Posted on Feb 2, 2020
Biography of Dmitri Mendeleev, Inventor of the Periodic Table
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On February 2, 1907, Dmitri Mendeleev, Russian chemist and inventor who devised the Periodic Table of the Elements, died at the age of 72. From the article:
"Biography of Dmitri Mendeleev, Inventor of the Periodic Table
Dmitri Mendeleev (February 8, 1834–February 2, 1907) was a Russian scientist best known for devising the modern periodic table of elements. Mendeleev also made major contributions to other areas of chemistry, metrology (the study of measurements), agriculture, and industry.
Fast Facts: Dmitri Mendeleev
Known For: Creating the Periodic Law and Periodic Table of the Elements
Born: February 8, 1834 in Verkhnie Aremzyani, Tobolsk Governorate, Russian Empire
Parents: Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev, Maria Dmitrievna Kornilieva
Died: February 2, 1907 in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
Education: Saint Petersburg University
Published Works: Principles of Chemistry
Awards and Honors: Davy Medal,
Spouse(s): Feozva Nikitichna Leshcheva, Anna Ivanovna Popova
Children: Lyubov, Vladimir, Olga, Anna, Ivan
Notable Quote: "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."
Early Life
Mendeleev was born on February 8, 1834, in Tobolsk, a town in Siberia, Russia. He was the youngest of a large Russian Orthodox Christian family. The exact size of the family is a matter of dispute, with sources putting the number of siblings between 11 and 17. His father was Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev, a glass manufacturer, and his mother was Dmitrievna Kornilieva.
In the same year that Dmitri was born, his father went blind. He died in 1847. His mother took on the management of the glass factory, but it burned down just a year later. To provide her son with an education, Dmitri's mother brought him to St. Petersburg and enrolled him in the Main Pedagogical Institute. Soon after, Dmitri's mother died.
Education
Dmitri graduated from the Institute in 1855 and then went on to earn a masters degree in education. He received a fellowship from the government to continue his studies and moved to the University of Heidelberg in Germany. There, he decided not to work with Bunsen and Erlenmeyer, two distinguished chemists, and instead set up his own laboratory at home. He attended the International Chemistry Congress and met many of Europe's top chemists.
In 1861, Dmitri went back to St. Petersburg to earn his P.hd. He then became a chemistry professor at the University of St. Petersburg. He continued to teach there until 1890.
The Periodic Table of the Elements
Dmitri found it hard to find a good chemistry textbook for his classes, so he wrote his own. While writing his textbook, Principles of Chemistry, Mendeleev found that if you arrange the elements in order of increasing atomic mass, their chemical properties demonstrated definite trends. He called this discovery the Periodic Law, and stated it in this way: "When the elements are arranged in order of increasing atomic mass, certain sets of properties recur periodically."
Drawing on his understanding of element characteristics, Mendeleev arranged the known elements in an eight-column grid. Each column represented a set of elements with similar qualities. He called the grid the periodic table of the elements. He presented his grid and his periodic law to the Russian Chemical Society in 1869.
The only real difference between his table and the one we use today is that Mendeleev's table ordered elements by increasing atomic weight, while the present table is ordered by increasing atomic number.
Mendeleev's table had blank spaces where he predicted three unknown elements, which turned out to be germanium, gallium, and scandium. Based on the periodic properties of the elements, as shown in the table, Mendeleev predicted properties of eight elements in total, which had not even been discovered.
Writing and Industry
While Mendeleev is remembered for his work in chemistry and the formation of the Russian Chemical Society, he had many other interests. He wrote more than 400 books and articles on topics in popular science and technology. He wrote for ordinary people, and helped create a "library of industrial knowledge."
He worked for the Russian government and became the director of the Central Bureau of Weights and Measures. He became very interested in the study of measures and did a great deal of research on the subject. Later, he published a journal.
In addition to his interests in chemistry and technology, Mendeleev was interested in helping to develop Russian agriculture and industry. He traveled around the world to learn about the petroleum industry and helped Russia to develop its oil wells. He also worked to develop the Russian coal industry.
Marriage and Children
Mendeleev was married twice. He wed Feozva Nikitchna Leshcheva in 1862, but the couple divorced after 19 years. He married Anna Ivanova Popova the year after the divorce, in 1882. He had a total of six children from these marriages.
Death
In 1907 at age 72, Mendeleev died from the flu. He was living in St. Petersburg at the time. His last words, spoken to his doctor, reportedly were, "Doctor, you have science, I have faith." This may have been a quote from the famous French writer Jules Verne.
Legacy
Mendeleev, despite his achievements, never won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In fact, he was passed over for the honor twice. He was, however, awarded the prestigious Davy Medal (1882) and ForMemRS (1892).
The Periodic Table did not gain acceptance among chemists until Mendeleev's predictions for new elements were shown to be correct. After gallium was discovered in 1879 and germanium in 1886, it was clear that the table was extremely accurate. By the time of Mendeleev's death, the Periodic Table of Elements was internationally recognized as one of the most important tools ever created for the study of chemistry."
"Biography of Dmitri Mendeleev, Inventor of the Periodic Table
Dmitri Mendeleev (February 8, 1834–February 2, 1907) was a Russian scientist best known for devising the modern periodic table of elements. Mendeleev also made major contributions to other areas of chemistry, metrology (the study of measurements), agriculture, and industry.
Fast Facts: Dmitri Mendeleev
Known For: Creating the Periodic Law and Periodic Table of the Elements
Born: February 8, 1834 in Verkhnie Aremzyani, Tobolsk Governorate, Russian Empire
Parents: Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev, Maria Dmitrievna Kornilieva
Died: February 2, 1907 in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
Education: Saint Petersburg University
Published Works: Principles of Chemistry
Awards and Honors: Davy Medal,
Spouse(s): Feozva Nikitichna Leshcheva, Anna Ivanovna Popova
Children: Lyubov, Vladimir, Olga, Anna, Ivan
Notable Quote: "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."
Early Life
Mendeleev was born on February 8, 1834, in Tobolsk, a town in Siberia, Russia. He was the youngest of a large Russian Orthodox Christian family. The exact size of the family is a matter of dispute, with sources putting the number of siblings between 11 and 17. His father was Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev, a glass manufacturer, and his mother was Dmitrievna Kornilieva.
In the same year that Dmitri was born, his father went blind. He died in 1847. His mother took on the management of the glass factory, but it burned down just a year later. To provide her son with an education, Dmitri's mother brought him to St. Petersburg and enrolled him in the Main Pedagogical Institute. Soon after, Dmitri's mother died.
Education
Dmitri graduated from the Institute in 1855 and then went on to earn a masters degree in education. He received a fellowship from the government to continue his studies and moved to the University of Heidelberg in Germany. There, he decided not to work with Bunsen and Erlenmeyer, two distinguished chemists, and instead set up his own laboratory at home. He attended the International Chemistry Congress and met many of Europe's top chemists.
In 1861, Dmitri went back to St. Petersburg to earn his P.hd. He then became a chemistry professor at the University of St. Petersburg. He continued to teach there until 1890.
The Periodic Table of the Elements
Dmitri found it hard to find a good chemistry textbook for his classes, so he wrote his own. While writing his textbook, Principles of Chemistry, Mendeleev found that if you arrange the elements in order of increasing atomic mass, their chemical properties demonstrated definite trends. He called this discovery the Periodic Law, and stated it in this way: "When the elements are arranged in order of increasing atomic mass, certain sets of properties recur periodically."
Drawing on his understanding of element characteristics, Mendeleev arranged the known elements in an eight-column grid. Each column represented a set of elements with similar qualities. He called the grid the periodic table of the elements. He presented his grid and his periodic law to the Russian Chemical Society in 1869.
The only real difference between his table and the one we use today is that Mendeleev's table ordered elements by increasing atomic weight, while the present table is ordered by increasing atomic number.
Mendeleev's table had blank spaces where he predicted three unknown elements, which turned out to be germanium, gallium, and scandium. Based on the periodic properties of the elements, as shown in the table, Mendeleev predicted properties of eight elements in total, which had not even been discovered.
