Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was born in the village of Verkhnie Aremzyani, near Tobolsk in Siberia, to Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev and Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva. His grandfather was Pavel Maximovich Sokolov, a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church from the Tver region. Ivan, along with his brothers and sisters, obtained new family names while attending the theological seminary. Despite being raised as an Orthodox Christian, he later rejected the religion and embraced a form of deism.
Mendeleev is thought to be the youngest of either 11, 13, 14 or 17 siblings (the exact number differs among sources). His father was a teacher of fine arts, politics and philosophy. Unfortunately for the family's financial well being, his father became blind and lost his teaching position. His mother was forced to work and she restarted her family's abandoned glass factory. At the age of 13, after the passing of his father and the destruction of his mother's factory by fire, Mendeleev attended the Gymnasium in Tobolsk.
Education
In 1849, his mother took Mendeleev across the entire state of Russia from Siberia to Moscow with the aim of getting Mendeleev a higher education. The university in Moscow did not accept him. The mother and son continued to St. Petersburg to the father’s alma mater. The now poor Mendeleev family relocated to Saint Petersburg, where he entered the Main Pedagogical Institute in 1850. After graduation, he contracted tuberculosis, causing him to move to the Crimean Peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea in 1855. While there he became a science master of the Simferopol gymnasium №1. He returned with fully restored health to Saint Petersburg in 1857.
Contributions and Achievements
His greatest accomplishment, however, was the stating of the Periodic Law and the development of the Periodic Table. From early in his career, he felt that there was some type of order to the elements, and he spent more than thirteen years of his life collecting data and assembling the concept, initially with the idea of resolving some of the disorder in the field for his students.
Mendeleev made other important contributions to chemistry. The Russian chemist and science historian Lev Chugaev has characterized him as "a chemist of genius, first-class physicist, a fruitful researcher in the fields of hydrodynamics, meteorology, geology, certain branches of chemical technology (explosives, petroleum, and fuels, for example) and other disciplines adjacent to chemistry and physics, a thorough expert of chemical industry and industry in general, and an original thinker in the field of economy." Mendeleev was one of the founders, in 1869, of the Russian Chemical Society. He worked on the theory and practice of protectionist trade and on agriculture.
Awards
Throughout the remainder of his life, Dmitri Mendeleev received numerous awards from various organizations including the Davy Medal from the Royal Society of England, the Copley Medal, the Society’s highest award, and honorary degrees from universities around the world and continued to be a popular social figure until his death at the age of seventy two in Petersburg.
Later life
Throughout the remainder of his life, Dmitri Mendeleev received numerous awards from various organizations including the Davy Medal from the Royal Society of England, the Copley Medal, the Society’s highest award, and honorary degrees from universities around the world and continued to be a popular social figure until his death at the age of seventy two in Petersburg.