Dmitri Mendeleev

• 1. Introduction

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  Dmitri Mendeleev claimed he saw the answer in a dream. "I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required," he recalled. "Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary." In 1863 there were 56 known elements, and chemists were finding a new one at a rate of roughly one per year. Mendeleev, a Russian chemist born in 1834, took that scattered list and arranged it into a system that not only ordered the elements but predicted ones nobody had ever seen. He was the youngest of his parents' large family, raised in Siberia, and he would die at 72 telling his physician, "Doctor, you have science, I have faith." Between that village childhood and that deathbed line lies a story of gaps left empty on purpose, a Nobel Prize denied by a single vote, and a vodka legend that outran the facts. Why did a man so widely honored across Europe fail to enter his own country's Academy of Sciences? And how did a textbook he was simply trying to finish become the source of his most important discovery?

• 2. Siberian Origins

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  Verkhnie Aremzyani, a village near Tobolsk in Siberia, was where Mendeleev was born, the youngest of 17 siblings. His brother Pavel reported that "only 14 stayed alive to be baptized," meaning the others died soon after birth. His father, Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev, had worked as a school principal and taught fine arts, politics, and philosophy at the Tambov and Saratov gymnasiums. The family name itself came from an accident of seminary tradition. Ivan's father, Pavel Maximovich Sokolov, was a Russian Orthodox priest from the Tver region, and the priests' children took new surnames at the theological seminary. Ivan received "Mendeleev" after a local landlord. His mother, Maria Dmitrievna Kornilieva, descended from Tobolsk merchants who founded the first Siberian printing house. Their ancestry traced to Yakov Korniliev, a 17th-century posad man turned wealthy merchant. Disaster struck the household when Ivan became blind and lost his teaching position. Maria restarted her family's abandoned glass factory to keep them afloat. Then, when Dmitri was 13, his father died and the factory burned down. He attended the Gymnasium in Tobolsk before the family's fortunes pushed them west. In 1849 his mother took him across Russia from Siberia toward Moscow, hoping to enroll him at the Moscow University. That door would not open.

• 3. The Road To Chemistry

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  Moscow University did not accept Mendeleev, so mother and son pressed on to Saint Petersburg, his father's alma mater. The now-poor family relocated there, and in 1850 he entered the Main Pedagogical Institute. Tuberculosis interrupted everything after graduation. The illness forced him to move in 1855 to the Crimean Peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea. While there he served as a science master of the 1st Simferopol Gymnasium, and by 1857 he returned to Saint Petersburg with fully restored health. Heidelberg drew him next, where between 1859 and 1861 he studied the capillarity of liquids and the workings of the spectroscope. Later in 1861 he published a textbook called Organic Chemistry, which earned him the Demidov Prize of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. His personal life moved in step with his career. On the 4th of April 1862 he became engaged to Feozva Nikitichna Leshcheva, and they married on the 27th of April 1862 at Nikolaev Engineering Institute's church in Saint Petersburg, where he taught. Academic titles followed quickly. He became a professor at the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute in 1864 and at Saint Petersburg State University in 1865. That same year he earned a Doctor of Science for his dissertation "On the Combinations of Water with Alcohol." By 1871 he had turned Saint Petersburg into an internationally recognized center for chemistry research.

• 4. Gaps Left On Purpose

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  Principles of Chemistry, the book Mendeleev wrote after becoming a teacher in 1867, became the definitive textbook of its time. He published it in two volumes between 1868 and 1870, writing it as he prepared a course. As he tried to classify the elements by their chemical properties, he noticed patterns, and from those patterns he built his table. On the 6th of 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. He described elements by both atomic weight and valence, stating that elements arranged by atomic weight show "an apparent periodicity of properties." The boldest part was the empty space. He told his audience, "We must expect the discovery of many yet unknown elements," naming two analogous to aluminium and silicon, whose atomic weights would fall between 65 and 75. He even corrected accepted figures, insisting tellurium's atomic weight had to lie between 123 and 126 and could not be 128. He was right about the order, though wrong in assuming atomic weight must always increase with position. For his three predicted elements he used the prefixes eka, dvi, and tri, the Sanskrit words for one, two, and three. That choice may have honored the Sanskrit grammarians of ancient India, who discovered two-dimensional patterns of speech sounds shown in the Śivasūtras of Pāṇini's grammar. Mendeleev was a friend of the Sanskritist Otto von Böhtlingk, then preparing a second edition of his book on Pāṇini, and he wished to honor Pāṇini in his naming.