Writing and Industry
While Mendeleev is remembered for his work in chemistry and the formation of the Russian Chemical Society, he had many other interests. He wrote more than 400 books and articles on topics in popular science and technology. He wrote for ordinary people, and helped create a "library of industrial knowledge."
He worked for the Russian government and became the director of the Central Bureau of Weights and Measures. He became very interested in the study of measures and did a great deal of research on the subject. Later, he published a journal.
In addition to his interests in chemistry and technology, Mendeleev was interested in helping to develop Russian agriculture and industry. He traveled around the world to learn about the petroleum industry and helped Russia to develop its oil wells. He also worked to develop the Russian coal industry.
Marriage and Children
Mendeleev was married twice. He wed Feozva Nikitchna Leshcheva in 1862, but the couple divorced after 19 years. He married Anna Ivanova Popova the year after the divorce, in 1882. He had a total of six children from these marriages.
Death
In 1907 at age 72, Mendeleev died from the flu. He was living in St. Petersburg at the time. His last words, spoken to his doctor, reportedly were, "Doctor, you have science, I have faith." This may have been a quote from the famous French writer Jules Verne.
Legacy
Mendeleev, despite his achievements, never won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In fact, he was passed over for the honor twice. He was, however, awarded the prestigious Davy Medal (1882) and ForMemRS (1892).
The Periodic Table did not gain acceptance among chemists until Mendeleev's predictions for new elements were shown to be correct. After gallium was discovered in 1879 and germanium in 1886, it was clear that the table was extremely accurate. By the time of Mendeleev's death, the Periodic Table of Elements was internationally recognized as one of the most important tools ever created for the study of chemistry."
Biography of Dmitri Mendeleev, Inventor of the Periodic Table
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Science in Focus: Big Questions The story of how Dmitri Mendeleev devised the periodic table of the elements.
Thank you, my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on February 2, 1907 Russian chemist and inventor who devised the Periodic Table of the Elements Dmitri Ivanovich [son of Ivan] Mendeleev died at the age of 72.
As new elements were being discovered, the complexities of chemistry increased exponentially as chemists grappled with how to bring order out of the chaos of so much information.
As professor, he developed a Russian language chemistry text book since none exist.
His periodic table was developed in the process of writing the textbook.
Mendeleev's Dream G64LS25
"Science in Focus: Big Questions
The story of how Dmitri Mendeleev devised the periodic table of the elements."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2dnk4OtbYE
Image:
1. Mendeleev's Periodic Table (1869)
2. A room at St Petersburg University used by Mendeleev
3. Dmitry Mendeleyev-Russian chemist taught in St Petersburg
4. Russian stamp issued in 1969 pays tribute to Mendeleev
Background from [https://edu.rsc.org/feature/mendeleev-the-man-and-his-legacy-/2020190.article]
"Mendeleev - the man and his legacy...
BY GORDON WOODS1 MARCH 2007
Russia's most famous chemist and formulator of the Periodic Table, died 100 years ago. In this article, the first of two to celebrate the legacy of Dmitri Mendeleev, we look at his life and work.
In Short
• Mendeleev spent years collecting data on elements, which he wrote down on separate cards
• When he laid the data out in order of increasing weight he saw an emerging pattern of repeated properties
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev the youngest of 14 children was born at Tobolsk, Siberia, 500 miles east of the Ural mountains, on 27 January 1834 (OS*). A double disaster struck the family of teenager Dmitri. First his father, headmaster and literature teacher at a local secondary school, died and then the glassworks owned by his mother Maria burnt down.
Dmitri's mother, however, was an ambitious woman of strong character, and recognising the academic ability of her youngest made his education her priority. In 1849 she took him and two siblings first to Moscow, where Dmitri was refused entry to the college because he was Siberian, and then on to St Petersburg, the capital of Czarist Russia, where she secured a place for him at the pedagogical college where her husband had trained.
Within a year of arriving in St Petersburg Maria died. Dmitri cherished her memory and later dedicated his doctorial research to her:
'conducting a factory, she educated me by her own word, she instructed by example, corrected with love, and to give me the cause of science she left Siberia with me, spending thus her last resources and strength. When dieing she said 'Be careful of illusion; work, search for divine and scientific truth'.
As a young student, Dmitri suffered poor health, possibly tuberculosis, and was unable to attend some of his course. Nevertheless, he was awarded a gold medal at the end for finishing top of the class.
In 1855, at the age of 21, he took a post as a science teacher at Simferopol School on the Crimean peninsula which had a warmer and healthier climate than elsewhere in Russia. However, within a week of his arrival, nearby British landings signalled the onset of the Crimean war, and the school closed. He was transferred to another school, further north, in Odessa, where he decided university research and not school teaching would be his future.
Early influences
After two years' doctoral research on the interaction of alcohols with water at St Petersburg University (1856-58), the Russian authorities awarded Mendeleev a scholarship to study in Paris under Henri Regnault and in Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen. Under the guidance of Regnault, he spent much time collecting information and making measurements on gases, and with Bunsen he learnt new techniques, notably spectroscopy. He accumulated enormous amounts of data about substances, which he would later try to organise and rationalise. In 1860, together with fellow Russian chemist Alexander Borodin, better known now as a composer, he attended the world's first international chemistry congress at Karlsruhe. [1] (Among the delegates were Gay-Lussac, Faraday, Berzelius, Kekulé, Cannizzaro, Odling, Wurtz, Dumas and Fehling.) At this time there was confusion about atomic weights - chemists could not agree whether oxygen, for example, was eight or 16. This confusion centred on the uncertainty surrounding chemical formulae - was water H2O or OH? After the conference Stanislao Cannizzaro, acknowledging the work of fellow Italian Amedeo Avogadro on chemical formulae and valency, produced the most accurate list of atomic weights then known. This work would later prove to be essential to Mendeleev in recognising periodicity.
Back at St Petersburg
Mendeleev returned to St Petersburg University, initially as a professor of chemistry in the technological section. Pressurised by his sister, he married Feosva Leshchevayi, six years his senior, and together they had a son Vladimir and daughter Olga. But Mendeleev was a workaholic, his science always came before his marriage, and his wife lived mainly alone with the children at an estate near Moscow, some 400 miles away.
In 1867 Mendeleev was appointed to the chair of inorganic chemistry at the university, and finding no suitable textbook for his students he wrote his own - Osnovy khimii (Principles of chemistry), which ran to eight editions, some of which have been translated into English, German and French. [2] Mendeleev had a set of rooms at the university which provided living accommodation as well as working space. (Today these rooms are filled with furniture, mostly from the family, chemical apparatus, paintings and books, some bound by Dmitri himself.) Fairly remote in Russia Mendeleev was unaware of other chemists' attempts, including de Chantcourtois, Newlands, Odling, Hinrichs, and Lothar Meyer, to organise the elements discovered so far. Meanwhile he continued to collect information about each element and wrote this down on separate cards. On 17 February 1869 (1 March in our Gregorian calendar) while arranging the cards in a way similar to playing a game of patience, he suddenly saw an emerging pattern of repeated properties when elements were listed in increasing weight order. This he initially called the Periodic System but in an improved version in 1871 he referred to it as a Periodic Table. (In Russia today it is often referred to as the Mendeleev Table.) The first public announcement of the Periodic System came a month later to the recently formed Russian physicochemical society by Professor Menschutkin because Mendeleev was ill. Later that month a summary about the Periodic System appeared in the German periodical Zeitschrift für Chemie (see Box 1). [2]
Mendeleev's Table was superior to earlier tables in two important ways. First he amended the atomic weights of some elements to place them correctly in the Table with properties related to adjacent elements, particularly in the same column. Secondly, he left spaces for yet to be discovered elements whose properties he boldly predicted. Nevertheless, Mendeleev's Periodic System, an idea from a distant land, was not initially accepted by other chemists.
Amendments to the Table
There were two reasons for some atomic weights to be amended - either they had been assigned the wrong valency or they had unusual isotopic abundances.
