Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (often romanized as Mendeleyev or Mendeleef)

(English: /ˌmɛndəlˈeɪəf/ MEN-dəl-AY-əf;[2] Russian: Дмитрий Иванович Менделеев,

[note 1] tr. Dmitriy Ivanovich Mendeleyev, IPA: [ˈdmʲitrʲɪj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ mʲɪnʲdʲɪ
ˈlʲejɪf] (About this soundlisten); 8 February 1834 – 2 February 1907 [OS 27 January
1834 – 20 January 1907]) was a Russian chemist and inventor. He is best remembered
for formulating the Periodic Law and creating a farsighted version of the periodic
table of elements. He used the Periodic Law not only to correct the then-accepted
properties of some known elements, such as the valence and atomic weight of
uranium, but also to predict the properties of eight elements that were yet to be
discovered.

Mendeleev was born in the village of Verkhnie Aremzyani, near Tobolsk in Siberia,
to Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev (1783–1847) and Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva (née
Kornilieva) (1793–1850).[3][4] Ivan worked as a school principal and a teacher of
fine arts, politics and philosophy at the Tambov and Saratov gymnasiums.[5] Ivan's
father, Pavel Maximovich Sokolov, was a Russian Orthodox priest from the Tver
region.[6] As per the tradition of priests of that time, Pavel's children were
given new family names while attending the theological seminary,[7] with Ivan
getting the family name Mendeleev after the name of a local landlord.[8]

Maria Kornilieva came from a well-known family of Tobolsk merchants, founders of

the first Siberian printing house who traced their ancestry to Yakov Korniliev, a
17th-century posad man turned a wealthy merchant.[9][10] In 1889, a local librarian
published an article in the Tobolsk newspaper where he claimed that Yakov was a
baptized Teleut, an ethnic minority known as "white Kalmyks" at the time.[11] Since
no sources were provided and no documented facts of Yakov's life were ever
revealed, biographers generally dismiss it as a myth.[12][13] In 1908, shortly
after Mendeleev's death, one of his nieces published Family Chronicles. Memories
about D. I. Mendeleev where she voiced "a family legend" about Maria's grandfather
who married "a Kyrgyz or Tatar beauty whom he loved so much that when she died, he
also died from grief".[14] This, however, contradicts the documented family
chronicles, and neither of those legends is supported by Mendeleev's autobiography,
his daughter's or his wife's memoirs.[4][15][16] Yet some Western scholars still
refer to Mendeleev's supposed "Mongol", "Tatar", "Tartarian" or simply "Asian"
ancestry as a fact.[17][18][19][20]

Mendeleev was raised as an Orthodox Christian, his mother encouraging him to

"patiently search divine and scientific truth".[21] His son would later inform that
he departed from the Church and embraced a form of "romanticized deism".[22]

Mendeleev was the youngest of 17 siblings, of whom "only 14 stayed alive to be

baptized" according to Mendeleev's brother Pavel, meaning the others died soon
after their birth.[5] The exact number of Mendeleev's siblings differs among
sources and is still a matter of some historical dispute.[23][24] Unfortunately for
the family's financial well-being, his father became blind and lost his teaching
position. His mother was forced to work and she restarted her family's abandoned
glass factory. At the age of 13, after the passing of his father and the
destruction of his mother's factory by fire, Mendeleev attended the Gymnasium in
Tobolsk.

In 1849, his mother took Mendeleev across Russia from Siberia to Moscow with the
aim of getting Mendeleev enrolled at the Moscow University.[8] The university in
Moscow did not accept him. The mother and son continued to Saint Petersburg to the
father's alma mater. The now poor Mendeleev family relocated to Saint Petersburg,
where he entered the Main Pedagogical Institute in 1850. After graduation, he
contracted tuberculosis, causing him to move to the Crimean Peninsula on the
northern coast of the Black Sea in 1855. While there, he became a science master of
the 1st Simferopol Gymnasium. In 1857, he returned to Saint Petersburg with fully
restored health.
Between 1859 and 1861, he worked on the capillarity of liquids and the workings of
the spectroscope in Heidelberg. Later in 1861, he published a textbook named
Organic Chemistry.[25] This won him the Demidov Prize of the Petersburg Academy of
Sciences.[25]

On 4 April 1862, he became engaged to Feozva Nikitichna Leshcheva, and they married
on 27 April 1862 at Nikolaev Engineering Institute's church in Saint Petersburg
(where he taught).[26]

Mendeleev became a professor at the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute and

Saint Petersburg State University in 1864,[25] and 1865, respectively. In 1865, he
became Doctor of Science for his dissertation "On the Combinations of Water with
Alcohol". He achieved tenure in 1867 at St. Petersburg University and started to
teach inorganic chemistry, while succeeding Voskresenskii to this post;[25] by
1871, he had transformed Saint Petersburg into an internationally recognized center
for chemistry research.
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Sculpture in honor of Mendeleev and the periodic table, located in Bratislava,

Slovakia

In 1863, there were 56 known elements with a new element being discovered at a rate
of approximately one per year. Other scientists had previously identified
periodicity of elements. John Newlands described a Law of Octaves, noting their
periodicity according to relative atomic weight in 1864, publishing it in 1865. His
proposal identified the potential for new elements such as germanium. The concept
was criticized and his innovation was not recognized by the Society of Chemists
until 1887. Another person to propose a periodic table was Lothar Meyer, who
published a paper in 1864 describing 28 elements classified by their valence, but
with no predictions of new elements.

