Dmitri MENDELEYEV Russian (1834-1907)

Emilangues
Mendeleyev’s BIOGRAPHY
Dmitri MENDELEYEV Russian (1834-1907)
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleïev, (1834 – 1907), chimiste russe.
Source : Collection privée milanaise
© MP / Leemage
The Big Four
© 2012 – SCÉRÉN – CNDP
Emilangues
I.
Presentation
The person
a) Dates: birth and death
1834 in Tobolsk – 2 February 1907
b) Where does he come from?
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev was born in Siberia, Russia died in Saint Petersburg
c) Did his family’s occupation show him the way?
No, it didn’t.
His grandfather was Pavel Maximovich Sokolov, a Russian priest. Ivan, along with his brothers, obtained
new family names while attending Tver theological seminary.
Mendeleyev was the youngest child of 17 siblings. At the age of 13 after the passing of his father and the
destruction of his mother's factory by fire, Mendeleyev attended the Gymnasium in Tobolsk.
In 1849, the now poor Mendeleyev family relocated to St. Petersburg, where he entered the Main
Pedagogical Institute in 1850. After he graduated, an illness that was diagnosed as tuberculosis caused
him to move to the Crimean Peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea in 1855.
d) Job, what age, where did he start?
There he became chief science master of the Simferopol gymnasium
The background
e) The century
End of the 19th
f) What happened in political life and society at that time? (Wars, dictatorship,
Church…)
Russian serfdom was abolished in 1861, but its abolition was achieved on terms unfavorable to the
peasants and served to increase revolutionary pressures.
g) What happened in the scientific field at that time? (Main discoveries, state of
knowledge, contemporary people…)
Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois, a French geologist, was the first person to notice the
periodicity of the elements in 1862.
John Newlands was an English chemist who in 1865 classified the 56 elements that had been discovered
at the time into 11 groups which were based on similar physical properties.
Kekulé was the principal formulator of the theory of chemical structure (1857-58). This theory proceeds
from the idea of atomic valence, especially the tetra valence of carbon and the ability of carbon atoms to
link to each other, to the determination of the bonding order of all of the atoms in a molecule.
II.
His work
Works and discoveries
h) What is he famous for?
As he attempted to classify the elements according to their chemical properties, he noticed patterns that
led him to create his Periodic Table. Mendeleev published his periodic table of all known elements (and
predicted several new elements to complete the table) in 1869.
The Big Four
© 2012 – SCÉRÉN – CNDP
Emilangues
i) Which less famous work did he do?
He was also a physicist, a fruitful researcher in the fields of hydrodynamics, meteorology, geology,
certain branches of chemical technology (explosives, petroleum, and fuels, for example) and other
disciplines adjacent to chemistry and physics, a thorough expert of chemical industry and industry in
general, and an original thinker in the field of economy.
Between 1859 and 1861, he worked on the capillarity of liquids and the workings of the spectroscope in
Heidelberg.
In 1865 he became Doctor of Science for his dissertation “On the Combinations of Water with Alcohol”.
In 1893, he was appointed Director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures. It was in this role that he was
directed to formulate new state standards for the production of vodka. His fascination with molecular
weights led him to conclude that to be in perfect molecular balance, vodka should be produced in the ratio
of one molecule of ethyl alcohol diluted with five molecules of water, giving a dilution by volume of
approximately 38% alcohol to 62% water. As a result of his work, in 1894 new standards for vodka were
introduced into Russian law and all vodka had to be produced at 40% alcohol by volume.
Mendeleyev also investigated the composition of oil fields, and helped to found the first oil refinery in
Russia.
j) What books did he write? (Title, date…)
In late August of 1861 his first book on the spectroscope.
In 1865 dissertation ”On the Combinations of Water with Alcohol”.
On March 6, 1869, The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements,
k) His work’s influence in the history of science
l) How was his work accepted? (Were people shocked? Was it criticized? Was it admired?
Was it published?)
His divorce and the surrounding controversy contributed to his failure to be admitted to the Russian
Academy of Sciences (despite his international fame by that time).
Though Mendeleyev was widely honored by scientific organizations all over Europe, including the
Copley Medal from the Royal Society of London, he resigned from St. Petersburg University on August
17, 1890.
m) Who took up his ideas and went further?
Discovery of new elements, for example gallium was discovered in 1875, and was found to have roughly
the same properties as Mendeleyev predicted for it.
In 1914 Henry Moseley found a relationship between an element's X-ray wavelength and its atomic
number and therefore re-sequenced the table by electronic charge rather than atomic weight.
n) Has his work/has his work had technological or philosophical applications?
III.
Your conclusion: for you, why can he be said an important person?
Sources :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Mendeleev
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_periodic_table
The Big Four
© 2012 – SCÉRÉN – CNDP