John Kotz, Paul Treichel, Gabriela Weaver (2005). "Chemistry and Chemical Reactivity," Cengage Learning. p. 333 A very accessible, non-fiction telling of the epic journey and transmutation of the collective human intellect through the ages. The book guides us through the labyrinth of dead ends and discoveries from Thales of Miletus in ancient Greece, through Mendeleyev of mid 19th century Czarist Russia that precipitated the identification and classification of the known elements. Though this may sound boring - it is not. By using Sanskrit prefixes to name "missing" elements, Mendeleev may have recorded his debt to the Sanskrit grammarians of ancient India, who had created theories of language based on their discovery of the two-dimensional patterns of speech sounds (exemplified by the Śivasūtras in Pāṇini's Sanskrit grammar). Mendeleev was a friend and colleague of the Sanskritist Otto von Böhtlingk, who was preparing the second edition of his book on Pāṇini [45] at about this time, and Mendeleev wished to honor Pāṇini with his nomenclature. [46] [47] [48] When the Princeton historian of science Michael Gordin reviewed this article as part of an analysis of the accuracy of Wikipedia for the 14 December 2005 issue of Nature, he cited as one of Wikipedia's errors that "They say Mendeleev is the 14th child. He is the 14th surviving child of 17 total. 14 is right out." However in a January 2006 article in The New York Times, it was noted that in Gordin's own 2004 biography of Mendeleev, he also had the Russian chemist listed as the 17th child, and quoted Gordin's response to this as being: "That's curious. I believe that is a typographical error in my book. Mendeleyev was the final child, that is certain, and the number the reliable sources have is 13." Gordin's book specifically says that Mendeleev's mother bore her husband "seventeen children, of whom eight survived to young adulthood", with Mendeleev being the youngest. [24] [25] Mendeleev was born in the village of Verkhnie Aremzyani, near Tobolsk in Siberia, to Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev [ ru] (1783–1847) and Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva ( née Kornilieva) (1793–1850). [3] [4] Ivan worked as a school principal and a teacher of fine arts, politics and philosophy at the Tambov and Saratov gymnasiums. [5] Ivan's father, Pavel Maximovich Sokolov, was a Russian Orthodox priest from the Tver region. [6] As per the tradition of priests of that time, Pavel's children were given new family names while attending the theological seminary, [7] with Ivan getting the family name Mendeleev after the name of a local landlord. [8]

Saint-PetersburgState University. "Museum-Archives n.a. Dmitry Mendeleev – Museums – Culture and Sport – University – Saint-Petersburg state university". Eng.spbu.ru. Archived from the original on 15 March 2010 . Retrieved 19 August 2012. The following year, determined to ensure her son’s education, his mother took him across the country hoping to get him into a good university. The University of Moscow rejected him. At last, they made it to Saint Petersburg, Russia’s then-capital. Saint Petersburg University — his father’s alma mater and, incidentally, both of my parents’— admitted him and the family relocated there despite their poverty.

In the Twelve Collegia building, now being the centre of Saint Petersburg State University and in Mendeleev's time – Head Pedagogical Institute – there is Dmitry Mendeleev's Memorial Museum Apartment [69] with his archives. The street in front of these is named after him as Mendeleevskaya liniya (Mendeleev Line). He invented pyrocollodion, a kind of smokeless powder based on nitrocellulose. This work had been commissioned by the Russian Navy, which however did not adopt its use. In 1892 Mendeleev organized its manufacture. Fortunately [Mendeleyev's] wife proved an imaginative and resourceful woman. She wisely chose to spend her time on the estate at Tver, except when her husband arrived there from St Petersburg, when she and the children would depart from the Mendeleyev town residence. In this way the marriage managed to survive, without the cohabitation which is the ruin of so many relationships." The introduction seemed too long for me (70 percent of the book) until Mendeleyev appearance. It was a good brush up of the history of philosophy and alchemy but chapters like Paracelsus’ went into too much detail for my taste. The best part goes from chapter 11 until the end of the book: the lives and contribution of Lavoisier, Dalton, Berzelius, de Chancourtois and Newlands, key precursors of our hero and his masterpiece. The author adds some nice touches like Goethe interest in the field and how at that time general culture was not dissociated from science (as it usually happens nowadays). Don C. Rawson, "Mendeleev and the Scientific Claims of Spiritualism." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 122.1 (1978): 1–8.

