Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev

1954

Storage C4 Men P

Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House

In early 1869, after having a dream, Russian chemist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907), sketched a draft of his periodic table. Mendeleev was a professor at the University of St Petersburg, and it was in the process of writing a book about inorganic chemistry that his mind became focused on ‘the challenge of arranging the chemical elements in an orderly pattern’ (Sutton, 2019). Mendeleev concluded that elements should be classified in accordance with their atomic weights, and then he placed all known elements into a table, which was presented to the Russian Chemical Society on the 6 March, 1869. Over the next couple of years, he tweaked the table, even leaving gaps for yet undiscovered elements.