D.I. Mendeleev

D.I. Mendeleev

(1834 – 1907)

A Russian name appeared in 1964 on the honorary board if science at Bridgeport University, USA: Mendeleev was added to the list of the greatest geniuses – Euclid, Archimedes, Copernicus, Galilei, Newton and Lavoisier. D.I.Mendeleev, the explorer of nature, is the greatest chemist of the world. The Mendeleev system has served for almost 150 years as a key to discovering new elements and it has retained its key capacity until now.

D.I. Mendeleev was the 14^th and the last child of the Director of the Gymnasium at Tobolsk. After finishing school at he age of 16 he was taken by his mother to St.Petersburg and entered the Pedagogical Institute in 1850, took a degree in chemistry in 1856 and in 1859 he was sent abroad for two years for further training. He returned to St. Petersburg in 1861 as Professor of Chemistry and gave a course of lectures on chemistry at St. Petersburg’s University. His lectures were always listened to with great interest and attention. Even in class of two hundred students everyone was able to follow his discussions from the beginning to the end. Interesting experiments were made in his classes.

In 1868 Mendeleev began to write a great text-book of chemistry, known in its English translation as the «Principles of Chemistry». Hard work preceded it. Mendeleev made thousands of experiments and calculation, wrote a lot of letters, and studied many reports. Everything in the world that was known about chemical elements Mendeleev knew. For months, for years he searched for missing data. All those data were being brought together and grouped in a special way. When compiling his, he tried to find some system of classifying the elements some sixty in all then known whose properties he was describing. This led him to formulate the Periodic Law: «The properties of elements and, consequently, the properties of the simple and complex bodies formed from them are periodic functions of their atomic weights». The Law earned him lasting international fame. He presented it verbally to the Russian Chemical Society in October 1868 and published it in February 1869. But Mendeleev was recognized as the author of the Periodic Law only after gallium; scandium and germanium had been discovered in France, Sweden and Germany and after the properties of a number of elements predicted by Mendeleev had been confirmed.

In this paper he set out clearly his discovery that if the elements are arranged in order of their atomic weights, chemically related elements appear at regular intervals. The greatness of Mendeleev’s achievement lies in the fact that he had discovered a generalization that not only unified an enormous amount of existing information but pointed the way to further progress.

Today the Periodic Law is studied by millions of school children and by students at higher educational establishments of natural sciences and engineering. It is studied by philosophers, historians, teachers and chemists.

The Law serves as a basis for thousands of researchers. The Periodic Law crossed national boundaries and has become the property of all nations, just like the works of Newton, Lomonosov, Pavlov, Lobachevsky, Einstein and other. In our country the Russian Chemical Society, a number of higher and secondary schools, some industrial plants have been named after Mendeleev. The Academy of Sciences and the Mendeleev Society award the Mendeleev Prize and the Mendeleev Gold Medal for outstanding research work in chemistry.

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