Mendeleevs Great Organization Born in a Siberian village and the last of at least 14 children, Dmitri Mendeleev revolutionized our

understanding of the properties of atoms and created a table that adorns every chemistry classroom in the world. After his father went blind and could no longer support the family, Mendeleevs mother started a glass factory to help make ends meet. Just as Mendeleev was finishing high school, his father died and the glass factory burned down. With most of her other children out on their own, his mother worked tirelessly and successfully to get him into college trying first Moscow and then St. Petersburg, where he was finally accepted. His mother died shortly after Dmitri's acceptance, followed a few short months later by his sister; both died from tuberculosis, a disease of the lungs. In his third year at college, he too was struck with an illness that caused him to be bedridden for the next year. He continued his studies, with professors and fellow students visiting him to give him assignments, graduated on time and was awarded the medal of excellence for being first in his class. Dmitri's illness did not improve and doctors said he probably had tuberculosis and two years to live providing he moved to a more suitable climate. So he moved south near the Black Sea in 1855, slowly regained his strength and eventually moved back to St. Petersburg where he was named Professor of Chemistry and received a Doctorate. Mendeleev not only taught in the university classrooms but anywhere he traveled. Many excerpts discuss his journeys by train where he would travel third class with the mouzhiks (peasants). It was on those journeys that he would share his findings about agriculture with peasants over a cup of tea. The admiration that Mendeleev had for the people of Russia was reciprocated. On the trains the mouzhiks would all gather round to see and talk with the man. The university students also adored him. Crowds of students would fill lecture halls to hear him speak of chemistry. In 1863, Dmitri married a woman named Feozva Nikitchna Lascheva, they had a boy and a girl, but never a very

happy marriage as he was so involved in his science. So in 1882, he divorced Feozva to marry his nieces best friend Anna, which according to Orthodox Catholicism is a sin. However, Mendeleev had become so famous that the Czar said "Mendeleev has two wives, yes, but I have only one Mendeleev". He and Anna were truly in love, had four children and were together until he died. As he grew older it also became apparent that personal appearance became less and less significant to him. Many stories abound relating to the idea that in his later years, Dmitri would only cut his hair and beard once a year. He would not even cut it by request of the Czar. One observer stated, "Every hair acted separate from the others." It was apparent that, in most respects, work came first for Dmitri Mendeleev. From early in his career, he felt that there was some type of order to the elements, and he spent more than thirteen years of his life collecting data and assembling the concept, initially with the idea of resolving some of the chaos in the field for his students. Mendeleev was one of the first modern-day scientists in that he did not rely solely on his own work but was in correspondence with scientists around the world. He then used their data along with his own data to arrange the elements according to their properties. In the late 1860's, Mendeleev began working on his great achievement: The Periodic Table of the Elements. By arranging all of the 63 elements then known by their atomic number, he managed to organize them into groups possessing similar properties. Where a gap existed in the table, he predicted a new element would one day be found and deduced its properties. Three of those elements were found during his lifetime: gallium, scandium, and germanium. On November 29, 1870, at 35 years old, Mendeleev took his concept even further by stating that it was possible to predict the properties of undiscovered elements. He then proceeded to make predictions for three new elements (ekaaluminum, eka-boron and eka-silicon) and suggested several properties of each, including density among others. The science world was perplexed, and many scoffed at Mendeleev's predictions. It was not until November, 1875, when the Frenchman Lecoq de Boisbaudran discovered Aluminum, that Dmitri's ideas were taken seriously. The other two elements were discovered later and their properties were found to be

remarkably similar to those predicted by Mendeleev. These discoveries took him to the top of the science world. Throughout the remainder of his life, Dmitri Mendeleev received numerous awards from various organizations including the Davy Medal, Copley Medal and honorary degrees from universities around the world. Following his resignation from the University of St. Petersburg, the Russian government appointed him Director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures.
No LAW of nature has been established all at once; it is discovered in pieces. Scientific Laws describe patterns of physical relationships which always work in the same way under the same conditions. The establishment of a law does not take place when the first thought of it takes form, or even when its significance is recognized, but only when it has been confirmed by the results of the experiment. The men of science must consider these results as the only proof of the correctness.