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Petersburg from the Karlsruhe Congress, Mendeleev taught at the St. In his original scheme the valences of the succeeding families, beginning with the carbon group, were 4, 3, 2, 1, 1, and 2.Īfter returning to St. His one conceptual advance over his immediate predecessors was seeing valence, the number that represents the combining power of an atom of a particular element, as the link among members of each family of elements and as the pattern for the order in which the families were themselves organized. In the first edition of his textbook Die modernen Theorien der Chemie (1864), Meyer used atomic weights to arrange 28 elements into 6 families that bore similar chemical and physical characteristics, leaving a blank for an as-yet-undiscovered element. Soon after Karlsruhe, various new atomic arrangements were published, eventually culminating in the independent works of Meyer and Mendeleev. For both, writing a textbook proved to be the impetus for developing the periodic table-that is, a device to present the more than 60 known elements in an intelligible fashion.įor some time chemists had been trying to devise a logical system of classification by arranging the elements by atomic weight, but confusion over how to determine atomic weights thwarted their attempts. In 1860 Meyer and Mendeleev were among the young chemists attending the first ever international chemistry congress, the Karlsruhe Congress, and both were impressed with Stanislao Cannizzaro’s presentation of Amedeo Avogadro’s hypothesis and the light it shed on the question of atomic weights. Edgar Fahs Smith Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania Karlsruhe and the Question of Atomic Weights
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During his graduate studies he traveled to Heidelberg to work with Bunsen. Petersburg, where he pursued a doctorate in chemistry. There he attended the Main Pedagogical Institute and the University of St. His mother-after her husband’s death and shortly before her own-took the 15-year-old Dmitri to St. His early contacts with political exiles gave him a lifelong love of liberal causes, and his freedom to roam the glassworks stimulated an interest in business and industrial chemistry. Mendeleev was born in Tobolsk, Siberia, where his father taught Russian literature and his mother owned and operated a glassworks.
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In medical school he became interested in chemistry, especially physiological topics like gases in the blood. He came from a medical family of Oldenburg, Germany, and first pursued a medical degree. Meyer was virtually born into a scientific career. Julius Lothar Meyer (1830–1895) and Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834–1907) worked at the University of Heidelberg only five years apart-both under the direction of Robert Bunsen-but they arrived there with significantly different backgrounds. Today’s instantly recognizable table includes well over 100 elements. For both Meyer and Mendeleev, writing a textbook proved to be the impetus for developing the periodic table-a device to present the more than 60 elements known at the time in an intelligible fashion. The periodic table is an iconic symbol of science.