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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Dmitri Mendeleev Biography MENDELÉEV, DMITRI IVANOVITCH (1831-1907). A Russian chemist, born in Tobolsk, Siberia. He graduated from the local Gymnasium and in 1850 entered the Institute of Pedagogy of St. Petersburg, where he applied himself to the study of natural sciences. In 1856 he was appointed docent at the University of St. Petersburg and in 1859-61 he worked in Heidelberg and published a monograph On the Capillarity of Gases. Shortly afterward he published his Organic Chemistry. He was made professor of chemistry at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology in 1863, and three years later at the university. In 1871-75 he made extensive studies on the compression of gases, embodied in his On the Elasticity of Gases. In 1876 he was commissioned by the authorities to study the petroleum industry in Pennsylvania and the Caucasus. His work on Aqueous Solutions (1886) was received by chemists as a notable contribution to experimental chemistry, although his "theory of solutions," according to which solvents invariably form chemical compounds with the substances dissolved in them, has been strongly criticized by physical chemists of the modern German school. As member of the Council of Commerce and Industries, Mendeléev was the champion of protection of home industries, and the policy of Russia in that direction dates practically from the publication of his Tariff Elucidated (1890). He worked out the formula for the pyrocollodial smokeless powder, serviceable for all firearms, when Russia undertook to rearm her forces. In 1893 he was made conservator of weights and measures in the new Chamber of Weights and Measures established in the Department of Finance. His Elements of Chemistry (1st ed., 1868-70; 3d Eng. trans. from the 7th Russian ed., 1905) is a standard work and has been translated into German and French, as well as English. In it he first set forth his celebrated principle, later embodied in La loi périodique des éléments chimiques (Paris, 1879) , and now generally known as the periodic law (q.v.), viz.: "The properties of the elements, as well as the forms and properties of their compounds, are in periodic dependence on, or form a periodic function of, the atomic weights of the elements." This law enabled Mendeléev to foretell the existence and even the properties of several unknown elements, which have since been actually discovered. Mendeléev is also the author of an interesting hypothesis on the nature of the universal ether embodied in Attempt toward a Chemical Conception, of the Ether (Eng. trans., New York, 1904). His scientific contributions (over 150) , dealing mostly with physical chemistry, have appeared in German and French scientific periodicals. Consult T. E. Thorpe, Essays in Historical Chemistry (London. 1902). The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XV (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 390-391. |