Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest For the Elements

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Marshall, James L. Marshall; Marshall, Virginia R. Marshall (2007). "Rediscovery of the elements: The Periodic Table" (PDF). The Hexagon: 23–29 . Retrieved 30 December 2019. A very popular Russian story credits Mendeleev with setting the 40% standard strength of vodka. For example, Russian Standard vodka advertises: "In 1894, Dmitri Mendeleev, the greatest scientist in all Russia, received the decree to set the Imperial quality standard for Russian vodka and the 'Russian Standard' was born" [65] Others cite "the highest quality of Russian vodka approved by the royal government commission headed by Mendeleev in 1894". [66]

Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikisource reference

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Kiparsky, Paul. "Economy and the construction of the Sivasutras". In M.M. Deshpande and S. Bhate (eds.), Paninian Studies. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1991. He invented pyrocollodion, a kind of smokeless powder based on nitrocellulose. This work had been commissioned by the Russian Navy, which however did not adopt its use. In 1892 Mendeleev organized its manufacture. Maria Kornilieva came from a well-known family of Tobolsk merchants, founders of the first Siberian printing house who traced their ancestry to Yakov Korniliev, a 17th-century posad man turned a wealthy merchant. [9] [10] In 1889, a local librarian published an article in the Tobolsk newspaper where he claimed that Yakov was a baptized Teleut, an ethnic minority known as "white Kalmyks" at the time. [11] Since no sources were provided and no documented facts of Yakov's life were ever revealed, biographers generally dismiss it as a myth. [12] [13] In 1908, shortly after Mendeleev's death, one of his nieces published Family Chronicles. Memories about D. I. Mendeleev where she voiced "a family legend" about Maria's grandfather who married "a Kyrgyz or Tatar beauty whom he loved so much that when she died, he also died from grief". [14] This, however, contradicts the documented family chronicles, and neither of those legends is supported by Mendeleev's autobiography, his daughter's or his wife's memoirs. [4] [15] [16] Yet some Western scholars still refer to Mendeleev's supposed "Mongol", "Tatar", " Tartarian" or simply "Asian" ancestry as a fact. [17] [18] [19] [20] Having read Isaac Asimov’s “The search of the elements” during my early twenties this book didn’t surprise me. Even this book's subtitle has almost the same name: “The quest of the elements”. Most of the alchemist and scientist names sounded familiar and I remembered most of their contribution thanks to Asimov’s remarkable style: easy-to-read but powerful and engaging as a good novel. Even though Strathern prose is pleasant and the content interesting, I prefer the former more direct approach. Maybe being a professional biochemist and an inspirational writer helped Asimov achieve a better result in telling this fascinating story. Fortunately [Mendeleyev's] wife proved an imaginative and resourceful woman. She wisely chose to spend her time on the estate at Tver, except when her husband arrived there from St Petersburg, when she and the children would depart from the Mendeleyev town residence. In this way the marriage managed to survive, without the cohabitation which is the ruin of so many relationships."

Mendeleev studied petroleum origin and concluded hydrocarbons are abiogenic and form deep within the earth – see Abiogenic petroleum origin. A promising scholar, Mendeleev — also spelled Mendeleyev in English — published papers by the time he was 20 and attended the world’s first chemistry conference at 26. By his mid-thirties, he was intensely preoccupied with classifying the 56 elements known by that point. He struggled to find an underlying principle that would organize them according to sets of similar properties and eventually reaped the benefits of the pattern-recognition that fuels creativity. Dmitri Mendeleev". RSC Education. Archived from the original on 5 July 2018 . Retrieved 23 February 2021. a b Larcher, Alf (21 June 2019). "A mother's love: Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva". Chemistry in Australia magazine. Royal Australian Chemical Institute. ISSN 1839-2539 . Retrieved 20 October 2019. Don C. Rawson, "Mendeleev and the Scientific Claims of Spiritualism." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 122.1 (1978): 1–8.This, however, does not detract from the amazing story behind the distillation of modern chemistry out of the quagmire of beliefs and false starts - era after era - finally culminating in Mendeleyev's periodic table of the elements and the birth of modern chemistry.

The following year, determined to ensure her son’s education, his mother took him across the country hoping to get him into a good university. The University of Moscow rejected him. At last, they made it to Saint Petersburg, Russia’s then-capital. Saint Petersburg University — his father’s alma mater and, incidentally, both of my parents’— admitted him and the family relocated there despite their poverty. Strathern conjures up from the dusty past, and richly fleshes out for us, the long line of extraordinary characters, their lives, influences, and contributions that eventually produced modern chemistry that has so profoundly shaped the modern world. We must expect the discovery of many yet unknown elements – for example, two elements, analogous to aluminium and silicon, whose atomic weights would be between 65 and 75. But rather than by willful effort, he arrived at his creative breakthrough by the unconscious product of what T.S. Eliot called idea-incubation— one February evening, after a wearying day of work, Mendeleev envisioned his periodic table in a dream. a b "Fellows of the Royal Society". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 16 March 2015.

Gordin, Michael D. (2015). Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226000299. Meija, Juris (2009). "Mendeleyev vodka challenge". Anal. Bioanal. Chem. 394 (1): 9–10. doi: 10.1007/s00216-009-2710-3. PMID 19288087. S2CID 1123151. Simon, H. A. (1966-67). Introduction to B. M. Kedrov, “On the question of the psychology of scientific creativity,” Soviet Psychology, 5(2), pp. 24-25. When the Princeton historian of science Michael Gordin reviewed this article as part of an analysis of the accuracy of Wikipedia for the 14 December 2005 issue of Nature, he cited as one of Wikipedia's errors that "They say Mendeleev is the 14th child. He is the 14th surviving child of 17 total. 14 is right out." However in a January 2006 article in The New York Times, it was noted that in Gordin's own 2004 biography of Mendeleev, he also had the Russian chemist listed as the 17th child, and quoted Gordin's response to this as being: "That's curious. I believe that is a typographical error in my book. Mendeleyev was the final child, that is certain, and the number the reliable sources have is 13." Gordin's book specifically says that Mendeleev's mother bore her husband "seventeen children, of whom eight survived to young adulthood", with Mendeleev being the youngest. [24] [25]