Classical atomic weights were determined from the relationship:
atomic weight = combining (or equivalent) weight × valency
The combining weight was measured experimentally to an accuracy of ca ±0.2 but this precision was wasted if the wrong valency was used. In the case of beryllium, for example, its combining weight was 4.5. Chemically it resembled aluminium, having a white amphoteric hydroxide, and so it was assigned a valency of three, and thus an atomic weight of 13.5 (3 × 4.5). Mendeleev pointed out that there was no space for an element between carbon and nitrogen, but with valency of two it would fit above magnesium. Thus beryllium was correctly placed by an atomic weight change. Similar situations occurred with uranium and indium.
We now know that elements are ordered in increasing atomic number and not atomic weight, but fortunately for Mendeleev and other contemporary chemists there are only three cases (Ar-K, Co-Ni and Te-I) among stable elements where the two orders differ. In 1869 argon was unknown, and Co and Ni had chemical properties and atomic weights so similar that it was not a problem that Ni preceded Co.
The difficult case to explain was Te-I. The accepted atomic weight of tellurium (128) was more than that of iodine (127), yet chemically iodine more closely resembled bromine. Mendeleev was convinced of the accuracy of his Table, so he reasoned that one of the atomic weights had to be wrong, probably the less familiar tellurium. His experimental assistant, Bohuslav Brauner, determined the molecular weight of a volatile halide to obtain a lower atomic weight of tellurium. He was so convinced of the expected result that when the atomic weight of tellurium was still too high he concluded that he must have failed to remove some heavy impurity. So tellurium was correctly placed in the Table but the amendments to its atomic weight were wrong. We now know that the anomaly arises because of the great abundances of the two heaviest tellurium isotopes, unlike iodine which unusually is monoisotopic. Twenty five years later the discovery of argon posed a similar problem. Mendeleev refused to believe that the atomic weight of argon was more than that of potassium. The explanation is the same.
In 1875 Frenchman Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran, by using the then new technique of spectroscopy, discovered a new element, which he called gallium. Details of gallium's properties reached Mendeleev who realised this was his 'eka-aluminium', ie one following aluminium. Table 1 lists the amazing similarity between the predicted and discovered elements. Mendeleev even suggested that the Frenchman had an incorrect value for the density of the element. This confidence, bordering, some thought, on arrogance, was shown to be justified when the gallium sample was purified. From this time chemists started to believe in the Mendeleev Table and began to use it in their search for new elements. Within a decade, two more of Mendeleev's predicted elements had been discovered - scandium by Nilson in 1881 and germanium by Winkler in 1886.
International recognition
With increasing acceptance of the Periodic Table, Mendeleev began to receive invitations to speak or receive honorary degrees from abroad, including the US, western Europe and Great Britain (notably Cambridge). [3] He spoke on Solutions of alcohol and water at the 1887 British Association annual meeting in Manchester also attended by Lothar Meyer with whom in 1882 he had shared the Davy medal of the Royal Society for their work on periodicity.
Mendeleev visited London again in May-June 1889 when he addressed the Royal Society, and spent a few days with Ludwig Mond and William Ramsay before a telegram told him of the illness of his young son. Mendeleev immediately set off for home and his Faraday lecture The Periodic Law of the chemical elements was read by Professor Armstrong to fellows of the Chemical Society at the Royal Institution. [4]
The Periodic Table established Mendeleev's national fame as a scientist and his interests widened beyond chemistry. He visited oilfields in Pennsylvania to gain knowledge for increasing the efficiency of oil extraction from Baku in southern Russia. He gave scientific advice on various agricultural projects and even went up in a hot-air balloon to get a better view of a total solar eclipse.
By 1880 Mendeleev had been separated from his wife for over 10 years. He then met his niece's closest friend, Anna Popova, a young music student, who captivated him and developed his interest in the Arts. Despite opposition from her parents and the Orthodox church, and the initial unwillingness of his estranged wife to permit divorce, he married Popova in 1882. They had four children, including twins.
Mendeleev's chemistry lectures were well attended, he was after all famous. In 1890 the students were unhappy about regulations imposed on them by the authorities - compulsory uniform, increased fees etc. Mendeleev's socialist leaning and the effect of a young wife led him to present the students' petition to the Public Enlightenment Department. Whether he was dismissed or resigned because of this is uncertain but the outcome was the same - he left St Petersburg University.
Two years later Mendeleev was appointed director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures in St Petersburg where he controversially employed women in responsible positions. He visited western Europe several times in connection with setting standards demanded by his appointment. His statue stands outside the Bureau building which has on its wall a giant Periodic Table erected in 1934 to mark the centenary of his birth.
In 1895 Ramsay discovered argon in the air with molecular weight about 40. At first Mendeleev disputed the discovery since there was no gap in his Periodic Table to be filled at either 20 or 40 (depending on whether the gas was diatomic or monatomic). He suggested it might be N3, akin to O3, with a molecular weight of 42. However his attitude changed when Ramsay reasoned that there must be a whole group of unreactive gases between the halogens and the alkali metals and then began to identify them.
The annual award of Nobel prizes started in 1900 for which priority was to be given for recent work. Despite the 35 years gap since his best work Mendeleev nearly won the 1906 chemistry award. [5] There was no second chance because he died in St Petersburg on 20 January 1907 (OS) while Anna read to him Jules Verne's Journey to the North Pole. Students carried a Periodic Table aloft at his State funeral. He is buried near his mother in Volkova cemetery at St Petersburg. His tombstone merely gives his name, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev.
Gordon Woods can be contacted at 3 Peterborough Avenue, Oakham, Rutland LE15 6EB or by e-mail ( [login to see] .uk).
Mendeleev's System, March 1869
Concerning the relation between the properties and atomic weights of the elements. D. Mendeleev, March 1869. [2]
Arranging the elements in vertical columns with increasing atomic weights so that the horizontal rows contain similar elements, again in increasing atomic weight order, then the following table is obtained from which general predictions can be drawn. Elements show a periodicity of properties if listed in order of their atomic weights.
[1]. Elements with similar properties either have atomic weights that are about the same (Pt, Ir, Os) or increase regularly (K, Rb, Cs).
[2]. The arrangement of the elements corresponds to their valency, and somewhat according to their chemical properties (eg Li, Be B, C, N, O, F).
[3]. The commonest elements have small atomic weights and they have distinctive properties. They are typical elements and it is correct to have the lightest element H as the basis of atomic weights.
[4]. The value of the atomic weight determines the properties of the element, hence studying compounds one should not only take [account] of the number and nature of the element but also their atomic weights. Therefore there will be a noticeable difference with some properties between S and Tl, Cl and J (I).
[5]. There are unknown new elements to discover similar to Al and Si within atomic weight range 65-75.
[6]. The atomic weights of some elements may be changed from knowing the properties of neighbouring elements. Thus the atomic weight of Te must be in the range of 123-126. It cannot be 128.
Some typical properties of an element can be predicted from its atomic weight. "
References
M. Laing, Educ. Chem., 1995, 32 [6], 151.
D. I. Mendeleev, Zeitschrift für Chemie, 1869, 12, 405.
Cambridge University Reporter, July 4 ,1894.
Faraday lecture, Professor Mendeleeff, JCS, 1889, 55, 634.
G. T. Woods, Educ. Chem., 1999, 36 [2], 42.
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SSgt Terry P. Maj Robert Thornton SFC (Join to see) SGT Steve McFarland MSG Andrew White Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. LTC Greg Henning SGT Gregory Lawritson SP5 Mark KuzinskiCWO3 (Join to see) PO1 William "Chip" Nagel Cynthia Croft SPC Margaret Higgins SSG Robert "Rob" WentworthCPT Paul Whitmer1SG Steven ImermanSSG Samuel Kermon
As new elements were being discovered, the complexities of chemistry increased exponentially as chemists grappled with how to bring order out of the chaos of so much information.
As professor, he developed a Russian language chemistry text book since none exist.
