Dmitri Mendeleev
?. Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (Russian: Дмитрий Иванович Менделеев - Orignalschreibweise: Менделѣевъ - Pronunciation / i wiss Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev transliteration; * 27 Januarjul / February 8 1834greg in Tobolsk, Russia; † 20 Januarjul / 2. . February 1907greg. St. Petersburg ) was a Russian chemist.
He developed independently by Lothar Meyer, a classification of the chemical elements, which he called the periodic law. It allowed a tabular arrangement, today Periodic Table or Periodic Table of the Elements ( PSE) above, and the prediction of three new elements. This Mendeleev completed provisionally the 50-year search for a connection between the atomic masses and the chemical properties of the chemical elements. In his honor, the element 101 got the name Mendelevium.
Life
Childhood and youth
Dmitri Mendeleev was born on February 8, 1834 as the youngest of the 17 children of Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev and Maria Dmitrievna Mendelejewa (born Korniljewa ) to the world. With 15 years after the death of his father, he attended the Gymnasium in Tobolsk.
1849 drew the impoverished family Mendeleev to St. Petersburg, where he joined in 1850 the Pedagogical Institute. From 1855 to 1856 he was suffering from tuberculosis, he recovering from the Crimea peninsula.
Between 1859 and 1861, Mendeleev dealt in Paris with the density of gases and taught in his apartment own laboratory a. At the University of Heidelberg he studied with Gustav Robert Kirchhoff with the new investigation method of spectroscopy. In 1862 he married in the Church of military engineering University of Saint Petersburg.
Scientific Work
Mendeleev received his doctorate in 1865 and was in the same year Doctor of Chemistry at the Technological Institute of Saint Petersburg. His doctoral thesis he wrote on the subject than the relationships of alcohol with water and performed with her and other works made important contributions to improving the quality of Russian vodka production. So go to the today usual alcohol content of the beverage and ingredients of today's production process back to his proposal. 1867 Mendeleev became Professor of Chemistry at the University of Saint Petersburg.
On March 6, 1869, he published the Periodic Table of Elements ( PSE) under the title The dependence of the chemical properties of the elements of atomic weight. The then known 63 elements were rising after atomic mass into seven groups with similar properties arranged. Lothar Meyer published a few months later, an almost identical table. Mendeleev was able with his system in 1871, the properties of hitherto unknown elements gallium ( at Mendeleev: eka- aluminum), scandium (Mendeleev: eka- boron): predict and germanium ( eka- silicon Mendeleev). Only a few years later his ideas were confirmed as correct.
Economic and political commitment
Mendeleev was also the father of the Russian oil industry. Already in the 1860s he visited the oil fields at Baku in Azerbaijan. In 1876 he traveled on behalf of the Russian government in the United States to study oil production in Pennsylvania and make recommendations for the exploitation of Russian reserves. After his return, he invented new methods for refining the oil. His recommendations he summarized the oil industry in Pennsylvania and in the Caucasus in the work.
Mendeleev was a Liberal. In his lectures and women were different from his colleagues admitted. He regularly made submissions to the government objected to the tsarist bureaucracy and political repression. He got himself traveling by rail through Russia, on which he always traveled third class its information. In 1890, he resigned in protest against the restriction of university autonomy back as a professor. In 1893 he was at the instigation of the Minister of Finance director of the Russian office of weights and measures and then led the metric system in Russia.
Awards and Private
Mendeleev was an honorary member of the Moscow University, member of the Russian Academy of Arts and a member of 90 foreign academies of science, including the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. The highest award for scientists, the Nobel Prize, was almost denied him in 1906. A voice lacked the relevant committee for this honor.
He was married twice and had several children. He spoke Russian, German and French. The chemist died in January 1907 from the effects of flu. At his funeral at the St. Petersburg Wolkowo cemetery several thousand people took part.
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, 1955, 101 chemical element named after the late Mendelevium chemist. Mendeleev was during the Soviet Union often namesake; so the Russian Chemical- Technological University in Moscow, the Tatar city Mendelejewsk, numerous other settlements and villages as well as the Moscow metro station " Mendelejewskaja ". Over time, additional objects were carriers of his name, including, but not a volcano, a submarine ridge and a crater on the moon.
Main theses to the periodic table
The main theses of his presentation to the Russian Chemical Society in March 1869
Mendeleev wrote later, when writing a chemistry book he was looking for a classification of the chemical elements. In addition to the atomic weight he had been guided by their properties:
- Similarities in the formation of compounds
- Electrochemical behavior and value
- Crystal form of the compounds
- Tendency to isomorphism
Works
- Dmitri I. Mendeleev: Fundamentals of Chemistry, 1868-1871