Dmitri Mendeleev: The man who dreamed the Periodic Table

 

The Card Game That Changed Science

In February 1869, a Russian chemist sat alone in his St. Petersburg study, arranging a deck of cards. But these were not ordinary playing cards — each one bore the name of a chemical element, its atomic weight, and its properties. He had been invited to visit a local cheese cooperative that day, but he declined. Instead, he stayed home to work on his textbook. What happened over the next three days would become one of the most celebrated moments in the history of science.

Dmitri Mendeleev was playing a game of solitaire with the universe itself. And when he finished, he had rearranged all of creation.

The Boy from Siberia

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was born on February 8, 1834, in the small Siberian town of Tobolsk. He was the last of fourteen surviving children — though some sources say thirteen — born to Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev, a teacher at the local gymnasium, and Mariya Dmitriyevna Kornileva.

His father was a respected educator, but tragedy struck early. In the year of Dmitri's birth, Ivan became blind and was forced to resign his position. The family, once comfortable, fell into poverty. It fell to Mariya — a woman of "great energy and remarkable force of character" — to support them. She revived a small glass factory owned by her family, managing it herself for many years.

But misfortune followed the Mendeleevs like a shadow. In December 1848, the glass factory burned to the ground. Dmitri's father had died the previous year. The family was destitute.

Yet Mariya refused to surrender. She recognized her youngest son's extraordinary potential. Despite their poverty, she made the decision to prioritize his education. She packed up Dmitri and two of his siblings and set out on an epic journey of more than two thousand kilometers from Siberia to Moscow.

When they arrived, the university in Moscow refused to admit him — because he came from Siberia. Undeterred, Mariya took the family to St. Petersburg, where Dmitri was finally accepted into the Main Pedagogical Institute.

Soon after, tragedy struck again. His mother and sister both died of tuberculosis. Dmitri himself fell ill with the same disease. He dedicated his doctoral research to his mother, writing:


"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. When dying she said: 'Be careful of illusion; work, search for divine and scientific truth.'"

The Making of a Chemist

In 1855, at the age of twenty-one, Mendeleev took a teaching post in Simferopol on the Crimean peninsula. He hoped the warmer climate would help his health. Within a week, British troops landed on the coast — the Crimean War had begun — and the school was forced to close. He was transferred to Odessa, then returned to St. Petersburg to pursue his doctorate.

In 1860, Mendeleev attended the Karlsruhe Congress, the first international chemistry conference. Chemistry legends like Robert Bunsen and Michael Faraday were there. The congress's main achievement was establishing a unified system for assigning atomic weights. This would prove crucial for Mendeleev's later work.

He returned to St. Petersburg worried that Russia was falling behind. He set out to rectify the situation, writing a five-hundred-page Russian-language textbook, Organic Chemistry, at just twenty-seven years old.

In 1867, he was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the University of St. Petersburg. He was assigned to teach inorganic chemistry and began writing another textbook, The Principles of Chemistry. The process of organizing his material would lead him to his greatest discovery.

The Discovery: A Pattern in the Chaos

By 1869, sixty-three chemical elements were known. They had been discovered over centuries, but no one had found a way to organize them in a meaningful system.

Mendeleev kept a collection of cards, each listing an element's atomic weight and properties. On February 17, 1869, while arranging his cards in order of atomic weight, he suddenly noticed something: elements with similar properties appeared at regular intervals.

He had discovered periodicity.

But Mendeleev did something no one before him had dared. He didn't just arrange what was known — he predicted what was missing. Where the pattern demanded an element that hadn't been discovered yet, he left a gap. He even predicted the properties of these unknown elements.

He named them using the Sanskrit prefixes "eka-" (one) — eka-boron, eka-aluminum, eka-silicon. He predicted their atomic weights, densities, melting points, and how they would react with other elements.

His paper, "The Dependence Between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements," was presented to the Russian Chemical Society on March 6, 1869.

The scientific world was not immediately convinced. But when three of his predicted elements were discovered — gallium in 1875, scandium in 1879, and germanium in 1886 — and matched his predictions almost perfectly, Mendeleev's fame was assured. The periodic table was no longer just an idea — it was a law of nature.

Interesting Fact: Mendeleev took a break from improving cheese-making techniques to present his periodic table to the world. He had been invited to visit a local cheese cooperative that day but chose instead to stay home and work on his discovery.

Beyond the Periodic Table

Mendeleev was far more than a one-discovery scientist. His interests were extraordinarily broad. He conducted research in physical chemistry, studying gases and liquids, and in 1860 defined the "absolute point of ebullition" — the temperature at which a gas will condense solely under pressure. He investigated the elasticity of gases and proposed a formula for their deviation from Boyle's law. In the 1880s, he studied the thermal expansion of liquids.

He contributed to the modernization of Russia in countless practical ways: through his work on weights and measures, protective tariffs, shipbuilding, Arctic shipping routes, and the manufacture of smokeless powder. From 1892 until his death, he served as Director of the Central Board of Weights and Measures.

In 1890, he left his professorship at the University of St. Petersburg after delivering a student protest to the Ministry of Education — a demonstration of his lifelong liberal convictions.

The Legacy

Mendeleev died on February 2, 1907, in St. Petersburg, at the age of seventy-two. He was buried with honors. At his funeral, his students carried a large banner through the streets — the periodic table.

His name survives in mendelevium, element 101 on the periodic table. In 2019, the United Nations and UNESCO proclaimed the International Year of the Periodic Table to mark the 150th anniversary of his discovery.

But his greatest legacy is simpler: every chemistry classroom in the world displays his creation. Every student who learns about the elements learns them through his vision. He took the chaos of sixty-three randomly discovered elements and revealed the hidden order of the universe.

Mendeleev once said: "I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper." Whether the dream was real or a convenient fiction, the result was very real indeed. He had organized not just the elements, but the very language of chemistry itself.

Editor's Note

"Mendeleev's story is one of resilience. Born into poverty, struck by tragedy, rejected by universities, and struggling with illness, he could have given up a dozen times. Instead, he created the single most important organizational tool in the history of chemistry. His periodic table is more than a chart — it is a testament to the power of seeing patterns where others see chaos."

Sources and Further Reading

Encyclopædia Britannica. Dmitri Mendeleev: Biography, Periodic Table, & Facts. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dmitri-Mendeleev

Oxford University Press. How exactly did Mendeleev discover his periodic table of 1869?  https://blog.oup.com/2014/08/dmitri-mendeleevs-lost-elements/

Wikipedia: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Mendeleev

Pioneers of Science and Chemistry:

• Marie Curie - Pioneering physicist and chemist who discovered radium and polonium, and won two Nobel Prizes
• Carl Friedrich Gauss - German mathematician who revolutionized number theory, statistics, and astronomy
• Isaac Newton - English physicist and mathematician who formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation
• Albert Einstein - German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity