mendeleev - bepress
TRANSCRIPT
Laval University
From the SelectedWorks of Fathi Habashi
May, 2018
MENDELEEVFathi Habashi
Available at: https://works.bepress.com/fathi_habashi/304/
MENDELEEV1
Fathi Habashi Laval University, Quebec City, Canada
INTRODUCTION Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907) (Figure 1-3), Russian chemist and founder of the Periodic System of the Elements, was born in Tobolsk in Siberia (Figure 4). His father was director of the local high school and his mother was a Tatar whose family had a glass factory. Tobolsk was a centre to which Russian political exiles were taken. Fire destroyed the glass factory and Dmitri's mother decided to move to Moscow. When Dmitri was not accepted at the university there they moved to St. Petersburg. He was admitted in 1850 to the Pedagogical Institute for training of high school teachers. He specialized in mathematics, physics and chemistry, and graduated in 1855. He obtained a position as a science teacher in Crimea but the war there (1853-1856) forced him to move to St. Petersburg where he was private - docent at the university.
Figure 1 - Mendeleev as a young
man
Figure 2 - Mendeleev
graduation
Figure 3 - Mendeleev as a
professor
STUDY ABROAD Mendeleev obtained a scholarship to study in France and Germany. In Paris he worked with Henry Regnault and in Heidelberg he worked with Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff. In Heidelberg (Figure 5) he met many Russians among them the chemist / composer Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin (1833-1887), the physiologist Ivan Mikhaylovich Sechenov (1829-1905), and the organic chemist Nikolay Nikolaevich Zinin (1812-1880) who were also studying there. While studying in Germany, he attended the Congress of Karlsruhe in 186o where Stanislao Cannizzaro made appeal for the molecular theory of
1 See also: F. Habashi, “Mendeleev and the Petroleum Industry”, Nano Studies [Georgia] 12, 209-218 (2015). Russian translation in Mining Journal of Kazakhstan 12,38-43(2017)
Avogadro. Cannizzaro's table of atomic weights were later used by Mendeleev when he arranged the elements in his Periodic Table.
Figure 4 - Map of Russia showing Tobolsk in Siberia
Figure 5 - Mendeleev with friends in Heidelberg in 1860. Left to right: N.
Zhitinsky, A. P. Borodin, D. I. Mendeleev, V. I. Olevinsky
PROFESSIONAL CAREER
University of St. Petersburg In 1861, Mendeleev returned to the University of St. Petersburg (Figure 6), married, taught organic chemistry and wrote a textbook on this subject. In 1863, he was made a professor of the St. Petersburg
Technological Institute, while continuing to teach organic chemistry at the university. In 1865, he was appointed full professor at the university.
Figure 6 - Saint Petersburg University where Mendeleev taught
Periodic Table When Mendeleev was preparing his lectures he decided to write a suitable chemistry book in Russian for his students. He collected data about the elements together with the atomic weights table he brought from Karlsruhe. In 1869, after years of studying chemical data, Mendeleev was ready to devise the table of elements. By that date, there were 63 known elements, which differed greatly in physical and chemical properties. He arranged these elements in the order of increasing atomic weights, starting with hydrogen and ending with uranium. He discovered that by arranging the elements in seven groups according to physical and chemical properties, a remarkable order prevailed. The same properties repeated themselves after each seven elements. Mendeleev then used the Periodic Table to predict how additional elements would be found. He foretold the atomic weights and the chemical properties of several of the missing elements, which were later discovered, and they had the properties Mendeleev had envisioned. By the time of his death in 1907, eighty-six elements were known. Between 1868 and 1871 he wrote Osnovy Khimii [Principles of Chemistry] in two volumes incorporating the Periodic Table (Figure 7). His book ran into many editions and was translated in many languages.
Figure 7 - Front page of Mendeleev’s
Osnovy Khimii
Baku Mendeleev’s discovery of the Periodic Table was just one aspect of his activity. Work on petroleum was his major occupation. He went to Baku in Azerbaijan many times to consult on oil production and wrote many articles on the subject. Azerbaijan at that time was part of Imperial Russia. In 1901, it produced
more than half of the world's oil. Kerosene was the main distillation product of petroleum and was widely used in households cooking in stoves and lighting fuel in lamps before electrical distribution became available. Mendeleev proposed building a pipeline for oil transportation from wells to the sea, where oil was to be stored in reservoirs then transported across the Caspian Sea by tanker till the Volga and from there till Nizhniy Novgorod [From 1932 to 1990, it was known as Gorky - - after the writer Maxim Gorky] where a factory for processing oil to various products should be built (Figure 8). He wanted refining to take place in Russia closer to the centers of consumption and not in the centers of production. But, the Petroleum Production Company was set up by Ludvig Nobel (1831–1888) in 1876 in Baku to refine the oil and to ship the illuminating oil to St. Petersburg. It was headquartered in St. Petersburg and became one of the largest oil companies in the world. The Nobel family was from Sweden but lived many years in Saint Petersburg.
Figure 8 - Map showing Baku on the Caspian Sea and Nizhniy Novgorod on the Volga, X, near
Moscow. Mendeleev’s proposal to refine petroleum closer to the centers of consumption Other activities At the request of the Ministry of State Property, Mendeleev examined in 1888 the possibilities of organizing a coal-mining industry in the Donets Basin. In 1899, he led an expedition of leading scientists to the Urals in an effort to encourage development of the region. On Aug. 7, 1887, he made an ascent in a government balloon for the purpose of observing a solar eclipse. He criticised the ionic theory of conductive solutions proposed by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927). He also called for wider use of fertilizers in agriculture.
