Julius Lothar Meyer (1830–1895) and Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev

(1834–1907) worked with Robert Bunsen at Heidelberg only five years

apart, but they arrived there with significantly different backgrounds.
Meyer was virtually born into a scientific career. He came from a
medical family of Oldenburg, Germany, and first pursued a medical
degree. In medical school he became interested in chemistry,
especially physiological topics like gases in the blood. Mendeleev was
born in Tobolsk, Siberia, where his father taught Russian literature
and his mother owned and operated a glassworks. His early contacts
with political exiles gave him a lifelong love of liberal causes, and his
freedom to roam the glassworks stimulated an interest in business and
industrial chemistry. His mother—after her husband's death and
shortly before her own—took the fifteen-year-old Dmitri to St.
Petersburg. There he attended the Main Pedagogical Institute and the
University of St. Petersburg, where he pursued a doctorate in
chemistry. During his graduate studies he traveled to Heidelberg to
work with Bunsen.

Meyer and Mendeleev were among the young chemists attending the
Karlsruhe Congress in 1860, and both were impressed with Stanislao
Cannizzaro's presentation of Amadeo Avogadro's hypothesis. For
both, writing a textbook proved to be the impetus for developing the
periodic table—that is, a device to present the more than sixty known
elements in an intelligible fashion. For some time chemists had been
trying to devise a logical system of classification by arranging the
elements by atomic weight, but confusion over how to determine
atomic weights thwarted their attempts. Soon after Karlsruhe, various
new atomic arrangements were published, culminating in the work of
Meyer and Mendeleev. In the first edition of Die Modernen Theorien
der Chemie (1864), Meyer used atomic weights to arrange twenty-
eight elements into six families that bore similar chemical and
physical characteristics, leaving a blank for an as-yet-undiscovered
element. His one conceptual advance over his immediate predecessors
was seeing valence, the number that represents the combining power
of an element (e.g. with atoms of hydrogen), as the link among
members of each family of elements and as the pattern for the order
in which the families were themselves organized. In his original
scheme the valences of the succeeding families, beginning with the
carbon group, were 4, 3, 2, 1, 1, and 2.

After returning to St. Petersburg from Karlsruhe, Mendeleev taught

at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, completed his doctoral
dissertation, started an experimental farm, and lectured for the Free
Economic Society on agricultural topics. When in 1867 he was
appointed to the chair of chemistry at the University of St.
Petersburg, he too began to write a textbook, Osnovy Khimii
(Principles of Chemistry; first edition, 1871), and worked out the
"periodic law," which was first published in papers in 1869.
Mendeleev succeeded in arranging all known elements into one table.

Meyer then published his classic paper of 1870 ("Die Natur der
chemischen Elemente als Function ihrer Atomgewichte," Justus
Liebigs Annalen der Chemie, supp. 7 [1870]), 354–364), describing the
evolution of his work since 1864. This paper is particularly famous for
its graphic display of the periodicity of atomic volume plotted against
atomic weight. Many chemists, including Bunsen, had their doubts
about the periodic law at first, but these doubters were gradually
converted by the discovery of elements predicted by the tabular
arrangement and the correction of old atomic weights that the table
cast in doubt. Meanwhile, Meyer and Mendeleev carried on a long
drawn-out priority dispute.

Whereas Meyer continued to pursue a life of research and teaching,

and spent the last twenty years of his life as a professor at Tübingen,
Mendeleev's strong democratic leanings got him into trouble with
political and academic authorities, although his scientific eminence
and the usefulness of his advice protected him to a certain degree. But
in 1890 he left his professorship at the University of St. Petersburg
after an official rebuke for delivering a student protest to the ministry
of education. He then rose in government service to the position of
Director of the Central Board of Weights and Measures. He
contributed to the modernization of Russia through his reports and
recommendations on weights and measures, protective tariffs,
shipbuilding and shipping routes in Arctic regions, the manufacture
of smokeless powder, and the development of heavy industry. When
he died, students carried the periodic table in the funeral procession