50 Fun Facts About Dmitri Mendeleev

Mendeleev wrote each element on a card and laid them out like which card game until a pattern emerged?

Solitaire, called patience in Europe: he kept rearranging the cards by weight until elements with similar properties lined up at regular intervals.

Mendelevium, element 101, was first made in 1955 by a team at which Californian university?

Berkeley's team made it one atom at a time by firing alpha particles at einsteinium, detected just seventeen atoms, and named the element for a Russian chemist at the height of the Cold War.

Which three elements, unknown in 1869, did Mendeleev correctly predict the properties of?

Germanium, gallium and scandium all turned up within 17 years; when gallium's discoverer reported a lower density than forecast, Mendeleev told him to measure again, and was proved right.

Mendeleev was born in Tobolsk, a town in which region of the Russian Empire?

Siberia: he was the last child of the headmaster of the local school, and left the region at fifteen when his widowed mother took him west in search of a university.

How did Mendeleev's father, born Ivan Sokolov, come by the surname Mendeleev?

Assigned to him at seminary, where priests' sons were routinely renamed: his was borrowed from a neighbouring landowner, and two of his brothers were given new surnames of their own.

Which Russian composer, a chemist by profession, joined Mendeleev at the first international chemistry congress in 1860?

Alexander Borodin, later the composer of the opera Prince Igor, became Mendeleev's lifelong friend; the congress's debates on atomic weights gave Mendeleev the numbers his table needed.

What business did Mendeleev's mother restart to support the family after his father went blind?

A glass factory: when it burned down in 1848, she staked what little she had left on getting her youngest son into a university far from home.

Which institution refused Mendeleev in 1849 after his mother took him across Russia to enrol?

Moscow University turned him away because pupils from his home district could apply only to Kazan, so mother and son pressed on to St Petersburg, where she died soon after he won a place.

Why did the newly graduated Mendeleev head for southern Russia in 1855?

For the sake of his health: he had been ill as a student, possibly with tuberculosis, and sought a warmer climate, but his first school, in Crimea, lay beside a war zone and he left within two months.

At Heidelberg in 1859, Mendeleev left which German chemist's laboratory to set up his own?

Robert Bunsen ran the university's laboratory, but Mendeleev found it ill-equipped for his delicate experiments, so he turned his rented flat into a private lab and piped in gas to run it.

Long before the Texas boom, Mendeleev crossed the Atlantic to study the oil fields of which US state?

Pennsylvania: he wanted its methods for Russia's own young oil industry, and came home to write a book comparing the two.

Which newly discovered gas did Mendeleev at first dismiss in the 1890s as just a three-atom form of nitrogen?

Argon had no gap waiting for it in his table, so he doubted it was an element at all; he came round once William Ramsay showed that a whole family of inert gases belonged there.

Which English chemist's 'Law of Octaves' likened the elements to musical notes a few years before Mendeleev's table?

John Newlands saw his paper refused publication in London; only after Mendeleev and a German rival were honoured for periodicity did he win the same Royal Society medal, in 1887.

Which textbook was Mendeleev writing for his students when the periodic pattern of the elements struck him?

Principles of Chemistry: with the first volume at the printer and a deadline looming, he was stuck on how to arrange the remaining elements, and the search for an order gave him the periodic law.

How did Mendeleev claim to have envisioned the complete arrangement of the elements?

In a dream, by the story he told a friend: he saw every element fall into place, woke and wrote the table down at once, later changing it in only one spot.

In 1887 Mendeleev went up alone in what to rise above the clouds and observe a total solar eclipse?

A balloon: rain had left it too heavy to lift two men, so the pilot climbed out, gave him a hasty lesson in handling it, and Mendeleev sailed off to watch the eclipse alone.

Which German chemist published a strikingly similar table of the elements within a year of Mendeleev's?

Lothar Meyer and Mendeleev then spent years disputing who came first, yet in 1882 the Royal Society simply split its Davy Medal between the two of them.

Which element's atomic weight did Mendeleev double, from about 120 to 240, to fit his table?

Uranium: chemists had assumed the wrong combining power for it, so Mendeleev doubled its weight to make it fit; later measurements settled on 238, bearing him out.

From which language did Mendeleev borrow the prefixes eka, dvi and tri for his predicted elements?

Sanskrit: eka, dvi and tri mean one, two and three, so 'eka-aluminium' was the first unknown element below aluminium; the choice may have been a nod to a Sanskrit scholar among his friends.

Despite his world fame, Mendeleev was voted down in 1880 for full membership of which Russian body?

The Academy of Sciences rejected him by a single vote and never did elect him; the outcry was such that universities and learned societies abroad rushed to honour him instead.

Which pair of elements did Mendeleev correctly order even though the heavier one came first?

Tellurium and iodine: he trusted his table over the scales and insisted tellurium's weight had been mismeasured; the weight was right, and its unusually heavy isotopes are to blame.

Mendeleev wrote up the findings of an 1875 scientific commission that investigated which fashionable craze?

Spiritualist séances: he published the commission's conclusions himself and went on attacking 'the apostles of spiritualism' as peddlers of superstition.

Which element, predicted by Mendeleev as 'eka-manganese', became the first to be made artificially, in 1937?

Technetium takes its name from the Greek for 'artificial': the gap Mendeleev left below manganese in 1871 stayed empty for 66 years, until the element was made in a laboratory.

Why was Mendeleev's 1882 marriage to Anna Popova technically bigamous?

The Church required a seven-year wait after a divorce; Mendeleev married anyway, defying the clergy and Anna's parents, and legend has the Tsar shrug that he had 'only one Mendeleev'.

Which famous Russian poet married Mendeleev's daughter Lyubov?