• 5. Vindication And Rivals

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  Gallium and germanium settled the argument. Some had dismissed Mendeleev for insisting more elements existed, but gallium was found in 1875 and germanium in 1886, slotting perfectly into the two missing spaces. He had named these predicted elements ekaaluminium and ekasilicon, along with ekaboron, which became gallium, germanium, and scandium. He was not working alone in the field. John Newlands had described a Law of Octaves, noting periodicity by relative atomic weight in 1864 and publishing it in 1865, and his proposal even pointed toward germanium. Critics rejected it, and the Society of Chemists did not recognize his innovation until 1887. Lothar Meyer published a paper in 1864 classifying 28 elements by valence, but offered no predictions of new elements. The timing between Mendeleev and Meyer was razor-thin. Mendeleev published his periodic table of all known elements in a Russian-language journal, and only a few months later Meyer published a virtually identical table in a German-language journal. Mendeleev's reach extended to elements already on the list. Uranium had been assigned valence 3 and an atomic weight of about 120, but he doubled both to valence 6 and atomic weight 240, close to the modern value of 238. The original draft of his arrangement surfaced years later under the name Tentative System of Elements.

• 6. A Scandal And A Snub

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  A threat of suicide marked Mendeleev's second courtship. He met Anna Ivanovna Popova in 1876, proposed in 1881, and threatened to kill himself if she refused. His divorce from Leshcheva was finalized one month after he married Popova in early 1882, which technically made him a bigamist, since the Russian Orthodox Church required at least seven years before lawful remarriage. The controversy carried a cost. It contributed to his failure to be admitted to the Russian Academy of Sciences despite his international fame. His family tree gained a literary branch through it all. His daughter Lyubov, from the second marriage, became the wife of the famous Russian poet Alexander Blok. His son Vladimir, a sailor, took part in the notable Eastern journey of Nicholas II, and his daughter Olga also came from the first marriage to Feozva. With Anna he had a son Ivan and twins. Honors arrived from across Europe even as his own country hesitated. The Royal Society of London gave him the Davy Medal in 1882 and later the Copley Medal in 1905. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1892. He resigned from Saint Petersburg University on the 17th of August 1890 after a dispute with the Ministry of Education over the treatment of university students. In 1893 he was appointed director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures, a post he held until his death.

• 7. The Prize That Got Away

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  Four nominations in 1906 brought Mendeleev to the edge of a Nobel Prize, and the Nobel Committee for Chemistry recommended the award to him for his discovery of the periodic system. He had been nominated in each of his final three years, 1905, 1906, and 1907, across nine nominations. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had elected him a member in 1905, and the Chemistry Section supported the committee's recommendation. The academy almost always approved such choices. Then the politics turned. At the full meeting, a dissenting committee member, Peter Klason, proposed the rival candidacy of Henri Moissan. Svante Arrhenius, though not on the chemistry committee, wielded great influence and pressed for rejection, arguing the periodic system was too old to honor in 1906. Contemporaries said Arrhenius was driven by a grudge, resenting Mendeleev's critique of his dissociation theory. After heated arguments, the academy chose Moissan by a margin of one vote. The two nominations in 1907 were again frustrated by Arrhenius's absolute opposition. Mendeleev's interests stretched far beyond the table. He investigated petroleum, helped found the first oil refinery in Russia, and remarked that burning petroleum as fuel "would be akin to firing up a kitchen stove with bank notes." He concluded that hydrocarbons are abiogenic and form deep within the earth, writing, "The capital fact to note is that petroleum was born in the depths of the earth."

• 8. Legends And Legacy

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  Russian Standard vodka still advertises that "In 1894, Dmitri Mendeleev, the greatest scientist in all Russia, received the decree to set the Imperial quality standard for Russian vodka." The story credits him with fixing vodka's 40% strength, but the facts do not cooperate. The Russian government had already introduced the 40% standard in 1843, when Mendeleev was nine years old. He did become head of the Archive of Weights and Measures in Saint Petersburg in 1892, evolving it into a government bureau, yet that body standardized trade weights and measuring instruments, not production quality. His 1865 doctoral dissertation discussed only medical-strength alcohol concentrations over 70%, and he never wrote anything about vodka. His real range was vast. The chemist and science historian Lev Chugaev called him "a chemist of genius, first-class physicist," a researcher in hydrodynamics, meteorology, geology, and chemical technology, and "an original thinker in the field of economy." He is credited with introducing the metric system to the Russian Empire. He invented pyrocollodion, a smokeless powder based on nitrocellulose, commissioned by the Russian Navy, which did not adopt it, though he organized its manufacture in 1892. His name now travels far. The synthetic element mendelevium, symbol Md and atomic number 101, was named for him, made by bombarding einsteinium with alpha particles. A large lunar impact crater Mendeleev sits on the far side of the Moon, carrying the name of the man who left blank spaces and trusted that the elements would arrive to fill them.