Short answers, pulled from the story.
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev entered the world in 1834 within the village of Verkhnie Aremzyani near Tobolsk. He was the youngest of seventeen siblings, though only fourteen survived baptism according to records from his brother Pavel.
On the 6th of March 1869 he presented a table which described elements according to both atomic weight and valence. This presentation stated that elements arranged by atomic weight exhibit an apparent periodicity of properties.
This controversy contributed to his failure to be admitted to the Russian Academy of Sciences despite his international fame by that time. The issue arose because his divorce from Feozva Nikitichna Leshcheva was finalized one month after he had married Popova on the 2nd of April in early 1882 while the Russian Orthodox Church required at least seven years before lawful remarriage.
The majority of the academy chose Henri Moissan by a margin of one vote over Dmitri Mendeleev. Svante Arrhenius pressed for the rejection of Mendeleev arguing that the periodic system was too old to acknowledge its discovery in 1906.
In fact the 40% standard was already introduced by the Russian government in 1843 when Mendeleev was nine years old. It is true that Mendeleev in 1892 became head of the Archive of Weights and Measures but that institution was charged with standardising Russian trade weights and measuring instruments not setting any production quality standards.