His periodic table was developed in the process of writing the textbook.
Mendeleev's Dream G64LS25
"Science in Focus: Big Questions
The story of how Dmitri Mendeleev devised the periodic table of the elements."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2dnk4OtbYE
Image:
1. Mendeleev's Periodic Table (1869)
2. A room at St Petersburg University used by Mendeleev
3. Dmitry Mendeleyev-Russian chemist taught in St Petersburg
4. Russian stamp issued in 1969 pays tribute to Mendeleev
Background from [https://edu.rsc.org/feature/mendeleev-the-man-and-his-legacy-/2020190.article]
"Mendeleev - the man and his legacy...
BY GORDON WOODS1 MARCH 2007
Russia's most famous chemist and formulator of the Periodic Table, died 100 years ago. In this article, the first of two to celebrate the legacy of Dmitri Mendeleev, we look at his life and work.
In Short
• Mendeleev spent years collecting data on elements, which he wrote down on separate cards
• When he laid the data out in order of increasing weight he saw an emerging pattern of repeated properties
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev the youngest of 14 children was born at Tobolsk, Siberia, 500 miles east of the Ural mountains, on 27 January 1834 (OS*). A double disaster struck the family of teenager Dmitri. First his father, headmaster and literature teacher at a local secondary school, died and then the glassworks owned by his mother Maria burnt down.
Dmitri's mother, however, was an ambitious woman of strong character, and recognising the academic ability of her youngest made his education her priority. In 1849 she took him and two siblings first to Moscow, where Dmitri was refused entry to the college because he was Siberian, and then on to St Petersburg, the capital of Czarist Russia, where she secured a place for him at the pedagogical college where her husband had trained.
Within a year of arriving in St Petersburg Maria died. Dmitri cherished her memory and later dedicated his doctorial research to her:
'conducting a factory, she educated me by her own word, she instructed by example, corrected with love, and to give me the cause of science she left Siberia with me, spending thus her last resources and strength. When dieing she said 'Be careful of illusion; work, search for divine and scientific truth'.
As a young student, Dmitri suffered poor health, possibly tuberculosis, and was unable to attend some of his course. Nevertheless, he was awarded a gold medal at the end for finishing top of the class.
In 1855, at the age of 21, he took a post as a science teacher at Simferopol School on the Crimean peninsula which had a warmer and healthier climate than elsewhere in Russia. However, within a week of his arrival, nearby British landings signalled the onset of the Crimean war, and the school closed. He was transferred to another school, further north, in Odessa, where he decided university research and not school teaching would be his future.
Early influences
After two years' doctoral research on the interaction of alcohols with water at St Petersburg University (1856-58), the Russian authorities awarded Mendeleev a scholarship to study in Paris under Henri Regnault and in Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen. Under the guidance of Regnault, he spent much time collecting information and making measurements on gases, and with Bunsen he learnt new techniques, notably spectroscopy. He accumulated enormous amounts of data about substances, which he would later try to organise and rationalise. In 1860, together with fellow Russian chemist Alexander Borodin, better known now as a composer, he attended the world's first international chemistry congress at Karlsruhe. [1] (Among the delegates were Gay-Lussac, Faraday, Berzelius, Kekulé, Cannizzaro, Odling, Wurtz, Dumas and Fehling.) At this time there was confusion about atomic weights - chemists could not agree whether oxygen, for example, was eight or 16. This confusion centred on the uncertainty surrounding chemical formulae - was water H2O or OH? After the conference Stanislao Cannizzaro, acknowledging the work of fellow Italian Amedeo Avogadro on chemical formulae and valency, produced the most accurate list of atomic weights then known. This work would later prove to be essential to Mendeleev in recognising periodicity.
Back at St Petersburg
Mendeleev returned to St Petersburg University, initially as a professor of chemistry in the technological section. Pressurised by his sister, he married Feosva Leshchevayi, six years his senior, and together they had a son Vladimir and daughter Olga. But Mendeleev was a workaholic, his science always came before his marriage, and his wife lived mainly alone with the children at an estate near Moscow, some 400 miles away.
In 1867 Mendeleev was appointed to the chair of inorganic chemistry at the university, and finding no suitable textbook for his students he wrote his own - Osnovy khimii (Principles of chemistry), which ran to eight editions, some of which have been translated into English, German and French. [2] Mendeleev had a set of rooms at the university which provided living accommodation as well as working space. (Today these rooms are filled with furniture, mostly from the family, chemical apparatus, paintings and books, some bound by Dmitri himself.) Fairly remote in Russia Mendeleev was unaware of other chemists' attempts, including de Chantcourtois, Newlands, Odling, Hinrichs, and Lothar Meyer, to organise the elements discovered so far. Meanwhile he continued to collect information about each element and wrote this down on separate cards. On 17 February 1869 (1 March in our Gregorian calendar) while arranging the cards in a way similar to playing a game of patience, he suddenly saw an emerging pattern of repeated properties when elements were listed in increasing weight order. This he initially called the Periodic System but in an improved version in 1871 he referred to it as a Periodic Table. (In Russia today it is often referred to as the Mendeleev Table.) The first public announcement of the Periodic System came a month later to the recently formed Russian physicochemical society by Professor Menschutkin because Mendeleev was ill. Later that month a summary about the Periodic System appeared in the German periodical Zeitschrift für Chemie (see Box 1). [2]
Mendeleev's Table was superior to earlier tables in two important ways. First he amended the atomic weights of some elements to place them correctly in the Table with properties related to adjacent elements, particularly in the same column. Secondly, he left spaces for yet to be discovered elements whose properties he boldly predicted. Nevertheless, Mendeleev's Periodic System, an idea from a distant land, was not initially accepted by other chemists.
Amendments to the Table
There were two reasons for some atomic weights to be amended - either they had been assigned the wrong valency or they had unusual isotopic abundances.
Classical atomic weights were determined from the relationship:
atomic weight = combining (or equivalent) weight × valency
The combining weight was measured experimentally to an accuracy of ca ±0.2 but this precision was wasted if the wrong valency was used. In the case of beryllium, for example, its combining weight was 4.5. Chemically it resembled aluminium, having a white amphoteric hydroxide, and so it was assigned a valency of three, and thus an atomic weight of 13.5 (3 × 4.5). Mendeleev pointed out that there was no space for an element between carbon and nitrogen, but with valency of two it would fit above magnesium. Thus beryllium was correctly placed by an atomic weight change. Similar situations occurred with uranium and indium.
We now know that elements are ordered in increasing atomic number and not atomic weight, but fortunately for Mendeleev and other contemporary chemists there are only three cases (Ar-K, Co-Ni and Te-I) among stable elements where the two orders differ. In 1869 argon was unknown, and Co and Ni had chemical properties and atomic weights so similar that it was not a problem that Ni preceded Co.
The difficult case to explain was Te-I. The accepted atomic weight of tellurium (128) was more than that of iodine (127), yet chemically iodine more closely resembled bromine. Mendeleev was convinced of the accuracy of his Table, so he reasoned that one of the atomic weights had to be wrong, probably the less familiar tellurium. His experimental assistant, Bohuslav Brauner, determined the molecular weight of a volatile halide to obtain a lower atomic weight of tellurium. He was so convinced of the expected result that when the atomic weight of tellurium was still too high he concluded that he must have failed to remove some heavy impurity. So tellurium was correctly placed in the Table but the amendments to its atomic weight were wrong. We now know that the anomaly arises because of the great abundances of the two heaviest tellurium isotopes, unlike iodine which unusually is monoisotopic. Twenty five years later the discovery of argon posed a similar problem. Mendeleev refused to believe that the atomic weight of argon was more than that of potassium. The explanation is the same.
In 1875 Frenchman Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran, by using the then new technique of spectroscopy, discovered a new element, which he called gallium. Details of gallium's properties reached Mendeleev who realised this was his 'eka-aluminium', ie one following aluminium. Table 1 lists the amazing similarity between the predicted and discovered elements. Mendeleev even suggested that the Frenchman had an incorrect value for the density of the element. This confidence, bordering, some thought, on arrogance, was shown to be justified when the gallium sample was purified. From this time chemists started to believe in the Mendeleev Table and began to use it in their search for new elements. Within a decade, two more of Mendeleev's predicted elements had been discovered - scandium by Nilson in 1881 and germanium by Winkler in 1886.
