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Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev was a Russian scientist known for discovering the structural pattern of chemical elements with which he designed the periodic table of elements. Mendeleev also made important contributions to other areas of chemistry, metrology or the study of measurements, agriculture, and industry.
Key facts: Dmitri Mendeleev
- Known for creating the periodic law and the periodic table of the elements.
- Born: February 8, 1834 in the Tobolsk Governorate, Russian Empire.
- Parents: Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleyev, Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleyeva.
- Died: February 2, 1907 in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire.
- Education: Saint Petersburg State University.
- Published Works: Principles of Chemistry, THE Periodic Table of the Elements.
- Prizes and honors: Davy Medal, named member of the Royal Society of London for Science.
- Spouse(s): Feozva Nikítichna Leshchiova, Anna Ivanova Popova.
- Children: Lyubov, Vladimir, Olga, Anna, Ivan.
- Notable Phrase: “I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Waking up, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place a subsequent correction seemed necessary».
his early years
Mendeleyev was born on February 8, 1834 in Tobolsk, in Siberia, Russia. He was the youngest son of a large Russian Orthodox Christian family. The exact number of relatives is controversial and it is said that he had between 11 and 17 siblings. His father, Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleyev, was a glassmaker. His mother was called Dmitrievna Mendeleyeva.
The same year that Dmitri was born, his father went blind. He died just over a decade later, when Dmitri was a teenager, in 1847. His mother took over management of the glassworks, which was destroyed by fire a year later. Despite this, in order to ensure the education of his son, Dmitri’s mother took him to St. Petersburg and enrolled him in the Main Pedagogical Institute. A short time later, Dmitri’s mother also died.
Education
Dmitri graduated from the Main Pedagogical Institute in 1855, later earning a master’s degree in education. He received a government scholarship to continue his studies and this led him to study at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Once in Germany, he preferred to build his own laboratory at home and turned down the opportunity to work with Bunsen (creator of the laboratory burner that bears his name) and Erlenmeyer (creator of the flask that bears his name), two notable chemists from the epoch. He attended the International Chemical Congress and met many of Europe’s leading chemists.
In 1861 Dmitri returned to St. Petersburg to earn a doctorate, became a professor of chemistry at St. Petersburg University, and remained teaching there for nearly 30 years, until 1890.
The periodic table
Dmitri decided to write his own textbook, Principles of Chemistry , to support his classes at the university. It was then that he discovered that if he ordered the chemical elements from smallest to largest according to their atomic mass, their chemical properties showed definite trends. He called this discovery the “periodic law” of the elements.
Thanks to his understanding of the characteristics of the elements, Mendeleev organized them into a grid of eight columns, each grouping together a set of elements with similar qualities. He called this grid the “periodic table of the elements” and presented it along with the recent periodic law to the Russian Chemical Society in 1869.
There is an important difference between the Periodic Table of the Elements that we use today and the table originally designed by Mendeleev. Mendeleev ordered the elements based on their increasing atomic weight , while the current table is ordered based on atomic number .
In addition to this change, Mendeleev’s table had three blank spaces where he predicted that currently unknown elements would be located. Those spaces were occupied by germanium (Ge), gallium (Ga) and scandium (Sc). In all, Mendeleev predicted properties of eight elements that had not been discovered at the time. This prediction was based on knowledge of the periodic properties of the elements as shown in the table.
Publications and other interests
Mendeleev is remembered for his research work in chemistry and for the formation of the Russian Chemical Society, although his interests were broader. He wrote more than 400 books and articles on popular science and technology topics that were accessible to the non-specialist public and helped create a library of industry knowledge. In addition to his work for the university, he worked for the Russian government and became director of the Russian Central Office of Weights and Measures. His interest in the study of weights and measurements led him to do extensive research on the subject, and he came to edit and publish a journal on the subject.
In addition to his extensive work in chemistry and technology, Mendeleev was interested in helping to develop Russian agriculture and industry. He decided to learn about the oil industry in order to continue contributing to the development of his country, and to achieve this he repeatedly traveled the world to learn about it and help Russia develop both the oil and coal industries.
marriage and children
Mendeleev was married twice. His first marriage was to Feozva Nikítichna Leshchiova in 1862, with whom he had three children, although only two survived. He was very unhappy during this first marriage and although he was divorced 19 years later, he actually lived apart from his first wife for many years before the divorce was made official. Then, without waiting the seven years required by law, he married Anna Ivanova Popova barely a year after the divorce, in 1882. Although it was a socially difficult marriage, Mendeleev was 26 years older and did not have the approval of the family. Anna, it was a happy relationship that produced four more children.
Death
As a young man, Mendeleev suffered from a disease that was initially diagnosed as tuberculosis, so he moved to the Crimea for its milder climate. However, shortly after another doctor indicated that it was a heart condition not too serious, so he returned to Saint Petersburg and resumed his prolific scientific career. His death came many years later from pneumonia. He was 72 years old.
Legacy
Despite not having won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, he was awarded the prestigious Davy Medal in 1882 and appointed as a fellow of London’s Royal Society for the Advancement of Natural Science in 1892.
The Periodic Table, like all new discoveries, was not accepted among the chemists of the time until Mendeleev’s predictions about the new elements were shown to be correct. After gallium was discovered in 1879 and germanium in 1886, it became clear that the table was accurate. At the time of Mendeleev’s death, the Periodic Table of Elements was internationally recognized as one of the most important tools created for the study of chemistry.
References
Vidal, R. (2021). Eureka!: 50 Scientific Discoveries That Changed the World. Penguin Books. Available at: https://books.google.co.ve/books?id=Y60LEAAAQBAJ&dq
Moreno, S. (2019). Mendeleev and other authors of the periodic table. Heaven. Available at: http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0370-39082019000200163
https://www.rinconeducativo.org/es/recursos-educativos/dimitri-ivanovich-mendeleev
