Biography of Dmitri Mendeleev (written by me late last year)

The modern periodic table can be credited to Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev. Born in Verkhniye Aremzyaniy, near Tobolsk, Russia, Mendeleev faced many hardships growing up. His father, Ivan Pavlovich, died a few years after Dmitri’s birth. His mother, Mariya Dmitriyevna, ran the family’s glass factory. Seeing Dmitri’s potential as a chemist, Mariya devoted her attention to him. The Mendeleev family moved to Moscow in order for Dmitri to receive higher education. When the university in Moscow did not accept him, the Mendeleevs moved to Saint Petersburg where Dmitri was accepted into the Main Pedagogical Institute in 1850. Dmitri would become a professor first at the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute and then Saint Petersburg State University. Needing a book from which to teach inorganic chemistry, Dmitri wrote his own, Principles of Chemistry. It was during the writing of this book that the periodic table came into existence.

 Dmitri Mendeleev literally dreamed up the periodic table one night in 1869. It is said that Dmitri saw the elements analogous to playing cards, and the elements fell into place. Dmitri then woke up and, remembering the order of the elements, wrote them down, with only one error. From this information, Dmitri was able to predict the properties of undiscovered elements, proven with the discoveries of gallium and germanium.