The Life of Dmitri Mendeleev

December 11, 2013

The Life of
Dmitri Mendeleev
By: John Sherfey
Dimitri was born on 1834. He had 14 other sibling. He was the youngest. Also, he had a blind father. Because of his father being blind, his mother had to work. So, what she did was start a glass factory which, sadly, burnt down to the ground. That same year, his father passed away.
Mendeleev was a young man in high school when this all happened. His mother, being the one who was mainly caring about his education now, went to Moscow to try to get him into the university there but they wouldn’t allow him to be admitted. So, then they went to the University of St. Petersburg and he was admitted there. He got a master’s degree in mathematics and science.
In the eighteen sixty’s he began working as a chemist. In 1869 he finally started creating the periodic table. The layout of the card game saltire was his inspiration of how to order the periodic table. The table is laid out in the order of the atomic weight of each element.
He wrote, in his book, that he arranged every element known to man just by their atomic mass and weight. He understood the science of elements and how they worked better than anyone else of his day. He guessed about future elements, as well, and what their properties might be. He also provided places for these possible new elements in the periodic table. At the time, however, a lot of people did not care for these extra spaces being in the table. His reasoning proved to be valid, though, because in his lifetime three new elements were actually found just as he predicted.
He began developing the periodic table while he was in still in college. He spent thirteen years collecting data from other scientists. He also was the only scientist in his time to seek out data and information from around the world and painstakingly collect and organize it to build the periodic table.
He was going to be awarded the Nobel Prize, which he would have received for chemistry, but he got the Davy metal and Copley metal, which is quite an accomplishment. He also had an element named after him: Mendelevium.
Dimitri helped make the first oil refinery and helped in form the process of mineral recovery.
After all that, he went back and change a few thing on the periodic table. When he was old he remarried. The marriage soon ended upon his death in 1907. His interesting life came to an end but his memory lives on with memorials in France, Sweden, and Germany.