Dmitri Mendeleev

Dmitri Mendeleev (born January 27 (February 8, New Style), 1834, Tobolsk, Siberia, Russian Empire—died January 20 (February 2), 1907, St. Petersburg, Russia) was a Russian chemist who developed the periodic classification of the elements. Mendeleev found that, when all the known chemical elements were arranged in order of increasing atomic weight, the resulting table displayed a recurring pattern, or periodicity, of properties within groups of elements. In his version of the periodic table of 1871, he left gaps in places where he believed unknown elements would find their place. He even predicted the likely properties of three of the potential elements. The subsequent proof of many of his predictions within his lifetime brought fame to Mendeleev as the founder of the periodic law.

Early life and education

Mendeleev was born in the small Siberian town of Tobolsk as the last of 14 surviving children (or 13, depending on the source) of Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev, a teacher at the local gymnasium, and Mariya Dmitriyevna Kornileva. Dmitri’s father became blind in the year of Dmitri’s birth and died in 1847. To support the family, his mother turned to operating a small glass factory owned by her family in a nearby town. The factory burned down in December 1848, and Dmitri’s mother took him to St. Petersburg, where he enrolled in the Main Pedagogical Institute. His mother died soon after, and Mendeleev graduated in 1855. He got his first teaching position at Simferopol in Crimea. He stayed there only two months and, after a short time at the lyceum of Odessa, decided to go back to St. Petersburg to continue his education. He received a master’s degree in 1856 and began to conduct research in organic chemistry. Financed by a government fellowship, he went to study abroad for two years at the University of Heidelberg. Instead of working closely with the prominent chemists of the university, including Robert Bunsen, Emil Erlenmeyer, and August Kekulé, he set up a laboratory in his own apartment. In September 1860 he attended the International Chemistry Congress in Karlsruhe, convened to discuss such crucial issues as atomic weights, chemical symbols, and chemical formulas. There he met and established contacts with many of Europe’s leading chemists. In later years Mendeleev would especially remember a paper circulated by the Italian chemist Stanislao Cannizzaro that clarified the notion of atomic weights.

In 1861 Mendeleev returned to St. Petersburg, where he obtained a professorship at the Technological Institute in 1864. After the defense of his doctoral dissertation in 1865 he was appointed professor of chemical technology at the University of St. Petersburg (now St. Petersburg State University). He became professor of general chemistry in 1867 and continued to teach there until 1890.

Formulation of the periodic law

As he began to teach inorganic chemistry, Mendeleev could not find a textbook that met his needs. Since he had already published a textbook on organic chemistry in 1861 that had been awarded the prestigious Demidov Prize, he set out to write another one. The result was Osnovy khimii (1868–71; The Principles of Chemistry), which became a classic, running through many editions and many translations. When Mendeleev began to compose the chapter on the halogen elements (chlorine and its analogs) at the end of the first volume, he compared the properties of this group of elements to those of the group of alkali metals such as sodium. Within these two groups of dissimilar elements, he discovered similarities in the progression of atomic weights, and he wondered if other groups of elements exhibited similar properties. After studying the alkaline earths, Mendeleev established that the order of atomic weights could be used not only to arrange the elements within each group but also to arrange the groups themselves. Thus, in his effort to make sense of the extensive knowledge that already existed of the chemical and physical properties of the chemical elements and their compounds, Mendeleev discovered the periodic law.

His newly formulated law was announced before the Russian Chemical Society in March 1869 with the statement “elements arranged according to the value of their atomic weights present a clear periodicity of properties.” Mendeleev’s law allowed him to build up a systematic table of all the 70 elements then known. He had such faith in the validity of the periodic law that he proposed changes to the generally accepted values for the atomic weight of a few elements and predicted the locations within the table of unknown elements together with their properties. At first the periodic system did not raise interest among chemists. However, with the discovery of the predicted elements, notably gallium in 1875, scandium in 1879, and germanium in 1886, it began to win wide acceptance. Gradually the periodic law and table became the framework for a great part of chemical theory. By the time Mendeleev died in 1907, he enjoyed international recognition and had received distinctions and awards from many countries.

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