Dmitri Mendeleyev

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Dmitri Ivánovich Mendeléyev (in Russian): ". [^dmjitrj α εvanуvj α α ] mj α ̧ α α α ̧ ̧ ] ] ] ] μ ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ], ] ] ], ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] (?·i)Tobolsk, 27 January^Jul./ 8 February 1834^Greg.- St. Petersburg, 20 January^Jul./ 2 February 1907^Greg.) was a Russian chemist, known for having discovered the underlying pattern and the publication in 1869 of the first periodic table version, which is now known as the periodic table of the elements.

Based on the spectral analysis established by the Germans Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff, he dealt with chemical-physical problems related to the emission spectrum of the elements. He made the determinations of specific volumes and analyzed the liquefaction conditions of the gases, as well as the origin of the oils.

His main research was the one that gave rise to the enunciation of the periodic law of the elements, the basis of the periodic system that bears his name. He was influenced by the 1858 article "Sunto di un corso di Filosofia Chimica" by Stanislao Cannizzaro. In 1869 he published his book Principles of Chemistry, in which he developed the theory of the periodic table.

Biography

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev was the youngest of at least 17 siblings in the family formed by Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleyev and Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleyeva. In the same year he was born, his father became blind, losing his job, he was the director of the school from town. One of his greatest physical features was his enormous beard which historians say he only shaved once a year.

They received an insufficient pension, so the mother had to take the reins of the family and run the glass factory that her grandfather had founded. Since she was young, she excelled in science at school, but not in spelling. A brother-in-law of his, exiled for political reasons, and a chemist from the factory instilled in him a love of science.

The family suffered, as Dmitri only finished high school, his father died, and the glass factory his mother ran burned down. She is she opted to invest the savings in Dmitri's education, instead of rebuilding the factory. At that time, most of the siblings, except for one sister, had already become independent, and the mother took them to Moscow so that Dmitri could enter the University. However, Mendeleev was not admitted; His Siberian origin closed the doors of the universities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, so he studied at the Pedagogical Institute of the latter city.

In 1862 he married Feozva Nikítichna Leschiova with whom he had three children, one of whom died. This was an unhappy marriage and from 1871 they lived apart. He was accused of bigamism, because once he divorced his wife, he remarried, without waiting the seven years required by Russian law.

He found happiness by marrying Anna Ivanovna Popova, 26 years his junior. To achieve this, Mendeleev was desperate for four years, even falling into a depression, because his wife refused to grant him a divorce and Anna's family was strongly opposed. On the verge of giving up, he got a divorce from his wife and went looking for Anna who was in Rome. In 1882 they married. They had four children, the eldest of whom, Liubov, would marry the Russian poet Aleksandr Blok.

Although he is best known in the West for having created the Periodic Table of the Elements, Dmitri Mendeleev's contribution to the development of Russia was vast and for this reason he is recognized as a true personality of the Russian Renaissance. His fields of study ranged from chemistry to aeronautics.

His extensive knowledge led him to become an influential figure among his contemporaries, serving as an adviser to Russia's Finance Minister Sergei Witte and writing more than 70 articles on the country's economic and social development.

Mendeleyev was one of the greatest teachers of his time and is credited with having educated thousands of students. He passed away on February 2, 1907, nearly blind. Mendeleev is considered a genius, not only because of the ingenuity he showed in applying everything known and predicting the unknown about the chemical elements and translating it into the periodic table, but also because of the numerous works carried out throughout his life in various fields. fields of science, agriculture, livestock, industry and oil.

Academic career

He presented the thesis On specific volumes to obtain the position of school teacher, and the thesis On the structure of siliceous combinations to obtain the position of professor of chemistry at the University of Saint Petersburg. At the age of 23, he was already in charge of a course at said university.

Portrait of Dmitri Mendeléyev of Iliá Repin.

Thanks to a scholarship, he was able to go to Heidelberg, where he carried out different investigations together with Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen, and published an article on “The cohesion of some liquids and on the role of molecular cohesion in the chemical reactions of liquids”. bodies”. This work could be done thanks to some precision devices ordered in Paris with which he found the absolute boiling temperature, and discovered why some gases could not be liquefied (because they were above the boiling temperature).