International recognition
With increasing acceptance of the Periodic Table, Mendeleev began to receive invitations to speak or receive honorary degrees from abroad, including the US, western Europe and Great Britain (notably Cambridge). [3] He spoke on Solutions of alcohol and water at the 1887 British Association annual meeting in Manchester also attended by Lothar Meyer with whom in 1882 he had shared the Davy medal of the Royal Society for their work on periodicity.
Mendeleev visited London again in May-June 1889 when he addressed the Royal Society, and spent a few days with Ludwig Mond and William Ramsay before a telegram told him of the illness of his young son. Mendeleev immediately set off for home and his Faraday lecture The Periodic Law of the chemical elements was read by Professor Armstrong to fellows of the Chemical Society at the Royal Institution. [4]
The Periodic Table established Mendeleev's national fame as a scientist and his interests widened beyond chemistry. He visited oilfields in Pennsylvania to gain knowledge for increasing the efficiency of oil extraction from Baku in southern Russia. He gave scientific advice on various agricultural projects and even went up in a hot-air balloon to get a better view of a total solar eclipse.
By 1880 Mendeleev had been separated from his wife for over 10 years. He then met his niece's closest friend, Anna Popova, a young music student, who captivated him and developed his interest in the Arts. Despite opposition from her parents and the Orthodox church, and the initial unwillingness of his estranged wife to permit divorce, he married Popova in 1882. They had four children, including twins.
Mendeleev's chemistry lectures were well attended, he was after all famous. In 1890 the students were unhappy about regulations imposed on them by the authorities - compulsory uniform, increased fees etc. Mendeleev's socialist leaning and the effect of a young wife led him to present the students' petition to the Public Enlightenment Department. Whether he was dismissed or resigned because of this is uncertain but the outcome was the same - he left St Petersburg University.
Two years later Mendeleev was appointed director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures in St Petersburg where he controversially employed women in responsible positions. He visited western Europe several times in connection with setting standards demanded by his appointment. His statue stands outside the Bureau building which has on its wall a giant Periodic Table erected in 1934 to mark the centenary of his birth.
In 1895 Ramsay discovered argon in the air with molecular weight about 40. At first Mendeleev disputed the discovery since there was no gap in his Periodic Table to be filled at either 20 or 40 (depending on whether the gas was diatomic or monatomic). He suggested it might be N3, akin to O3, with a molecular weight of 42. However his attitude changed when Ramsay reasoned that there must be a whole group of unreactive gases between the halogens and the alkali metals and then began to identify them.
The annual award of Nobel prizes started in 1900 for which priority was to be given for recent work. Despite the 35 years gap since his best work Mendeleev nearly won the 1906 chemistry award. [5] There was no second chance because he died in St Petersburg on 20 January 1907 (OS) while Anna read to him Jules Verne's Journey to the North Pole. Students carried a Periodic Table aloft at his State funeral. He is buried near his mother in Volkova cemetery at St Petersburg. His tombstone merely gives his name, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev.
Gordon Woods can be contacted at 3 Peterborough Avenue, Oakham, Rutland LE15 6EB or by e-mail ( [login to see] .uk).
Mendeleev's System, March 1869
Concerning the relation between the properties and atomic weights of the elements. D. Mendeleev, March 1869. [2]
Arranging the elements in vertical columns with increasing atomic weights so that the horizontal rows contain similar elements, again in increasing atomic weight order, then the following table is obtained from which general predictions can be drawn. Elements show a periodicity of properties if listed in order of their atomic weights.
[1]. Elements with similar properties either have atomic weights that are about the same (Pt, Ir, Os) or increase regularly (K, Rb, Cs).
[2]. The arrangement of the elements corresponds to their valency, and somewhat according to their chemical properties (eg Li, Be B, C, N, O, F).
[3]. The commonest elements have small atomic weights and they have distinctive properties. They are typical elements and it is correct to have the lightest element H as the basis of atomic weights.
[4]. The value of the atomic weight determines the properties of the element, hence studying compounds one should not only take [account] of the number and nature of the element but also their atomic weights. Therefore there will be a noticeable difference with some properties between S and Tl, Cl and J (I).
[5]. There are unknown new elements to discover similar to Al and Si within atomic weight range 65-75.
[6]. The atomic weights of some elements may be changed from knowing the properties of neighbouring elements. Thus the atomic weight of Te must be in the range of 123-126. It cannot be 128.
Some typical properties of an element can be predicted from its atomic weight. "
References
M. Laing, Educ. Chem., 1995, 32 [6], 151.
D. I. Mendeleev, Zeitschrift für Chemie, 1869, 12, 405.
Cambridge University Reporter, July 4 ,1894.
Faraday lecture, Professor Mendeleeff, JCS, 1889, 55, 634.
G. T. Woods, Educ. Chem., 1999, 36 [2], 42.
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The Mystery of Matter: “UNRULY ELEMENTS” (Documentary)
Over a single weekend in 1869, a young Russian chemistry professor named Dmitri Mendeleev invents the Periodic Table, bringing order to the growing gaggle of...
The Mystery of Matter: “UNRULY ELEMENTS” (Documentary)
"Over a single weekend in 1869, a young Russian chemistry professor named Dmitri Mendeleev invents the Periodic Table, bringing order to the growing gaggle of elements. But this sense of order is shattered when a Polish graduate student named Marie Sklodowska Curie discovers radioactivity, revealing that elements can change identities — and that atoms must have undiscovered parts inside them.
The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements is an exciting series about one of the great adventures in the history of science: the long and continuing quest to understand what the world is made of. Three episodes tell the story of seven of history’s most important scientists as they seek to identify, understand and organize the basic building blocks of matter.
The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements shows us not only what these scientific explorers discovered but also how, using actors to reveal the creative process through the scientists’ own words and conveying their landmark discoveries through re-enactments shot with replicas of their original lab equipment. Knitting these strands together is host Michael Emerson, a two-time Emmy Award-winning actor.
Meet Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier, whose discovery of oxygen led to the modern science of chemistry, and Humphry Davy, who made electricity a powerful new tool in the search for elements. Watch Dmitri Mendeleev invent the Periodic Table and see Marie Curie’s groundbreaking research on radioactivity crack open a window into the atom. Learn how Harry Moseley’s investigation of atomic number redefined the Periodic Table, and how Glenn Seaborg’s discovery of plutonium opened up a whole new realm of elements still being explored today."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbuDmY5gpXQ
Images:
1. Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev as a young man.
2. Mendeleev's name is on a list of famous people who worked at the Simferopol School, Crimera
3. Mendeleev’s handwritten periodic table from 1869 – with gaps
Background from [https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/the-father-of-the-periodic-table/3009828.article]
"MIKE SUTTON2 JANUARY 2019
Mike Sutton looks at how Mendeleev’s patience revealed periodicity in the elements
The urge to discover patterns in our surroundings appears to be a fundamental human trait. Thousands of years ago, our remote ancestors built massive stone monuments that were precisely aligned to significant points in the annual solar cycle. And in the 19th century, thoughtful chemists noticed family resemblances among the elements and tried to embed them in an explanatory paradigm.
A century and a half ago, Dmitri Mendeleev took a crucial step in this search for order among the elements, by publishing the first draft of his periodic table. In 2019 the world-wide community of chemists is celebrating this anniversary, and rightly so. Like Stonehenge, the table reflects regularities in nature which were due to causes that remained mysterious when it was originally constructed. But how did Mendeleev come to build his monument?
Early years
Dmitri grew up in Siberia, on the outer edge of western civilisation. His home, Tobolsk, is 1000km nearer to Beijing than to Paris, and his pathway from there to scientific eminence was difficult. He was the youngest of more than a dozen Mendeleev siblings, and soon after his birth in 1834 ill-health forced his father Ivan, a high-school teacher, into retirement. The inadequacy of Ivan’s pension drove his wife Maria to take on the management of a semi-derelict glass-works, formerly run by her brother.