Alexander Blok married Lyubov Mendeleeva in 1903 and wrote for her the cycle of poems that made his name, Verses About the Beautiful Lady.

Which Royal Society honour, its oldest and earlier won by Darwin and Faraday, went to Mendeleev in 1905?

The Copley Medal reached him 36 years after his first table, and a year before the Nobel Prize in Chemistry slipped past him by a single vote.

Appointed to run Russia's Bureau of Weights and Measures in the 1890s, Mendeleev broke with custom by hiring whom?

Women: to take on Olga Ozarovskaya in 1898 he went to the finance minister for special permission, as the civil service did not employ women, and he then brought in several more.

Mendeleev is credited with saying that burning oil as fuel was like stoking a stove with what?

Banknotes: to Mendeleev oil was too valuable a chemical raw material to burn, and he pressed Russia to refine it into other products instead.

Which Swedish scientist, said to bear a grudge, lobbied against Mendeleev's 1906 Nobel Prize?

Svante Arrhenius is said to have resented Mendeleev's attack on his theory of ions in solution; though not on the chemistry committee, he pressed the academy in Stockholm to reject him.

Who was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Chemistry instead of Mendeleev, by a margin of one vote?

Henri Moissan, honoured for isolating fluorine, edged the vote, then died in February 1907, two months after collecting the prize and eighteen days after Mendeleev himself.

Which branch of chemistry was the subject of Mendeleev's first textbook, which won Russia's Demidov Prize?

Organic chemistry: the prize made his name as an author, so when he later needed a textbook for a new course and found none to his liking, he simply wrote another.

Of what did Mendeleev die in Saint Petersburg in 1907, aged 72?

Influenza: he died six days short of his 73rd birthday, and students carrying a large copy of his periodic table led the funeral procession through crowded streets.

In the early 1890s, Mendeleev developed what for the Russian Navy?

Smokeless gunpowder: he called his formula pyrocollodion and worked out how to make it in bulk, yet the navy that had commissioned it never adopted it.

What did Mendeleev conclude about the origin of petroleum?

It forms deep inside the Earth: in 1877 he proposed that oil arises from metal carbides far below ground, an idea most scientists now reject in favour of long-dead organisms.

As head of Russia's Bureau of Weights and Measures, Mendeleev is credited with introducing what to the empire?

The metric system: his bureau first remade Russia's own pound and arshin as precise platinum-iridium standards checked in Paris, which opened the way for metric units beside them.

Why is the story that Mendeleev fixed vodka at 40 per cent a myth?

His thesis never mentions the figure: it was a precise study of how alcohol and water combine, and the legend that it fixed vodka's strength arose only after his death.

In 1902 Mendeleev tried to place which hypothetical substance in his table as a chemical element?

The ether: alarmed that electrons and radioactivity threatened his idea of unchangeable elements, he recast it as an ultra-light inert gas placed above the noble gases, a bold idea later discredited.

Which body was Mendeleev among the founders of in 1868?

The Russian Chemical Society, whose rules he drafted himself, was where his periodic law was first announced a few months later; it now carries his name.

Why did Mendeleev leave his chair at St Petersburg University in 1890?

He backed protesting students: he carried their petition to the education minister himself, and the row ended a teaching career of more than thirty years at the university.

Mendeleev repeatedly travelled to inspect the booming oil fields of which city, then in the Russian Empire?

Baku: he toured its oil works more than once and came back with proposals for putting its heavy oil to better use.

Where is the large lunar crater named after Mendeleev?

On the far side of the Moon: the crater can never be seen from Earth, and even after astronomers named it in 1961, charts went on labelling it 'Basin IX' for another decade.

How did Mendeleev finish his course at St Petersburg's teachers' institute in 1855?

With a gold medal: the following year he defended a master's thesis at the university and won the right to lecture there, aged twenty-two.

Which craft did Mendeleev practise as a hobby, leaving examples of his handiwork in his museum apartment?

Bookbinding: he bound his own books, and legend adds suitcases so well made that a shop assistant took him for a master suitcase-maker rather than a chemist.

After only weeks at his first school in wartime Crimea, Mendeleev was moved to a lyceum in which Black Sea port?

Odessa: at its Richelieu Lyceum he got his first laboratory, and decided that research, not schoolteaching, was where his future lay.

In Russia the ideal gas law, pV = nRT, bears Mendeleev's name together with that of which French engineer?

Émile Clapeyron wrote down the first version in 1834, the year Mendeleev was born; forty years later Mendeleev recast it in the general form now used.

In 1891 Mendeleev helped persuade the Russian Finance Ministry to adopt what economic measure?

Temporary protective tariffs: his 700-page study of Russian industry underpinned the customs schedule of 1891, which became known as the 'Mendeleev tariff'.

Which organisation declared 2019 the International Year of the Periodic Table, 150 years after Mendeleev's breakthrough?

The United Nations marked 150 years since his 1869 law; remarkably, re-sorting the elements by atomic number decades later left his arrangement almost untouched.

Which Italian chemist's paper reviving Avogadro's ideas, circulated at an 1860 congress, gave Mendeleev reliable atomic weights?

Stanislao Cannizzaro's paper ended years of confusion over whether oxygen weighed 8 or 16, and in later years Mendeleev still singled it out from all he had heard at the congress.

Which German chemist's 'triads' of similar elements, spotted decades before Mendeleev, were an early hint of periodicity?

Johann Döbereiner, a coachman's son with little schooling, began as an apothecary's apprentice, yet rose to a professorship at Jena and a lasting friendship with Goethe.

Late in life Mendeleev drew up plans for a ship of his own design to explore which region?

The Arctic: he wanted a sea route across the top of Russia and worked on early icebreakers, but the navy ministry turned his own design down.