D.I. MENDELEYEV (1834-1907)

1. A Russian name appeared in 1964 on the honorary board of science at Bridgeport University, USA: Mendeleyev was added to the list of the greatest geniuses - Euclid, Archimedes, Copernicus, Galilei, Newton and Lavoisier. D.I, Mendeleyev, the explorer of nature, is the greatest chemist of the world. The Mendeleyev system has served for almost 100 years as a key to discovering new elements and it has retained its key capacity until now.

2. D.I. Mendeleyev was the fourteenth, and last child of the Director of the gymnasium at Tobolsk. At 16 he was taken by his mother to St.Petersburg to seek higher education. He entered the Pedagogical Institute where his father has also studied. In 1856 he took a degree in chemistry and in 1859 he was sent abroad for two years for further training. He returned to St.Petersburg in 1861 as Professor of Chemistry.

3. In 1868 Mendeleyev began to write a great textbook of chemistry, known in its English translation as the "Principles of Chemistry". In compiling this, he tried to find some system of classifying the elements - some sixty in all then known - whose properties he was describing. This led him to formulate the Periodic Law, which earned him lasting international fame. He presented it verbally to the Russian Chemi-  cal Society in October 1868 and published it in February 1869.

4. In this paper he set out clearly his discovery that if the elements are arranged in order of their atomic weights, chemically related elements appear at regular intervals.

The greatness of Mendeleyev's achievement lies in the fact that he had discovered a generalization that not only unified an enormous amount of existing information but pointed the way to further progress.

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What can you say about the greatness of Mendeleyev'a discovery?

1. The greatness of Mendeleyev's achievement lies in the fact that his Periodic Table pointed the way to further progress in chemistry.

2. Mendeleyev had discovered several new elements.

3. Mendeleyev created the system of classifying chemical elements.