Under the guidance of Regnault, he spent much time collecting information and making measurements on gases, and with Bunsen he learnt new techniques, notably spectroscopy. Mendeleev's name is on a list of famous people who worked at the Simferopol School, Crimera Early influencesĪfter two years' doctoral research on the interaction of alcohols with water at St Petersburg University (1856-58), the Russian authorities awarded Mendeleev a scholarship to study in Paris under Henri Regnault and in Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen. He was transferred to another school, further north, in Odessa, where he decided university research and not school teaching would be his future. However, within a week of his arrival, nearby British landings signalled the onset of the Crimean war, and the school closed. In 1855, at the age of 21, he took a post as a science teacher at Simferopol School on the Crimean peninsula which had a warmer and healthier climate than elsewhere in Russia. Nevertheless, he was awarded a gold medal at the end for finishing top of the class. When dieing she said 'Be careful of illusion work, search for divine and scientific truth'.Īs a young student, Dmitri suffered poor health, possibly tuberculosis, and was unable to attend some of his course. 'conducting a factory, she educated me by her own word, she instructed by example, corrected with love, and to give me the cause of science she left Siberia with me, spending thus her last resources and strength. Dmitri cherished her memory and later dedicated his doctorial research to her: Within a year of arriving in St Petersburg Maria died. In 1849 she took him and two siblings first to Moscow, where Dmitri was refused entry to the college because he was Siberian, and then on to St Petersburg, the capital of Czarist Russia, where she secured a place for him at the pedagogical college where her husband had trained. First his father, headmaster and literature teacher at a local secondary school, died and then the glassworks owned by his mother Maria burnt down.ĭmitri's mother, however, was an ambitious woman of strong character, and recognising the academic ability of her youngest made his education her priority. A double disaster struck the family of teenager Dmitri. They allege that the Russian, originally from the remote town of Tobolsk in Siberia, was obsessed with finding structure among the elements and laid them out written on cards, like a game of solitaire.Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev the youngest of 14 children was born at Tobolsk, Siberia, 500 miles east of the Ural mountains, on 27 January 1834 (OS*). Some accounts of how Mendeleev devised the periodic table try to make it fit that romantic template. How much more noble this sounds than a desperate attempt to meet a publisher’s deadline. Then everything falls into place, the paradigm shifts, and nothing is ever the same. There is the period of struggle and confusion that ends when a lone genius sees the light, perhaps in a reverie or dream. When we retell stories of scientists pondering great questions like this, they are often made to seem romantic. But was there any order to the building blocks of the physical world? He needed some system to organise the material. How was he going to cram the remaining 55 into volume two?Ĭlearly he couldn’t afford to take the same rambling stroll through the properties of the elements as he had in the first volume. By January 1869, he had completed the first volume, but it covered only eight of the 63 chemical elements then known. As a professor at the University of St Petersburg in Russia, he was supposed to teach chemistry to students, and to guide him in that task he had arranged a contract with a Russian publisher to write a two-volume textbook. Mendeleev’s table of elements wasn’t the first, but it was the bestĭMITRI Mendeleev had a problem.
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