Resigning from the University After the assassination of Alexander II by Russian revolutionaries in March 1881, the authorities made every effort to root out all forms against the Government which, it was claimed, had penetrated science. In March 1890, student disturbances started in St. Petersburg University. The students drew up a petition to improve the university and asked Mendeleev to present it to Alexander III. On March 16, Mendeleev presented the petition but it was rejected by the authorities. After this incident Mendeleev felt insulted and he submitted his resignation. The news of his resignation caused further outbreaks in the university. Many arrests were made and the protest was suppressed.
Admiralty In the spring of 1890, the Admiralty, and, later, the Ministry of War, invited Mendeleev to work on the production of a new type of smokeless gunpowder. Mendeleev developed a new kind of gunpowder to which he gave the name of Pyrrocollodion which proved to be superior to foreign makes. Following successful tests the new gunpowder was put into production. But in 1894 he was obliged to leave the Admiralty on account of the unfriendly attitude on the part of certain influential persons. Office of Standard Weights and Measures In 1892 Mendeleev accepted the post of scientific treasurer of the Office of Standard Weights and Measures. It was located opposite the main building of the Technological Institute. Next to the building was erected later his statue seated with his Periodic Table on the wall beside him (Figure 9). During his mandate he established special laboratories: weighing, thermometric, electrical, photometric, hydrometric, gasometric, etc. In 1899 he introduced the metric system into Russia.
Figure 9 - Mendeleev seated with his Periodic Table on the wall beside him Figure - Statue of Mendeleev at the Office of Standard Weights and Measures now known as Mendeleev Institute of
Metrology
MUSEUM During the years 1866-1890, Mendeleev lived in a three-room apartment in the University building adjoining the chemical laboratory, as did all the professors of chemistry at that time (Figure 10). This same apartment has been preserved as the Mendeleev Museum and was opened in 1911 when the Conference on Pure and Applied Chemistry convened in St. Petersburg. In 1952, four rooms adjacent to the Museum were
added to house the other documents belonging to Mendeleev which had been collected since the Museum was opened (Figures 11and 12).
Figure 10 - Mendeleev in old age in his office in 1904
Figure 11 - Mendeleev’s desk at his office in Saint Petersburg University
Figure 12 - Books in Mendeleev Museum
The Museum shows pictures of Mendeleev's childhood, his graduation, of Tobolsk and the glass factory managed by his mother. His early scientific work at the Pedagogical Institute is represented by a variety of crystal models. There are also the carefully sealed samples of the liquids investigated by Mendeleev during his two-year study in Heidelberg (1859-1861) which resulted in his discovery of the "Absolute Boiling Temperature", later known as the critical temperature.
Mendeleev's original two important manuscripts on the Periodic Table are enlarged and displayed on the wall dated February 17, 1869 (old style). The Museum also contains pictures of those important chemists who supported Mendeleev's discovery like Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran discoverer of gallium, Lars Fredrik Nilson discoverer of scandium, and Clemens Alexander Winkler discoverer of germanium. The discovery of these metals was predicted by Mendeleev who also predicted their properties with great
accuracy. Pictures of Bohuslav Brauner who correctly placed the rare earths in the Periodic System, that of William Ramsay who discovered the inert gases and thus introduced the 0-group into the System, and that of Ida Tacke and Walter Noddack, who later discovered rhenium. A photograph on Mendeleev’s desk is his visit to Berlin in 1900 on the occasion of 200th anniversary of the foundation of the Prussian Academy of Science (Figure 13).
Figure 13 - Photograph in Berlin 1900 on the 200th anniversary of the Prussian Academy of Science.
Sitting from left: Van’t Hoff, Beilstein, Ramsay, Mendeleev, Baeyer, Cossa. Standing: Ladenburg, Jørgensen, Hjelt, Landolt, Winkler, Thorpe
The Museum possesses a collection of all eight editions of Mendeleev's Principles of Chemistry. There is also some of his laboratory equipment, e.g., balances, a cathetometer, etc. In the study, his desk stands almost in the centre of the room, with bookcases and shelves lining the walls in the same way as Mendeleev left them. His library contains 20,000 titles. Many of these books were presented by their authors. The Museum also contains Mendeleev's personal albums, which were not only devoted to his family life, but also to his travels, press clippings, invitations, congratulations and other documents. Several albums are filled with reproductions of works of art, and two albums contain the diplomas and the honorary degree he received. Although Mendeleev is best known for his Periodic System, there are other fields in which he made important contributions. For example, he did work in economics, technology, population analysis, the petroleum industry, the iron industry, metreology, and others. Most of these studies he published as books. The Academy of Sciences published Mendeleev's works in 25 volumes in 1934-1954. The administration of the Museum published, in 1975, a forty-page illustrated guide for the Museum, and in 1977 it assumed the publication of an annual volume entitled "History and Methodology of Science", which covers research done on Mendeleev's life and work. At present, work is being done by research workers at the Museum on a "Chronicle" which relates Mendeleev's life day to day.
LEGACY The Periodic Table chart is found in almost every chemistry lecture room. His name was given to the Institute of Chemical Technology at the University in Moscow. Many statues were erected for Mendeleev (Figures 14 and 15), many postage stamps in Russia and abroad (Figures 16), and medals (Figure 17).
Figure 14 - Statue of Mendeleev at the University of Saint Petersburg
Figure 15 - Mendeleev and the Periodic Table at the University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia
Figure 16 - Mendeleev stamps
Figure 17 - Mendeleev gold medal References F. Habashi, The Periodic Table and Mendeleev, Published by Métallurgie Extractive Québec, Quebec City, Canada 2017, 218 pages. Distributed by Laval University Bookstore “Zone”, www.zone.ul.ca