This enterprise supported the family until 1848, when it burnt down. Then Ivan died, and in 1849 Maria took her two youngest children to Moscow, hoping that her brother would help Dmitri enter university there. When this plan failed, they moved to St Petersburg and in 1850 Dmitri was accepted (somewhat reluctantly) by the college where his father had trained as a teacher. A lecturer there – Alexander Voskresensky, who had studied in Germany under Justus Liebig – encouraged Dmitri’s interest in chemistry.
He graduated in 1855, and his dissertation – on isomorphism and other relationships between physical form and chemical composition – was published in a mining journal. Further articles for scientific and technical periodicals followed, but he lacked a secure income. By then both his mother and sister had died, and he himself was suffering from what appeared to be tuberculosis. However, a year teaching in the more benign climate of the Crimea improved his health significantly, and a new doctor confidently dismissed the previous diagnosis.
In the autumn of 1856 Mendeleev successfully defended a master’s thesis on relationships between the specific volumes of substances and their crystallographic and chemical properties. Shortly afterwards the University of St Petersburg licensed him as a chemistry tutor, allowing him access to its laboratory. In 1859 he received state funding for two years of advanced study abroad.
Establishing a career
At Heidelberg University in Gemany, Mendeleev did research on several topics, including surface tension, capillarity and evaporation, and he retained an interest in intermolecular forces throughout his career. In 1860 he attended the Karlsruhe conference, where the Italian chemist Stanislau Cannizzaro delivered a ground-breaking paper on atomic weights (now called relative atomic masses). This was a crucial step towards the periodic system, as previously there had been considerable dispute over the assigning of atomic weights to the elements.
Some chemists claimed these weights were irrelevant, or denied the physical existence of atoms altogether. Others preferred a system based on an atomic weight of eight for oxygen, assuming that water’s formula was HO, rather than H2O. But at Karlsruhe Cannizzarro revived the ideas of his fellow-countryman Amadeo Avogadro to support the H2O water formula, and an atomic weight of 16 for oxygen. During the 1860s opinion shifted in his favour – fortunately for Mendeleev, as the regularities which pointed him towards the periodic table would have been less visible on the older system.
After returning to St Petersburg in 1861 Mendeleev resumed teaching at the university, while also lecturing at the city’s Technological Institute. In addition, he published an organic chemistry textbook and several articles for a technical encyclopaedia, as well as travelling widely in search of opportunities to apply scientific discoveries to Russia’s economic development. A visit to the Baku oilfields in 1863 began his long-term commitment to the emerging petrochemical industry, for example.
Mendeleev’s doctoral thesis (on solution theory) was accepted in 1865, and in 1867 the university appointed him professor of general chemistry. He was required to lecture on inorganic chemistry, and since there was no satisfactory Russian textbook, he began writing one. This focussed his mind on the challenge of arranging the chemical elements in an orderly pattern. Several others – including Leopold Gmelin in Germany, Jean Baptiste Dumas in France and John Newlands in England – had attempted this, with limited success. Mendeleev was aware of some of these efforts, but his own approach was distinctive in important respects.
Putting his cards on the table
The breakthrough came early in 1869, as Mendeleev was preparing for another industrial tour – this time to investigate and improve cheese-making techniques. Meanwhile, having completed the first volume of his textbook, he was struggling to establish a framework for the second. He later recalled the process as follows:
’So I began to look about and write down the elements with their atomic weights and typical properties, analogous elements, and like atomic weights on separate cards, and this soon convinced me that the properties of the elements are in periodic dependence upon their atomic weights…’
D Mendeleev, Principles of Chemistry, 1905 (emphasis added)
Mendeleev laid out his cards in columns and rows, as if in a game of solitaire or patience – a favourite pastime of his during railway journeys. The vertical columns listed the known elements in order of increasing atomic weight, with a new column being started whenever this enabled him to fit elements with similar characteristics into the same horizontal row.
As other chemists had noted, a few groups of elements – in particular the alkali metals and the halogens – clearly belonged together. But many others – especially the rare earth elements (lanthanides) – presented problems however they were arranged. At this point Mendeleev, unlike most of his predecessors, refused to give up the struggle.
If an element’s position in his table seemed anomalous, he was willing to adjust its atomic weight to give it more compatible companions. For example, he proposed that the formula for beryllium oxide was BeO, rather than the accepted Be2O3. This lowered beryllium’s atomic weight, enabling him to locate it with magnesium rather than aluminium.
On the 6th of March 1869 the first rough sketch of his table was presented to the Russian Chemical Society (an organisation he had helped to found a few months previously). Later that year the society’s journal published a more considered version, a short abstract of which appeared in German translation. It attracted little attention outside Russia but Mendeleev persevered, continuing to lay out more cards on his table.
Mind the gaps
The revised diagram Mendeleev published in 1871 looks more familiar to modern eyes. To compile it he made further assumptions. For example, he lowered the atomic weight of tellurium, making its neighbour iodine the heavier of the two. This allowed him to place iodine with the halogens, and tellurium with sulfur and selenium. Such adjustments were arguably within the range of experimental error at that time. But Mendeleev could not have foreseen that atomic number rather than atomic weight would later become the table’s ordering principle, or that the identification of isotopes by mass spectrometry would eventually explain these and other anomalies.
With equal audacity, Mendeleev enhanced the coherence of his table by leaving gaps for as-yet undiscovered elements to complete the pattern he envisaged. Besides predicting their chemical character, he also assigned them notional values for physical properties like specific gravity and melting-point.
The first – gallium – was identified spectroscopically by a French chemist, Paul Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1875. When enough of it became available for testing, all gallium’s properties matched Mendeleev’s predictions – except its specific gravity, which appeared to be 4.7. However, after Mendeleev recommended fresh measurements it was found to be 5.9 – virtually identical with his predicted figure.
The discovery of scandium in 1879 and germanium in 1885 – both exhibiting the properties Mendeleev had predicted for them – persuaded more chemists that his table, despite its remaining anomalies, was too useful to ignore. Meanwhile, other researchers (notably Lothar Meyer in Germany) also highlighted periodic variations in the physical properties of the elements. Mendeleev later remarked: ‘Although I have had my doubts about some obscure points, yet I have never once doubted the universality of this law, because it could not possibly be the result of chance.’ [Mendeleev, op cit]
While he was correct about the over-arching principle of periodicity, Mendeleev was not infallible as a prophet. He predicted several other elements which were never found. And he argued until the end of his life that the ether – an essential but undetectable component in then accepted theories of light and electromagnetism – was really a chemical element, even though he had failed to isolate it in the laboratory. He suggested it might be the lightest of the noble gases, with an atomic weight of 0.17.
Later years
In his private life, Mendeleev was defiantly unconventional. He had his hair cut and beard trimmed only once a year, declining to vary this custom even for an audience with the Czar. Also, his domestic arrangements were somewhat irregular. In 1862 he married Feosva Lescheva, having been steered in her direction by a well-meaning elder sister who thought it was time he settled down. The couple had two children, but following a period of increasing mutual unhappiness they agreed to separate, alternately occupying Dmitri’s town house and his country retreat.
Several years later Dmitri fell in love with Anna Popov, a 17 year old art student. When Anna’s parents sent her away to continue her studies in Rome, Dmitri followed her, and in 1881 the 47 year old proposed marriage. Anna accepted, but even after Dmitri and Feosva were divorced a further obstacle remained. The Russian Orthodox Church recognised civil divorces, but demanded a seven-year interval before a subsequent marriage. Nevertheless, in 1882 Dmitri found a priest willing (for a substantial fee) to perform the ceremony prematurely, and despite their ambiguous – and technically bigamous – situation, the couple lived happily together and raised four children.
