Periodicity

Abstract

Mentioning 1984 to the man on the street brings to mind ‘big brother’, ‘doublespeak’ and other artifacts of the world of George Orwell. What does it mean to scientists? 1984 marks the sesquicentennial of the birth of the Russian scientist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev, the chief architect of the Periodic Table. Mendeleyev, who was the youngest of fourteen children, was born in Tobolsk, Western Siberia on 8 February 1834. But wasn’t Mendeleyev merely one of at least half a dozen nineteenth-century scientists who worked on the Periodic Table? What gave him such a prominent position, when he wasn’t even one of the first to think of the concept? During this time period in the middle of the last century, the leading scientific centres were universities in England, France and Germany. How did a Russian become involved anyway? What was so significant about Mendeleyev’s work that he became one of only seven scientists to have a chemical element named in their honour?