In 1890 he resigned his professorship at St. Petersburg University following a dispute with officials at the Ministry of Education over the treatment of university students. [61] In 1892 he was appointed director of Russia's Central Bureau of Weights and Measures, and led the way to standardize fundamental prototypes and measurement procedures. He set up an inspection system, and introduced the metric system to Russia. [62] [63] Strathern illuminates all of the major characters, their lives, and their intellectual entanglements in myth, religious dogma, superstition, and the specially persistent influences of alchemy that took chemistry millennia to shed like an emergent butterfly from its chrysalis.Gordin, Michael (22 December 2005). "Supplementary information to accompany Nature news article "Internet encyclopaedias go head to head" ( Nature 438, 900–901; 2005)" (PDF). Blogs.Nature.com. p.178 – via 2004. Mendeleev also proposed changes in the properties of some known elements. Prior to his work, uranium was supposed to have valence 3 and atomic weight about 120. Mendeleev realized that these values did not fit in his periodic table, and doubled both to valence 6 and atomic weight 240 (close to the modern value of 238). [43] Helen Palmer (1998). "Inner Knowing: Consciousness, Creativity, Insight, and Intuition". J.P. Tarcher/Putnam. p. 113: "The sewing machine, for instance, invented by Elias Howe, was developed from material appearing in a dream, as was Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of elements" Pfennig, Brian W. (2015). Principles of Inorganic Chemistry. Wiley. p.109. ISBN 978-1118859025 . Retrieved 4 March 2016. What is the world made of? The ancient Greeks speculated about earth, air, fire, and water; today we turn to the periodic table for more reliable information. The story of how we got from there to here is full of fascinating people, and in this elegant, entertaining book, Paul Strathern introduces us to ancient philosophers, medieval alchemists, and the earliest chemists-and to Dimitri Mendeleyev, the card-playing nineteenth-century Russian who claimed that the answers came to him in a dream. “Chemistry has been a neglected area of science writing, and Mendeleyev, the king of chemistry, is a largely forgotten genius. [This book] goes a long way toward correcting this injustice.” (Simon Singh, author of Fermat’s Last Theorem, in the Sunday Telegraph) Mendeleyev’s Dream by Paul Strathern – eBook Details

Strathern, Paul (2001). Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest For the Elements. New York: St Martins Press. ISBN 978-0241140659. Barrett, D. (1993). The “Committee of sleep”: A study of dream incubation of problem solving, Dreaming, 3, pp. 115-122. The wondrous and illuminating story of humankind's quest to discover the fundamentals of chemistry, culminating in Mendeleyev's dream of the Periodic Table. Simon, H. A. (1966-67). Introduction to B. M. Kedrov, “On the question of the psychology of scientific creativity,” Soviet Psychology, 5(2), pp. 24-25.

The Quest for the Elements

Vaccines / Used chemistry in medicine / life is chemical process / published Great Surgery Book / Mercury, salt, sulphur theory In Mendeleyev’s Dream: The Quest for the Elements ( public library), novelist Paul Strathern reconstructs the landmark moment from the scientist’s letters and diaries, and reimagines it with a dose of satisfying literary flourishing: Dmitri Mendeleev is often referred to as the Father of the Periodic Table. He called his table or matrix, "the Periodic System". [50] Later life Dmitri Mendeleev in 1890 Dmitri Mendeleev's second wife, Anna In another department of physical chemistry, he investigated the expansion of liquids with heat, and devised a formula similar to Gay-Lussac's law of the uniformity of the expansion of gases, while in 1861 he anticipated Thomas Andrews' conception of the critical temperature of gases by defining the absolute boiling-point of a substance as the temperature at which cohesion and heat of vaporization become equal to zero and the liquid changes to vapor, irrespective of the pressure and volume. [52]

Coined term ‘gas’ / tree experiment to show weight as it grew / gastric juices importance in digestionMendeleev was the youngest of 17 siblings, of whom "only 14 stayed alive to be baptized" according to Mendeleev's brother Pavel, meaning the others died soon after their birth. [5] The exact number of Mendeleev's siblings differs among sources and is still a matter of some historical dispute. [23] [b] Unfortunately for the family's financial well-being, his father became blind and lost his teaching position. His mother was forced to work and she restarted her family's abandoned glass factory. At the age of13, after the passing of his father and the destruction of his mother's factory by fire, Mendeleev attended the Gymnasium in Tobolsk. In this elegant, erudite, and entertaining book, Paul Strathern unravels the quixotic history of chemistry through the quest for the elements.