Dmitri Mendeleev and the Creation of the Periodic Table of Elements

The Life before Science

Dmitri Mendeleev was born on February 8, 1834 in Tobolsk, Siberia, Russia to Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev and Maria Dmitrievna Kornilieva. He was the youngest of seventeen kids.. After Mendeleev's father became blind, his mother started a glass factory to support the family. Later, when the glass factory burned down, his mother took him to St. Petersburg and somehow got him into college.

Creation of the Periodic Table of Elements

In the late 1860s, Dmitri Mendeleev started his work on what would be one of the most famous scientific achievements of all time, the periodic table of elements. He organized all the 63 known elements into groups with similar properties. When he found a gap, he predicted what element would be there and what its properties would be. Three of those elements were actually found while he was alive. Mendeleev called then ekaboron, ekaaluminum, and ekasilicon. His table was completely accepted within fifteen years by the discovery of germanium (1871), scandium (1879), and germanium (1886).