He participated in the Karlsruhe congress where he was impressed by Cannizzaro's ideas on the weight of elements. Upon returning to Saint Petersburg he found himself without a permanent job, which gave him time to write different works. Among which stands out his book Organic Chemistry , which he wrote influenced by what he had heard in Karlsruhe.

About Mendeleev's personality, it can be said that he was a workaholic and his reputation for bad temper was based on the fact that while he worked, he yelled, growled and grumbled. It is said that someone asked him about his bad temper, to which he replied that it was a way to stay healthy and not get an ulcer.

In 1864 he was appointed professor of technology and chemistry at the St. Petersburg Technical Institute. In 1867, he held the chair of chemistry at the University of Saint Petersburg, where he studied isomorphism, the compression of gases, and the properties of rarefied air.

He would remain in this chair for 23 years. Mendeleev was in favor of introducing reforms in the Russian educational system. He did not get elected president of the imperial academy of sciences, due to his liberalism.

Dmitri Mendeléyev (1878), by Iván Kramskói.

In 1890, he finished his stay at the university, because he interceded for the students, and delivered a letter addressed to Tsar Alexander III of Russia to Ivan Delianov, Minister of Public Instruction. The minister returned it to him with a note attached which read:

By order of the Minister of Public Instruction, the role attached is returned to the Councillor of State, Professor Mendeléyev, since neither the minister nor any of those who are at the service of his Imperial Majesty has the right to receive this kind of paper...

Outraged, Dmitri left the university classrooms. Perhaps for this reason, he has remained on the margins of politics and the State since then, although he expressed his liberal ideas and his opposition to oppression.

In 1865, after the liberation of the serfs in 1861, he decided to buy a farm where he put into practice scientific methods to improve the harvest and had a humanitarian relationship with the peasants. He obtained a yield well above what was produced before, so many peasants from nearby farms went to seek his advice.^{[citation needed ]}

In 1869, he published the most important of his works, Principles of Chemistry, where he formulated his famous periodic table, translated into many languages and which was a textbook for many years. He was a defender of applied science and studies to improve industrial production techniques in numerous fields. He contributed to the construction of the first oil refinery in Russia, raised the first theories about the origin of oil and even predicted that this resource will become a key component of the world economy. In 1863, he was the first to suggest the idea of using pipelines to transport fuel. He promoted the importance of oil as a raw material for petrochemicals. He is credited with claiming that burning oil for fuel "would be similar to lighting a kitchen stove with banknotes."

In 1876, he was sent to the United States to learn about oil extraction and then put it into practice in the Caucasus. The study of oil refining led him to investigate the phenomenon of the attraction of molecules from homogeneous or different bodies, a matter that he studied until the day he died. In 1887, he published Study of aqueous solutions according to specific weight, where he concluded that solutions contain associations of hydrated molecules in a state of mobile equilibrium, which dissociate in different ways following the percentage of concentration.

In 1887, he undertook a solo balloon voyage to study a solar eclipse. The apparatus was intended to rise high enough to offer an unobstructed view of a solar eclipse to the scientist and a pilot. A unique opportunity to study the solar corona. However, the day of the event it rained, spoiling all observation plans. Despite this, Mendeleyev is said to have removed the pilot and other things from the basket in order to make the flight.

Scientifically, this trip was of no importance. The aerostat failed to fly over the clouds but it was a success as a publicity claim. The dramatic story of a famous scientist who risks his life and is forced to carry out repairs to make the first flight in a hot air balloon was so audacious that the French Academy of Meteorology awarded him a medal. It is worth mentioning that this area was also one of the many in which the Russian genius showed interest.

He also encouraged the use of fertilizers in agriculture and experimented with several of them on his own farm. He improved and invented various instruments, including an apparatus for measuring the density of liquids. He was director of the Russian Bureau of Weights and Measures, and was influential in the country's transition to the metric system. In 1889, he was made an honorary member of the Council of Commerce and Manufactures.

In 1890, commissioned by the Ministry of War and Navy, he prepared a smokeless gunpowder for pyrocollodium. At the request of the Russian Navy, he carried out studies on the European experience in the production of smokeless powder and developed his own formula, called "pyrocollodion", as well as helping the development of the country's industry. It is not known why the formula was not adopted in Russia and French technique was exported instead. There are those who maintain that it was due to competition between military officials; others cite the strict requirements for the process proposed by Mendeleev. However, a kind of gunpowder much like its own was produced and imported on a large scale in the United States during World War I, including to the possible country of origin.