After becoming a teacher in 1867, Mendeleev wrote the definitive textbook of his
time: Principles of Chemistry (two volumes, 1868–1870). It was written as he was
preparing a textbook for his course.[25] This is when he made his most important
discovery.[25] As he attempted to classify the elements according to their chemical
properties, he noticed patterns that led him to postulate his periodic table; he
claimed to have envisioned the complete arrangement of the elements in a dream:[27]
[28][29][30][31]

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.
— Mendeleev, as quoted by Inostrantzev[32][33]

Unaware of the earlier work on periodic tables going on in the 1860s, he made the
following table:
Cl 35.5 K 39 Ca 40
Br 80 Rb 85 Sr 88
I 127 Cs 133 Ba 137

By adding additional elements following this pattern, Mendeleev developed his

extended version of the periodic table.[34][35] On 6 March 1869, he made a formal
presentation to the Russian Chemical Society, titled The Dependence between the
Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements, which described elements
according to both atomic weight (now called relative atomic mass) and valence.[36]
[37] This presentation stated that

The elements, if arranged according to their atomic weight, exhibit an apparent

periodicity of properties.
Elements which are similar regarding their chemical properties either have
similar atomic weights (e.g., Pt, Ir, Os) or have their atomic weights increasing
regularly (e.g., K, Rb, Cs).
The arrangement of the elements in groups of elements in the order of their
atomic weights corresponds to their so-called valencies, as well as, to some
extent, to their distinctive chemical properties; as is apparent among other series
in that of Li, Be, B, C, N, O, and F.
The elements which are the most widely diffused have small atomic weights.
The magnitude of the atomic weight determines the character of the element,
just as the magnitude of the molecule determines the character of a compound body.
We must expect the discovery of many yet unknown elements – for example, two
elements, analogous to aluminium and silicon, whose atomic weights would be between
65 and 75.
The atomic weight of an element may sometimes be amended by a knowledge of
those of its contiguous elements. Thus the atomic weight of tellurium must lie
between 123 and 126, and cannot be 128. (Tellurium's atomic weight is 127.6, and
Mendeleev was incorrect in his assumption that atomic weight must increase with
position within a period.)
Certain characteristic properties of elements can be foretold from their atomic
weights.

Mendeleev published his periodic table of all known elements and predicted several
new elements to complete the table in a Russian-language journal. Only a few months
after, Meyer published a virtually identical table in a German-language journal.
[38][39] Mendeleev has the distinction of accurately predicting the properties of
what he called ekasilicon, ekaaluminium and ekaboron (germanium, gallium and
scandium, respectively).[40][41]

Mendeleev also proposed changes in the properties of some known elements. Prior to
his work, uranium was supposed to have valence 3 and atomic weight about 120.
Mendeleev realized that these values did not fit in his periodic table, and doubled
both to valence 6 and atomic weight 240 (close to the modern value of 238).[42]

For his predicted eight elements, he used the prefixes of eka, dvi, and tri
(Sanskrit one, two, three) in their naming. Mendeleev questioned some of the
currently accepted atomic weights (they could be measured only with a relatively
low accuracy at that time), pointing out that they did not correspond to those
suggested by his Periodic Law. He noted that tellurium has a higher atomic weight
than iodine, but he placed them in the right order, incorrectly predicting that the
accepted atomic weights at the time were at fault. He was puzzled about where to
put the known lanthanides, and predicted the existence of another row to the table
which were the actinides which were some of the heaviest in atomic weight. Some
people dismissed Mendeleev for predicting that there would be more elements, but he
was proven to be correct when Ga (gallium) and Ge (germanium) were found in 1875
and 1886 respectively, fitting perfectly into the two missing spaces.[43]

By using Sanskrit prefixes to name "missing" elements, Mendeleev may have recorded
his debt to the Sanskrit grammarians of ancient India, who had created
sophisticated theories of language based on their discovery of the two-dimensional
patterns of speech sounds (arguably most strikingly exemplified by the Śivasūtras
in Pāṇini's Sanskrit grammar). Mendeleev was a friend and colleague of the
Sanskritist Otto von Böhtlingk, who was preparing the second edition of his book on
Pāṇini[44] at about this time, and Mendeleev wished to honor Pāṇini with his
nomenclature.[45][46][47]

The original draft made by Mendeleev would be found years later and published under
the name Tentative System of Elements.[48]

Dmitri Mendeleev is often referred to as the Father of the Periodic Table. He

called his table or matrix, "the Periodic System".[49]