Dmitry Mendeleev Essay, Research Paper
Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev
(1834-1907)
Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev was Russian chemist, known
for his development of the periodic table of elements. This is a
table created to arrange the elements by their atomic number.
Mendeleyev was born in Tobolsk, Siberia. He studied
chemistry at the University of Saint Petersburg, until 1859 when
he was sent to learn at the University of Heidelberg. Where he
became aquatinted with the Italian chemist Stanislao
Cannizzaro, whose views on atomic weight changed his thinking.
Mendeleyev came back to Saint Petersburg and became a
professor of chemistry at the Tech. Institute in 1863. He
became professor of general chemistry at the University of
Saint Petersburg in 1866. Mendeleyev was a renowned teacher,
and, because no good textbook in chemistry was available, he
wrote the two-volume “Principles of Chemistry” which became a
classic.
During the writing of his book, Mendeleyev tried to
organize the elements according to their chemical properties and
atomic mass. In 1869 he published his first of what became
known as the periodic table, a table created to arrange the
elements by their atomic number. In 1871 he published a better
version of the periodic table, in which he left empty spaces for
elements that were undiscovered. Mendeleyev’s chart and
theories gained acceptance when three predicted
elements?gallium, germanium, and scandium?were discovered
and fit the places he had set aside.
Mendeleyev’s experiment also included the study of the
“chemical theory of solution”, the “thermal expansion of liquids”,
and the “nature of petroleum. In 1887 he went on a solo balloon
flight to study a solar eclipse, being the first to ever witness a
solar eclipse from the air. In 1893 he became director of the
Bureau of Weights and Measures in Saint Petersburg and held
this position until his death.