In 1892, he was appointed scientific conservator of the Office of Weights and Measures, in compensation for what happened at the university. After a year, after having reorganized it, he was appointed director, which committed him to make various trips, among which is the one made to London, where he received honorary doctorates from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford.

In 1902, he traveled to Paris and visited Marie and Pierre Curie in their laboratory. He observed the experiment on the phosphorescence of zinc sulfide, due to X-rays, and concluded that "in radioactive bodies there is an ethereal gas that causes light vibrations and that enters and leaves the bodies as a comet enters and leaves the solar system." ”.^{[citation required]}

He was not completely convinced by the theory of radioactivity and the structure of the atom. He considered radioactivity to be a property or state of substances, while atoms and molecules did not really exist, although energy did. He traveled throughout Europe visiting various scientists.^{[citation needed ]}

He contributed to shipbuilding and research and to Arctic sea voyages. He participated in the development of Arctic navigation and in the creation of new types of Russian ships. Likewise, he participated in the design of the Yermak, the first icebreaker in the Arctic. The idea of making the northern territories of Russia accessible by sea was very attractive to the enlightened scientist.^{[citation needed]}

In Russia, he was never recognized, due to his liberal ideas, so he was never admitted to the Russian Academy of Sciences. However, in 1955 the chemical element with atomic number 101 was named mendelevium (Md) in his honor.^{[citation needed ]}

Failed Nobel Prize

Soviet fraud with seal, in honor of Mendeléyev.

Dmitri Mendeleyev was on the verge of winning a Nobel Prize, a circumstance that finally eluded him. The Nobel Committee for Chemistry recommended to the Swedish Academy of Sciences that the highest award be given to the creator of the periodic table, and while the Academy rarely ignores the Committee's recommendations, unfortunately this was one of them. In 1906, almost all the members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences agreed that the rightful winner of that year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry should be the Russian Dmitri Mendeleyev, who had been made a member of the Academy by a year before and who was considered one of the most brilliant minds, for which he must have been rewarded (among many other things) for laying the foundations of the periodic table of elements.

Unexpectedly, shortly before Mendeleev's name was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize, the Academy changed its mind and awarded it to the French chemist Henri Moissan. The reason for this sudden and surprising decision was caused by the intervention of Peter Klason, an academic who disagreed with the advisability of awarding the Nobel to the Russian chemist for something he had done four decades ago (in 1869), for which he proposed the name of Moissan for his research on the isolation of fluoride. But the one who was really behind the effort to keep Dmitri Mendeleyev from being awarded the Nobel Prize and who had convinced Klason to be discordant with the rest of the academics was Svante August Arrhenius, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1903 for the theory of dissociation. electrolytic.^{[citation needed]}

Arrhenius, despite not being a member of the Academy, had a lot of influence among several of his colleagues, and little by little he managed to convince them thanks to the invaluable collaboration that Peter Klason gave him. And it is that all this effort so that Mendeleev would not be awarded the prize came from a personal conflict that Arrhenius had had for three years, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize and his Russian colleague harshly criticized his theory in public. electrolytic dissociation. A year after that recognition of his work was cut short, the scientist died.

Ideals

Dmitri Mendeleev was born and grew up in the traditional and immobile Russia of the tsars, and he was always pointed out within his country, at that time an entire empire, as a liberal person, something that harmed him within its borders. He grew up in the orthodox faith, although his mother encouraged him from an early age to "seek divine, patient and scientific truth". Later, he abandoned this faith and embraced deism, which accepts knowledge of God through reason and personal experience, rather than through direct revelation, faith, or tradition.

The economy and social policy were some of his favorite topics and he was a great defender of protectionism and the development of national industries.

Scientific work

The arrangement of chemical elements in a periodic table was Mendeleev's great contribution to science, since this grouping by atomic weights and valences

The great success of Mendeléyev, the periodic table and the prediction of undiscovered elements even in 1891.

allows to observe a regularity in the properties of the elements. In addition, he sensed that there were still elements to be discovered, and for this reason there were gaps in the table, and he pointed out the properties that these should have.

