Interesting facts about the life and activities of the famous scientist Dmitry Mendeleyev - in the Presidential Library collections

February 8, 2018 marks the 184th anniversary of the outstanding Russian scientist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev. Numerous materials from the Presidential Library are devoted to his active and diverse scientific activity, as well as his biography.

Dmitry Ivanovich was really engaged in a variety of areas in science. His works such as "On the conditions for the development of factory business in Russia", "Where to build oil plants?", "The explanatory tariff, or the Study on the development of industry in connection with its general customs tariff of 1891",  "Cherished thoughts", "Materials for judging about spiritualism" and others are stored in the electronic reading room.

"Whatever Mendeleyev wrote about, he seemed to be talking with a reader - a close acquaintance. Absolute sincerity, extreme spontaneity, sharply individual manner, infinitely many personal - these are integral parts of Mendeleev's works", notes B. G. Kuznetsov, the author of the book "Lomonosov. Lobachevsky. Mendeleev: Essays on Life and Worldview", published in 1945 and presented in public on the portal of the Presidential Library. He stresses that Mendeleyev's literary heritage is an inexhaustible source of biographical information: "The study of aqueous solutions" is opened with a dedication to the mother, very experienced and briefly telling about her life. In other physical and mathematical works, every now and then deviations, subjective assessments, autobiographical references. <...> The apology of the factory industry is supported by memories of childhood spent at the plant; in the article on public education there are interspersed mandatory stories about the Tobolsk gymnasium and the pedagogical institute".  

Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev was born in a large family of the director of the Tobolsk gymnasium, he was the seventeenth child by the count. One of the articles of the historical popular science magazine "Rodina" for December 2016 tells of his childhood, which you can "leaf through" on the Presidential Library portal. The boy grew up in the village of Aremzany, where his mother, Maria Dmitrievna, was in charge of running a family glass factory. The children "spent the whole day unattended around the district, playing with peasant boys, or fled to the factory, watching how an iridescent miracle - glass - was born out of sand and soda. Maria Dmitrievna encouraged this interest. Little Mendeleevs were even allowed to blow glass balls into which manganese, iron, copper were added for color". Did Dmitri's passion for chemistry go from here, which will glorify him in the future?

The history of creating the famous periodic system of chemical elements, which brought Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev worldwide fame, is described by O. N. Pisarzhevsky in his work "Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev. 1834-1907" from the fund of the Presidential Library.

The search for patterns among the chemical elements was carried out for a long time and unsuccessfully, and the Russian scientist decided to approach this question in a fundamentally different way: "Unlike other researchers, Mendeleev, who naively adjusted the elements to his conceived schemes, guided in his search with a firm belief in the necessity of the existence of a "then the general law of nature, which would be connected with the mass of the atom and would determine all the similarities and differences of the elements among themselves", - O. N. Pisarzhevsky writes.

The table itself was formed as follows: "He helped the success of his searches by a simple and intuitive reception. He took advantage of the stock of unnecessary business cards - narrow stripes of cardboard. He made up something like a movable file of elements of these cardboard cards. On the back of each card, he wrote down under the name of the element its atomic weight and the formulas of the main compounds that this element forms with the others. <...> Having decomposed these cards, combining them in all possible combinations, comparing them among themselves on the properties of the elements, he could with great ease cover the whole set of elements with the entire complex interlacing of their properties with a mental eye. More and more clearly in his consciousness manifested the signs of the system, to which all this motley heterogeneous collection of terrestrial bodies was subordinated".

The famous story that the periodic table was caught in Mendeleev's dream, O. N. Pisarzhevsky explains as follows: "Mendeleev really recalled how he spent hours adjusting the elements in the ranks, reading his notes to the ripples in his eyes. His head was spinning with tension. After all, when light cards with names of substances were moved from place to place, whole echelons of information about these substances came into motion in the consciousness of the researcher. <...> And even when, exhausted, he fell asleep for his reflections, restless, sleepless thought continued to beat in the mind of the researcher. And it is quite possible that just at the moment when the more superficial, disturbing stimuli were hampered by sleep, the observation that was prepared by years of labor and was already forming in consciousness was free and fully formed".

These and other interesting facts about the life and work of the brilliant Russian scientist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev can be found in the materials from the Presidential Library's fund, which today has more than 600 thousand items.