Dmitri Mendeleev

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907) [ MEN -de-LAY-ev), Russian scientist, bureaucratic expert, public figure and humanitarian, recognized for numerous contributions to the social and economic betterment of Russian society and to the advancement of science, including contributions to chemistry, physical chemistry, physics, chemical engineering, geodesy, metrology, meteorology, aeronautics, mining, manufacturing, agriculture and economics, most well known for having discovered that ordering the then (1869) known chemical elements, sixty-three in number, according to their increasing atomic weights, revealed a repeated cycle of recurrence, every seven elements, of many of their chemical and physical properties &mdash; i.e., the properties recurred as functions of the elements' atomic weights &mdash; a discovery that permitted him to predict subsequently experimentally-established revised values for the atomic weights of several elements and, audaciously but spectacularly importantly, to predict the subsequently confirmed existence of yet undiscovered elements with atomic weights and properties required to fill in missing elements in an otherwise consistent periodicity in his ordering scheme, a scheme which chemists subsequently referred to as the periodic table of the chemical elements, considering it to reflect a 'law' of chemistry, the periodic law or periodic system (Mendeleev and Jensen 2002).

Mendeleev was a driven man. In addition to producing his greatest work-the periodic law and periodic table of the elements-he researched, lectured, and wrote at a ferocious pace. A fine-print list of his published works takes up ten pages. Chemistry was the heart of his work, but he also played a major role in the economic development of Russia by modernizing that nation's weights and measures and through his advocacy of improved mining, manufacturing, agriculture, and trade. He fought ignorance and mysticism by reforming education and opening the sciences to women, and helped found and head the Russian Chemical Society. He habitually worked day and night, keeping himself going with a mixture of drive, determination, and strong Russian tea (Adler 2002).

According to D. I. Mendeleev’s self-examination, four subjects, more than others, have made his name: Periodic Law, studying physics of gases at low pressure (the gas state equation), the concept of solution as a composition of molecular associates and The Principles of Chemistry. In fact, Mendeleev’s scientific interests and his creative activity, besides pure chemistry, stretched over such distant fields as industry (17% of his publications are related to this area), economics (14%), metrology (11%), aeronautics (9%) and agriculture (7%). The Periodic Law seems to constitute only a fragment of his heritage....(Dmitriev IS et al. 2010).

Introduction
When, within a few years of the announcement of Mendeleev's ordering scheme in 1869, chemists discovered three new chemical elements (gallium, scandium, germanium), each in accord with his prediction of their atomic weights and properties, and after confirmation of his proposed revisions of the atomic weights for certain specified elements, as suggested by his periodic table, Mendeleev's contemporaries worldwide eventually came to recognize his discovery as a natural law of chemistry, one that transcended taxonomy, and recognized it as a fundamental contribution to our understanding of the nature of physical reality, setting the stage for his successors, notably the 20th century Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, to formulate a theory of atomic structure and its regularities that explained Mendeleev's periodic law, as well certain deviations to it discovered with the ever expanding discovery of new elements, in particular, the rare earth elements (Brush 1996), and to refine it as reflecting an ordering by atomic number &mdash; the number of protons in the element's nucleus &mdash; instead of by atomic weight.

As Robert Adler (2002) points out, Mendeleev's periodic law of the chemical elements "gave chemistry three gifts".


 * It organized an otherwise jumble of seemingly disparate elements "into a well-ordered array in which both family traits and similarities to neighbors stood out clearly". That meant chemists no longer had learn certain basic properties of the elements individually, but in groups, and could organize the elements into groups with similar types of reactions in a coherent way.


 * New to chemistry, it gave chemists the power to predict &mdash; "he stole from astronomers and physicists the power to predict". Chemists acquired a mantle that mathematical physicists cherished as indication of membership in the society of true scientists.


 * It gave to chemists (and physicists, as it turns out), including Mendeleev, a research agenda, that "something of great importance, something fundamental, must be at work to marshal the elements into such neat ranks and files." (Adler 2002).

As the law of gravity ineluctably evokes the name of Isaac Newton, atomic theory the name of John Dalton, the theory of evolution the name of Charles Darwin, and the theory of relativity the name of Albert Einstein, the periodic law of the chemical elements evokes the name of Dmitri Mendeleev.

Mendeleev's life and work and 'world' he lived in
As the 17th and last child of his parents, among the 14 who lived long enough to receive a Christian name, Dmitri Mendeleev entered the world on February 8, 1834 (Babaev 2009), in Tobolsk, a city founded in 1587, located in west-central Russia, in the heart of Western Siberia some 8° south of the Arctic Circle, southeast of Moscow (2385 km 1482 mi, by train), south of the confluence of two rivers, the Irtysh and Ob rivers, nearer the confluence of the Irtysh and Tobol rivers, on the bank of the Tobol in the bend of the Irtysh. ....

Chronology of events in Mendeleev's life and times
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