robert Bunsen at Heidelberg University. In 1860 Bunsen and his colleague Gustav Kirchhoff discovered the element cesium using chemical spectroscopy – a new method they had developed, which Bunsen introduced Mendeleev to.

In 1860, Mendeleev attended the first ever international chemistry conference, which took place in Karlsruhe, Germany. Much of the conference’s time was spent discussing the need to standardize chemistry.
This conference played a key role in Mendeleev’s eventual development of the periodic table. Mendeleev’s periodic table was based on atomic weights and he watched as the conference produced an agreed, standardized method for determining these weights.

At the conference, he also learned about Avogardo’s Law which states that:

All gases, at the same volume, temperature and pressure, contain the same number of molecules.

By the time he returned to Saint Petersburg in 1861 to teach at the Technical Institute, Mendeleev had become even more passionate about the science of chemistry. He was also worried that chemistry in Russia was trailing behind the science he had experienced in Germany.

He believed that improved Russian language chemistry textbooks were a necessity, and he was determined to do something about it. Working like a demon, in just 61 days the 27 year old chemist poured out his knowledge in a 500 page textbook: Organic Chemistry. This book won the Domidov Prize and put Mendeleev at the forefront of Russian chemical education.

Mendeleev was a charismatic teacher and lecturer, and held a number of academic positions until, in 1867, aged just 33, he was awarded the Chair of General Chemistry at the University of Saint Petersburg.

In this prestigious position, he decided to make another push to improve chemistry in Russia, publishing The Principles of Chemistry in 1869. Not only did this textbook prove popular in Russia, it was popular elsewhere too, appearing in English, French and German translations.

“Knowing how contented, free, and joyful is life in the world of science, one fervently wishes that many would enter its portals.”

Dmitri Mendeleev, 1834 to 1907

Chemist

The Periodic Table

At this time, chemistry was a patchwork of observations and discoveries.

Mendeleev was certain that better, more fundamental principles could be found; this was his mindset when, in 1869, he began writing a second volume of his book The Principles of Chemistry.
At the heart of chemistry were its elements. What, wondered Mendeleev, could they reveal to him if he could find some way of organizing them logically?

He wrote the names of the 65 known elements on cards – much like playing cards – one element on each card. He then wrote the fundamental properties of every element on its own card, including atomic weight. He saw that atomic weight was important in some way – the behavior of the elements seemed to repeat as their atomic weights increased – but he could not see the pattern.

Convinced that he was close to discovering something significant, Mendeleev moved the cards about for hour after hour until finally he fell asleep at his desk.

When he awoke, he found that his subconscious mind had done his work for him! He now knew the pattern the elements followed. He later wrote:

“In a dream I saw a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.”

Dmitri Mendeleev, 1834 to 1907

Chemist

It took him only two weeks to publish The Relation between the Properties and Atomic Weights of the Elements. The Periodic Table had been unleashed on the scientific world.

Why was Mendeleev’s Periodic Table Successful?

As with many discoveries in science, there is a time when a concept becomes ripe for discovery, and this was the case with the periodic table in 1869.

Lothar Meyer, for example, had proposed a rough periodic table in 1864 and by 1868 had devised one that was very similar to Mendeleev’s, but he did not publish it until 1870.

John Newlands published a periodic table in 1865. Newlands wrote his own law of periodic behavior:

“Any given element will exhibit analogous [similar] behavior to the eighth element following it in the table”

Newlands also predicted the existence of a new element (germanium) based on a gap in his table. Unfortunately for Newlands, his work was largely ignored.

The reason Mendeleev became the leader of the pack was probably because he not only showed how the elements could be organized, but he used his periodic table to:

• Propose that some of the elements, whose behavior did not agree with his predictions, must have had their atomic weights measured incorrectly.
• 
  
• Predict the existence of eight new elements. Mendeleev even predicted the properties these elements would have.

It turned out that chemists had measured some atomic weights incorrectly. Mendeleev was right! Now scientists everywhere sat up and paid attention to his periodic table.

And, as new elements that he had predicted were discovered, Mendeleev’s fame and scientific reputation were enhanced further. In 1905, the British Royal Society gave him its highest honor, the Copley Medal, and in the same year he was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Element 101 is named Mendelevium in his honor.

“Dmitri Mendeleev was 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.”

Lev Aleksandrovich Chugaev, 1873 to 1922

Chemist

The End

Dmitri Mendeleev died in Saint Petersburg, February 2, 1907, six days before his 73rd birthday. He was killed by influenza.