In 1860, he began his studies on the preparation of a manual of chemistry. To do this, he made some cards where he listed the most significant properties of the elements known up to then. By arranging these cards, he was able to see that sixty appeared in a row, and most of the elements were arranged in increasing order of relative atomic mass. In this way, elements with similar chemical properties were located in vertical groups.

Previously, in 1817, J. W. Döbereiner, when very few chemical elements were still known, intuited the existence of triads or groups of elements with similar properties, with the characteristic that the atomic weight of the central element was the arithmetic mean approximate atomic weights of extreme elements; this was the case, for example, with lithium, sodium and potassium or chlorine, bromine and iodine or sulfur, selenium and tellurium.

Also, A. E. de Chancourtois, in 1862, established a telluric helix or telluric screw, placing the chemical elements in order of increasing atomic weights on a helix, with 16 elements per turn. In this way, he observed that many of the elements with similar properties were located in the generatrix of the cylinder, one above the other; He thus stated a law that the properties of elements are the properties of numbers.

In 1868, J. A. Newlands had arranged the elements into linear groupings, enunciating his law of octaves, in which he stated that, if all the elements were placed in increasing order of atomic weights, after every seven elements, an eighth whose properties are similar to those of the first, but Dimitri was unaware of this work and, on the other hand, his far surpassed him.

The elaboration of the table as such was carried out throughout the years 1868-1869. A first version was presented to the Russian Chemical Society, where the idea that the properties of elements can be represented through periodic functions of their atomic weights appeared explicitly.^{[citation needed ]}

Simultaneously with Mendeleev, but independently, J. L. Meyer came to a classification that was practically the same, but it was based on the physical properties of the elements and not on the chemical ones, as Mendeleev did.^{[citation required ]}

The great merit of Mendeleev lies in the importance he gave to group similarity, reaching the following conclusions:

considers certain atomic weights incorrect and alters them, because they did not fit the general pattern of the table;
predicts new states of valence of some elements;
invests the order of growing atomic weights when appropriate, as in the case of telury and iodine;
leave some positions of the table vacant, to place in them elements not yet discovered and that they thought they would exist if the law of periodicity was actually verified.

Starting from this periodic nature of the table, he predicted the properties of some unknown elements, and specifically those that should occupy the positions immediately below boron, aluminum and silicon, and which he named: eka-boro, eka- aluminum and eka-silicon, respectively. Shortly after, the discovery of eka-aluminium, designated as gallium (atomic number 31, discovered in 1875 by L. de Boisbaudran), eka-boron, called scandium (atomic number 21, discovered in 1879 by L. F. Nilson), and eka-silicon, designated as germanium (number 32, discovered by Winkler, in 1886), proved him right.

Subsequently, the noble gases and transuranides were added to the table and, although when the first inert gases began to be discovered it seemed that the theory of periodicity collapsed, it was observed that, by intercalating in the relationship of the elements in order of increasing atomic weights, it was enough to invert the argon and potassium so that they all fit in a column, located between the halogens and the alkali metals. Later, Moseley and Bohr explained this arrangement, using the concept of atomic structure. The periodicity of the properties observed by Mendeleev is due to the number of electrons in the orbitals of their last levels.^{[citation needed]}

The Periodic Table

Death

The last years of her degree were spent in nursing due to a diagnosis of tuberculosis. He passed away on February 2, 1907, nearly blind. Mendeleev is considered a genius, not only because of the ingenuity he showed in applying everything known and predicting the unknown about the chemical elements and translating it into the periodic table, but also because of the numerous works carried out throughout his life in various fields. fields of science, agriculture, livestock, industry, oil, etc.

Acknowledgments and Honors

Sculpture in honour of Mendeléyev and its periodic table, located in Bratislava (Slovakia).

In 1905 Dmitri Mendeléyev was awarded the Copley Medal, a prize awarded annually by the Royal London Society to a natural person as recognition of scientific work for its outstanding achievements in the physical or biological sciences.
In 1955 the chemical element of atomic number 101 was named Mendelevio (Md) in the periodic table, in his honour for his research in this area.
In his honor was erected the Monument to the DI Mendeléyev Pharmacy in St. Petersburg.
Sculpture in honour of Mendeléyev and its periodic table, located in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Soviet fraud with a stamp in honor of Mendeléyev.

Eponymy

The lunar crater Mendeleev bears this name in his memory.
The asteroid (2769) Mendeleev also commemorates its name.

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