Dmitri Mendeleev

                                                                 Dmitri Mendeleev

A chemist by both education and trade, Dmitri Mendeleev helped to transform the world of science with his way of organizing the elements. Mendeleev was born in Russia, where he spent much of his scientific career teaching and studying chemistry.

Dmitri Mendeleev's story begins in Tobolsk, Russia. In 1834, the Mendeleev family welcomed Dmitri, youngest of 17 children, to the world. The Mendeleevs were a relatively well-off family who valued education. When Dmitri's father passed away in 1847, his mother took it upon herself to ensure that Dmitri went to university, taking him over 1,300 miles to St. Petersburg to enroll. Legend has it that Mrs. Mendeleev made the journey with Dimitri on horseback, then died shortly after he was accepted to the Institute of Pedagogy in St. Petersburg.

The bright young Dmitri Mendeleev finished his studies and then began working at the university in chemistry. His studies took him to Paris and Heidelberg but eventually, he returned to St. Petersburg where he began tinkering with the organization of the elements.

Mendeleev was born in the small Siberian town of Tobolsk as the last of 14 surviving children (or 13, depending on the source) of Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev, a teacher at the local gymnasium, and Mariya Dmitriyevna Kornileva. Dmitri’s father became blind in the year of Dmitri’s birth and died in 1847. To support the family, his mother turned to operating a small glass factory owned by her family in a nearby town. The factory burned down in December 1848, and Dmitri’s mother took him to St. Petersburg, where he enrolled in the Main Pedagogical Institute. His mother died soon after, and Mendeleev graduated in 1855. He got his first teaching position at Simferopol in Crimea. He stayed there only two months and, after a short time at the lyceum of Odessa, decided to go back to St. Petersburg to continue his education. He received a master’s degree in 1856 and began to conduct research in organic chemistry. Financed by a government fellowship, he went to study abroad for two years at the University of Heidelberg. Instead of working closely with the prominent chemists of the university, including Robert Bunsen, Emil Erlenmeyer, and August Kekulé, he set up a laboratory in his own apartment. In September 1860 he attended the International Chemistry Congress in Karlsruhe, convened to discuss such crucial issues as atomic weights, chemical symbols, and chemical formulas. There he met and established contacts with many of Europe’s leading chemists. In later years Mendeleev would especially remember a paper circulated by the Italian chemist  Stanislao Cannizzaro  that clarified the notion of atomic weights.

In 1861 Mendeleev returned to St. Petersburg, where he obtained a professorship at the Technological Institute in 1864. After the defense of his doctoral dissertation in 1865 he was appointed professor of chemical technology at the University of St. Petersburg (now St. Petersburg State University). He became professor of general chemistry in 1867 and continued to teach there until 1890.