| Born at
Tobolsk in Siberia. Mendeleyev trained and worked as a chemistry teacher
and then entered university. At 25 he got a government grant to study abroad
and spent two years at Heidlberg, from 1859-1861. In September of 1860,
he attended the Karlsruhe conference at which Stanislao Cannizarro, the
Italian chemist, circulated copies of his table of atomic weights. Mendeleyev
used this to produced his periodic table in 1869, when he was Professor
of General Chemistry at the University of St. Petersburg. Although other
chemists hat put forward systematic and periodic arrangements of elements
before this, it was Mendeleyev's genius that enabled him to see that his
table of elements was incomplete. He left gaps and predicted that properties
of the missing elements. When these were later discovered and found to
be as he had predicted, there could be no doubt that he had uncovered a
fundamental pattern of matter. Yet it was to be another 50 years before
the explanation for the periodic table was revealed. That had to wait for
the discovery of the electron and the realisation that this was the key
to chemical bonding. |
|