In politics Mendeleev was also a maverick - an outspoken liberal who resigned his professorship in 1890 to dissociate himself from the government’s harsh suppression of student protests. This gesture was applauded by his students but provoked hostility in official circles. Nevertheless, Sergius Witte, Russia’s minister of finance from 1892, appreciated the value of Mendeleev’s contributions and in 1893 appointed him head of the government’s bureau of weights and measures. From this base he continued applying scientific knowledge to assist Russia’s economic development.
In 1905 London’s Royal Society honoured Mendeleev with its Copley medal, having already received its Davy medal in 1882. In 1906 he was nominated for the Nobel prize, but although the chemistry panel supported his candidature the awards committee ruled that his discovery was not recent enough to qualify him for consideration. The decision was probably influenced by the Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius, who had clashed with Mendeleev in the past.
Almost half a century after his death in 1907, Mendeleev joined an even more exclusive club. In 1955 physicists at the University of California’s Berkeley campus bombarded element 99 (einsteinium) with alpha particles to produce traces of element 101. Officially confirmed as ‘mendelevium’, this new element embedded his name in the icon which he had created. By then the table’s layout was becoming explicable in terms of sub-atomic structures and quantum energy exchanges, at a level of detail Mendeleev could never have foreseen. However, this in no way diminishes the stature of his achievement.
Others before him had suggested that the list of known elements might be arranged in a meaningful pattern. They noted significant correspondences, but found no definitive picture. Mendeleev, however, was convinced that the chemical elements must be viewed as a collective entity. Armed with this conviction, he gave his table coherence by boldly revising the positions of some known elements, and by leaving gaps for others as yet undiscovered. Although some of his predictions were incorrect, he scored enough hits to establish his table as the basis for our understanding of the elements, and to confirm his status as one of the founders of modern chemistry.
Mike Sutton is a science historian based in Newcastle, UK
Further reading
W H Brock, The Fontana History of Chemistry, Fontana Press, 1993
M Fontani, M Costa and M V Orna, The Lost Elements: The Periodic Table’s Shadow Side, Oxford University Press, 2015
E R Scerri, The Periodic Table: its Story and its Significance, Oxford University Press, 2006"
FYI SSgt Corwin WhickerSP5 Geoffrey VannersonSSgt Boyd Herrst Col Carl Whicker Cpl James R. " Jim" Gossett JrSP5 Jeannie CarleSPC Chris Bayner-CwikTSgt David L.PO1 Robert GeorgeSSG Robert Mark Odom SPC Nancy GreeneSSG Franklin Briant1stsgt Glenn Brackin Sgt Kelli Mays Lt Col Charlie BrownPO3 Bob McCord [~655611:spc-douglas-bolton [SSG Donald H "Don" Bates SSG William JonesSP5 Jesse Engel
"Over a single weekend in 1869, a young Russian chemistry professor named Dmitri Mendeleev invents the Periodic Table, bringing order to the growing gaggle of elements. But this sense of order is shattered when a Polish graduate student named Marie Sklodowska Curie discovers radioactivity, revealing that elements can change identities — and that atoms must have undiscovered parts inside them.
The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements is an exciting series about one of the great adventures in the history of science: the long and continuing quest to understand what the world is made of. Three episodes tell the story of seven of history’s most important scientists as they seek to identify, understand and organize the basic building blocks of matter.
The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements shows us not only what these scientific explorers discovered but also how, using actors to reveal the creative process through the scientists’ own words and conveying their landmark discoveries through re-enactments shot with replicas of their original lab equipment. Knitting these strands together is host Michael Emerson, a two-time Emmy Award-winning actor.
Meet Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier, whose discovery of oxygen led to the modern science of chemistry, and Humphry Davy, who made electricity a powerful new tool in the search for elements. Watch Dmitri Mendeleev invent the Periodic Table and see Marie Curie’s groundbreaking research on radioactivity crack open a window into the atom. Learn how Harry Moseley’s investigation of atomic number redefined the Periodic Table, and how Glenn Seaborg’s discovery of plutonium opened up a whole new realm of elements still being explored today."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbuDmY5gpXQ
Images:
1. Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev as a young man.
2. Mendeleev's name is on a list of famous people who worked at the Simferopol School, Crimera
3. Mendeleev’s handwritten periodic table from 1869 – with gaps
Background from [https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/the-father-of-the-periodic-table/3009828.article]
"MIKE SUTTON2 JANUARY 2019
Mike Sutton looks at how Mendeleev’s patience revealed periodicity in the elements
The urge to discover patterns in our surroundings appears to be a fundamental human trait. Thousands of years ago, our remote ancestors built massive stone monuments that were precisely aligned to significant points in the annual solar cycle. And in the 19th century, thoughtful chemists noticed family resemblances among the elements and tried to embed them in an explanatory paradigm.
A century and a half ago, Dmitri Mendeleev took a crucial step in this search for order among the elements, by publishing the first draft of his periodic table. In 2019 the world-wide community of chemists is celebrating this anniversary, and rightly so. Like Stonehenge, the table reflects regularities in nature which were due to causes that remained mysterious when it was originally constructed. But how did Mendeleev come to build his monument?
Early years
Dmitri grew up in Siberia, on the outer edge of western civilisation. His home, Tobolsk, is 1000km nearer to Beijing than to Paris, and his pathway from there to scientific eminence was difficult. He was the youngest of more than a dozen Mendeleev siblings, and soon after his birth in 1834 ill-health forced his father Ivan, a high-school teacher, into retirement. The inadequacy of Ivan’s pension drove his wife Maria to take on the management of a semi-derelict glass-works, formerly run by her brother.
This enterprise supported the family until 1848, when it burnt down. Then Ivan died, and in 1849 Maria took her two youngest children to Moscow, hoping that her brother would help Dmitri enter university there. When this plan failed, they moved to St Petersburg and in 1850 Dmitri was accepted (somewhat reluctantly) by the college where his father had trained as a teacher. A lecturer there – Alexander Voskresensky, who had studied in Germany under Justus Liebig – encouraged Dmitri’s interest in chemistry.
He graduated in 1855, and his dissertation – on isomorphism and other relationships between physical form and chemical composition – was published in a mining journal. Further articles for scientific and technical periodicals followed, but he lacked a secure income. By then both his mother and sister had died, and he himself was suffering from what appeared to be tuberculosis. However, a year teaching in the more benign climate of the Crimea improved his health significantly, and a new doctor confidently dismissed the previous diagnosis.
In the autumn of 1856 Mendeleev successfully defended a master’s thesis on relationships between the specific volumes of substances and their crystallographic and chemical properties. Shortly afterwards the University of St Petersburg licensed him as a chemistry tutor, allowing him access to its laboratory. In 1859 he received state funding for two years of advanced study abroad.
Establishing a career
At Heidelberg University in Gemany, Mendeleev did research on several topics, including surface tension, capillarity and evaporation, and he retained an interest in intermolecular forces throughout his career. In 1860 he attended the Karlsruhe conference, where the Italian chemist Stanislau Cannizzaro delivered a ground-breaking paper on atomic weights (now called relative atomic masses). This was a crucial step towards the periodic system, as previously there had been considerable dispute over the assigning of atomic weights to the elements.
Some chemists claimed these weights were irrelevant, or denied the physical existence of atoms altogether. Others preferred a system based on an atomic weight of eight for oxygen, assuming that water’s formula was HO, rather than H2O. But at Karlsruhe Cannizzarro revived the ideas of his fellow-countryman Amadeo Avogadro to support the H2O water formula, and an atomic weight of 16 for oxygen. During the 1860s opinion shifted in his favour – fortunately for Mendeleev, as the regularities which pointed him towards the periodic table would have been less visible on the older system.
After returning to St Petersburg in 1861 Mendeleev resumed teaching at the university, while also lecturing at the city’s Technological Institute. In addition, he published an organic chemistry textbook and several articles for a technical encyclopaedia, as well as travelling widely in search of opportunities to apply scientific discoveries to Russia’s economic development. A visit to the Baku oilfields in 1863 began his long-term commitment to the emerging petrochemical industry, for example.
