15
Mendeleev’s Periodic Table
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was born in a small village near Tobolsk, Siberia,
in 1834, and grew up as an orthodox Christian. He was one of 17 siblings, 14
of whom survived. He had a very difficult childhood. When he was little, his
father who was a teacher went blind, so his mother had to go to work in a
local glass factory. The factory burnt down when Dimitri was only fourteen,
whereafter they went into poverty. His mother was however determined to
get him an education and sent him to St. Petersburg, but 10 days after he was
admitted to the school, his mother died. So Dimitri had to make it on his own
through sheer hard work. He later trained in Europe as a chemist and returned
to Moscow at the age of twenty seven to teach. He was determined to teach
the modern ideas that he learned while in Europe to students in Russia. He
also kept doing research in chemistry.
His work in chemistry led to the famous periodic table that adorns every
chemistry classroom today, from high schools to colleges. The periodic table
arranged all the various elements in a systematic way that reflected their
atomic property. At the time he invented the periodic table in 1869, only
sixty three elements were known. Mendeleev arranged the known elements
in groups of eight each; he put elements with similar properties in a vertical
column. For example, sodium and potassium have similar properties and are
vertically one below the other in the periodic table. So are fluorine and chlorine
as well as inert gases e.g. helium and neon, etc. It was 5 years after John
Newland put forward a theory of octaves, which was similar to Mendeleev’s
table but had some defects, such as putting hydrogen and fluorine in the
same column, etc. For this and other defects in the arrangement, Newland’s
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
R. N. Mohapatra, The Neutrino Story: One Tiny Particle’s Grand Role in the Cosmos,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51846-2_15
119
Mendeleev’s Periodic Table
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was born in a small village near Tobolsk, Siberia,
in 1834, and grew up as an orthodox Christian. He was one of 17 siblings, 14
of whom survived. He had a very difficult childhood. When he was little, his
father who was a teacher went blind, so his mother had to go to work in a
local glass factory. The factory burnt down when Dimitri was only fourteen,
whereafter they went into poverty. His mother was however determined to
get him an education and sent him to St. Petersburg, but 10 days after he was
admitted to the school, his mother died. So Dimitri had to make it on his own
through sheer hard work. He later trained in Europe as a chemist and returned
to Moscow at the age of twenty seven to teach. He was determined to teach
the modern ideas that he learned while in Europe to students in Russia. He
also kept doing research in chemistry.
His work in chemistry led to the famous periodic table that adorns every
chemistry classroom today, from high schools to colleges. The periodic table
arranged all the various elements in a systematic way that reflected their
atomic property. At the time he invented the periodic table in 1869, only
sixty three elements were known. Mendeleev arranged the known elements
in groups of eight each; he put elements with similar properties in a vertical
column. For example, sodium and potassium have similar properties and are
vertically one below the other in the periodic table. So are fluorine and chlorine
as well as inert gases e.g. helium and neon, etc. It was 5 years after John
Newland put forward a theory of octaves, which was similar to Mendeleev’s
table but had some defects, such as putting hydrogen and fluorine in the
same column, etc. For this and other defects in the arrangement, Newland’s
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
R. N. Mohapatra, The Neutrino Story: One Tiny Particle’s Grand Role in the Cosmos,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51846-2_15
119