![]() But Mendeleev was a workaholic, his science always came before his marriage, and his wife lived mainly alone with the children at an estate near Moscow, some 400 miles away. Pressurised by his sister, he married Feosva Leshchevayi, six years his senior, and together they had a son Vladimir and daughter Olga. Mendeleev returned to St Petersburg University, initially as a professor of chemistry in the technological section. Back at St PetersburgĪ room at St Petersburg University used by Mendeleev This work would later prove to be essential to Mendeleev in recognising periodicity. This confusion centred on the uncertainty surrounding chemical formulae - was water H 2O or OH? After the conference Stanislao Cannizzaro, acknowledging the work of fellow Italian Amedeo Avogadro on chemical formulae and valency, produced the most accurate list of atomic weights then known. 1 (Among the delegates were Gay-Lussac, Faraday, Berzelius, Kekulé, Cannizzaro, Odling, Wurtz, Dumas and Fehling.) At this time there was confusion about atomic weights - chemists could not agree whether oxygen, for example, was eight or 16. In 1860, together with fellow Russian chemist Alexander Borodin, better known now as a composer, he attended the world's first international chemistry congress at Karlsruhe. He accumulated enormous amounts of data about substances, which he would later try to organise and rationalise. Under the guidance of Regnault, he spent much time collecting information and making measurements on gases, and with Bunsen he learnt new techniques, notably spectroscopy. Mendeleev's name is on a list of famous people who worked at the Simferopol School, Crimera Early influencesĪfter two years' doctoral research on the interaction of alcohols with water at St Petersburg University (1856-58), the Russian authorities awarded Mendeleev a scholarship to study in Paris under Henri Regnault and in Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen. He was transferred to another school, further north, in Odessa, where he decided university research and not school teaching would be his future. However, within a week of his arrival, nearby British landings signalled the onset of the Crimean war, and the school closed. In 1855, at the age of 21, he took a post as a science teacher at Simferopol School on the Crimean peninsula which had a warmer and healthier climate than elsewhere in Russia. Nevertheless, he was awarded a gold medal at the end for finishing top of the class. ![]() When dieing she said 'Be careful of illusion work, search for divine and scientific truth'.Īs a young student, Dmitri suffered poor health, possibly tuberculosis, and was unable to attend some of his course. '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. Dmitri cherished her memory and later dedicated his doctorial research to her: Within a year of arriving in St Petersburg Maria died. In 1849 she took him and two siblings first to Moscow, where Dmitri was refused entry to the college because he was Siberian, and then on to St Petersburg, the capital of Czarist Russia, where she secured a place for him at the pedagogical college where her husband had trained. First his father, headmaster and literature teacher at a local secondary school, died and then the glassworks owned by his mother Maria burnt down.ĭmitri's mother, however, was an ambitious woman of strong character, and recognising the academic ability of her youngest made his education her priority. ![]() A double disaster struck the family of teenager Dmitri. Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev the youngest of 14 children was born at Tobolsk, Siberia, 500 miles east of the Ural mountains, on 27 January 1834 (OS*). ![]()
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