Mendeleev’s doctoral thesis (on solution theory) was accepted in 1865, and in 1867 the university appointed him professor of general chemistry. He was required to lecture on inorganic chemistry, and since there was no satisfactory Russian textbook, he began writing one. This focussed his mind on the challenge of arranging the chemical elements in an orderly pattern. Several others – including Leopold Gmelin in Germany, Jean Baptiste Dumas in France and John Newlands in England – had attempted this, with limited success. Mendeleev was aware of some of these efforts, but his own approach was distinctive in important respects.
Putting his cards on the table
The breakthrough came early in 1869, as Mendeleev was preparing for another industrial tour – this time to investigate and improve cheese-making techniques. Meanwhile, having completed the first volume of his textbook, he was struggling to establish a framework for the second. He later recalled the process as follows:
’So I began to look about and write down the elements with their atomic weights and typical properties, analogous elements, and like atomic weights on separate cards, and this soon convinced me that the properties of the elements are in periodic dependence upon their atomic weights…’
D Mendeleev, Principles of Chemistry, 1905 (emphasis added)
Mendeleev laid out his cards in columns and rows, as if in a game of solitaire or patience – a favourite pastime of his during railway journeys. The vertical columns listed the known elements in order of increasing atomic weight, with a new column being started whenever this enabled him to fit elements with similar characteristics into the same horizontal row.
As other chemists had noted, a few groups of elements – in particular the alkali metals and the halogens – clearly belonged together. But many others – especially the rare earth elements (lanthanides) – presented problems however they were arranged. At this point Mendeleev, unlike most of his predecessors, refused to give up the struggle.
If an element’s position in his table seemed anomalous, he was willing to adjust its atomic weight to give it more compatible companions. For example, he proposed that the formula for beryllium oxide was BeO, rather than the accepted Be2O3. This lowered beryllium’s atomic weight, enabling him to locate it with magnesium rather than aluminium.
On the 6th of March 1869 the first rough sketch of his table was presented to the Russian Chemical Society (an organisation he had helped to found a few months previously). Later that year the society’s journal published a more considered version, a short abstract of which appeared in German translation. It attracted little attention outside Russia but Mendeleev persevered, continuing to lay out more cards on his table.
Mind the gaps
The revised diagram Mendeleev published in 1871 looks more familiar to modern eyes. To compile it he made further assumptions. For example, he lowered the atomic weight of tellurium, making its neighbour iodine the heavier of the two. This allowed him to place iodine with the halogens, and tellurium with sulfur and selenium. Such adjustments were arguably within the range of experimental error at that time. But Mendeleev could not have foreseen that atomic number rather than atomic weight would later become the table’s ordering principle, or that the identification of isotopes by mass spectrometry would eventually explain these and other anomalies.
With equal audacity, Mendeleev enhanced the coherence of his table by leaving gaps for as-yet undiscovered elements to complete the pattern he envisaged. Besides predicting their chemical character, he also assigned them notional values for physical properties like specific gravity and melting-point.
The first – gallium – was identified spectroscopically by a French chemist, Paul Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1875. When enough of it became available for testing, all gallium’s properties matched Mendeleev’s predictions – except its specific gravity, which appeared to be 4.7. However, after Mendeleev recommended fresh measurements it was found to be 5.9 – virtually identical with his predicted figure.
The discovery of scandium in 1879 and germanium in 1885 – both exhibiting the properties Mendeleev had predicted for them – persuaded more chemists that his table, despite its remaining anomalies, was too useful to ignore. Meanwhile, other researchers (notably Lothar Meyer in Germany) also highlighted periodic variations in the physical properties of the elements. Mendeleev later remarked: ‘Although I have had my doubts about some obscure points, yet I have never once doubted the universality of this law, because it could not possibly be the result of chance.’ [Mendeleev, op cit]
While he was correct about the over-arching principle of periodicity, Mendeleev was not infallible as a prophet. He predicted several other elements which were never found. And he argued until the end of his life that the ether – an essential but undetectable component in then accepted theories of light and electromagnetism – was really a chemical element, even though he had failed to isolate it in the laboratory. He suggested it might be the lightest of the noble gases, with an atomic weight of 0.17.
Later years
In his private life, Mendeleev was defiantly unconventional. He had his hair cut and beard trimmed only once a year, declining to vary this custom even for an audience with the Czar. Also, his domestic arrangements were somewhat irregular. In 1862 he married Feosva Lescheva, having been steered in her direction by a well-meaning elder sister who thought it was time he settled down. The couple had two children, but following a period of increasing mutual unhappiness they agreed to separate, alternately occupying Dmitri’s town house and his country retreat.
Several years later Dmitri fell in love with Anna Popov, a 17 year old art student. When Anna’s parents sent her away to continue her studies in Rome, Dmitri followed her, and in 1881 the 47 year old proposed marriage. Anna accepted, but even after Dmitri and Feosva were divorced a further obstacle remained. The Russian Orthodox Church recognised civil divorces, but demanded a seven-year interval before a subsequent marriage. Nevertheless, in 1882 Dmitri found a priest willing (for a substantial fee) to perform the ceremony prematurely, and despite their ambiguous – and technically bigamous – situation, the couple lived happily together and raised four children.
In politics Mendeleev was also a maverick - an outspoken liberal who resigned his professorship in 1890 to dissociate himself from the government’s harsh suppression of student protests. This gesture was applauded by his students but provoked hostility in official circles. Nevertheless, Sergius Witte, Russia’s minister of finance from 1892, appreciated the value of Mendeleev’s contributions and in 1893 appointed him head of the government’s bureau of weights and measures. From this base he continued applying scientific knowledge to assist Russia’s economic development.
In 1905 London’s Royal Society honoured Mendeleev with its Copley medal, having already received its Davy medal in 1882. In 1906 he was nominated for the Nobel prize, but although the chemistry panel supported his candidature the awards committee ruled that his discovery was not recent enough to qualify him for consideration. The decision was probably influenced by the Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius, who had clashed with Mendeleev in the past.
Almost half a century after his death in 1907, Mendeleev joined an even more exclusive club. In 1955 physicists at the University of California’s Berkeley campus bombarded element 99 (einsteinium) with alpha particles to produce traces of element 101. Officially confirmed as ‘mendelevium’, this new element embedded his name in the icon which he had created. By then the table’s layout was becoming explicable in terms of sub-atomic structures and quantum energy exchanges, at a level of detail Mendeleev could never have foreseen. However, this in no way diminishes the stature of his achievement.
Others before him had suggested that the list of known elements might be arranged in a meaningful pattern. They noted significant correspondences, but found no definitive picture. Mendeleev, however, was convinced that the chemical elements must be viewed as a collective entity. Armed with this conviction, he gave his table coherence by boldly revising the positions of some known elements, and by leaving gaps for others as yet undiscovered. Although some of his predictions were incorrect, he scored enough hits to establish his table as the basis for our understanding of the elements, and to confirm his status as one of the founders of modern chemistry.
Mike Sutton is a science historian based in Newcastle, UK
Further reading
W H Brock, The Fontana History of Chemistry, Fontana Press, 1993
M Fontani, M Costa and M V Orna, The Lost Elements: The Periodic Table’s Shadow Side, Oxford University Press, 2015
E R Scerri, The Periodic Table: its Story and its Significance, Oxford University Press, 2006"
FYI SSgt Corwin WhickerSP5 Geoffrey VannersonSSgt Boyd Herrst Col Carl Whicker Cpl James R. " Jim" Gossett JrSP5 Jeannie CarleSPC Chris Bayner-CwikTSgt David L.PO1 Robert GeorgeSSG Robert Mark Odom SPC Nancy GreeneSSG Franklin Briant1stsgt Glenn Brackin Sgt Kelli Mays Lt Col Charlie BrownPO3 Bob McCord [~655611:spc-douglas-bolton [SSG Donald H "Don" Bates SSG William JonesSP5 Jesse Engel
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Man, after years of using I have almost totally forgotten the tables. Old age has its' effects.
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