Dmitri Mendeleev

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dmitri Mendeleev

Dmitri Mendeleev in 1897

Born 8 February 1834

Verhnie Aremzyani, Russian Empire

Died 2 February 1907 (aged 72)

St. Petersburg, Russian Empire

Nationality Russian

Fields Chemistry, physics and adjacent fields

Alma mater Saint Petersburg University

Notable students Dmitri Konovalov, Valery Gemilian,Alexander

Baykov

Known for Inventing the Periodic table of chemical elements

Dmitri Ivanovich
Mendeleev (also romanized Mendeleyev or Mendeleef; Russian:Дми́три
й Ива́нович Менделе́ев listen (help·info)) (8 February [O.S. 27
January] 1834 – 2 February [O.S. 20 January] 1907), was a
Russian chemist and inventor. He is credited as being the creator of the
first version of the periodic table of elements. Using the table, he predicted
the properties of elements yet to be discovered.

Contents
[hide]

• 1 Life
• 2 Periodic Table
• 3 Other achievements
• 4 See also
• 5 References
• 6 Further reading
• 7 External links
o 7.1 Biographies
o 7.2 Periodic table

o 7.3 Other

Life
Mendeleev was born in Verhnie Aremzyani village, near Tobolsk, to Ivan
Pavlovich Mendeleev and Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva (née Kornilieva).
His grandfather was Pavel Maximovich Sokolov, a priest of the Russian
Orthodox Church from the Tver region.[1] Ivan, along with his brothers and
sisters, obtained new family names while attending the theological
seminary.[2]
Mendeleev is thought to be the youngest of 14 siblings, but the exact
number differs among sources.[3] 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, the now poor Mendeleev family relocated to Saint Petersburg,
where he entered the Main Pedagogical Institute in 1850. After
graduation, tuberculosis caused 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.
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 had got engaged to
Feozva Nikitichna Leshcheva, and they married on 27 April 1862 at
Nikolaev Engineering College's church in Saint Petersburg.[4] Mendeleev
became Professor of Chemistry at the Saint Petersburg Technological
Institute and Saint Petersburg State University in 1863. 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 (on 2 April[5]) in early 1882. Even after the divorce,
Mendeleev was technically a bigamist; the Russian Orthodox
Church required at least 7 years before lawful re-marriage. His divorce and
the surrounding controversy contributed to his failure to be admitted to the
Russian Academy of Sciences (despite his international fame by that time).
His daughter from his second marriage, Lyubov, became the wife of the
famous Russian poet Alexander Blok. His other children were son Vladimir
(a sailor, he took part in the notable Eastern journey of Nicholas II) and
daughter Olga, from his first marriage to Feozva, and son Ivan and a pair
of twins from Anna.
Though Mendeleev was widely honored by scientific organizations all over
Europe, including the Copley Medal from the Royal Society of London, he
resigned from Saint Petersburg University on 17 August 1890.
In 1893, he was appointed Director of the Bureau of Weights and
Measures. It was in this role that he was directed to formulate new state
standards for the production of vodka. As a result of his work, in 1894 new
standards for vodka were introduced into Russian law and all vodka had to
be produced at 40% alcohol by volume.[6]
Mendeleev also investigated the composition of oil fields, and helped to
found the first oil refinery in Russia.
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.[7]
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
Mendeleev's 1871 periodic table

Sculpture in honor of Mendeleev and the periodic table, located in Bratislava, Slovakia
Sculpture in Saint Petersburg

Other scientists had suggested in the 1860s that the elements display
periodicity. John Newlands published his Law of Octaves in 1865. The lack
of spaces for undiscovered elements and the placing of two elements in
one box were criticized and his ideas were not accepted. Another
was Lothar Meyer, who published a paper in 1864 describing 28 elements.
Neither attempted to predict new elements. In 1863 there were 56 known
elements with a new element being discovered at a rate of approximately
one per year.
After becoming a teacher, Mendeleev wrote the definitive two-volume
textbook at that time: Principles of Chemistry(1868–1870). As he
attempted to classify the elements according to their chemical properties,
he noticed patterns that led him to postulate his Periodic Table. Mendeleev
was unaware of the other work on periodic tables going on in the 1860s.
He made the following table, and by adding additional elements following
this pattern, developed his extended version of the periodic table.[8][9]

Cl 35.5 K 39 Ca 40

Br 80 Rb 85 Sr 88

I 127 Cs 133 Ba 137

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

1. The elements, if arranged according to their atomic weight,

exhibit an apparent periodicity of properties.
2. Elements which are similar in regards to their chemical
properties have atomic weights which are either of nearly the same
value (e.g., Pt, Ir, Os) or which increase regularly (e.g., K, Rb, Cs).
 3. 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.
4. The elements which are the most widely diffused have small
atomic weights.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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 (127.6) remains higher than that of iodine (126.9)
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.
8. 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 (germanium,gallium and scandium, respectively) 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
(Sanskrit one, two, three) in their naming. Mendeleev questioned some of
the currently accepted atomic weights (they could be measured only with a
relatively low accuracy at that time), 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 (gallium) and Ge
(germanium) were found in 1875 and 1886 respectively, fitting perfectly
into the two missing spaces.[10]
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. According to
Professor Paul Kiparsky of Stanford University, Mendeleev was a friend
and colleague of the Sanskritist Böhtlingk, who was preparing the second
edition of his book on Pāṇini[11] at about this time, and Mendeleev wished
to honor Pāṇini with his nomenclature.[12]Noting that there are striking
similarities between the Periodic Table and the introductory Śiva Sūtras in
Pāṇini's grammar, Prof. Kiparsky says:
[T]he 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...[13]

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 (explosives, petroleum, and fuels, for example) 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 assolutions.

Mendeleev Medal

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." (Dmitri
Mendeleev, 1877)[14]