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Petersburg to earn a master's degree. Mendeleyev continued his studies abroad, with two years at the University of Heidelberg. As a professor, Mendeleyev taught first at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute and then at the University of St. Petersburg, where he remained through Realizing he was in need of a quality textbook to cover the subject of inorganic chemistry, he put together one of his own, The Principles of Chemistry.
While he was researching and writing that book in the s, Mendeleyev made the discovery that led to his most famous achievement.
He noticed certain recurring patterns between different groups of elements and, using existing knowledge of the elements' chemical and physical properties, he was able to make further connections.
He systematically arranged the dozens of known elements by atomic weight in a grid-like diagram; following this system, he could even predict the qualities of still-unknown elements. In , Mendeleyev formally presented his discovery of the periodic law to the Russian Chemical Society. At first, Mendeleyev's system had very few supporters in the international scientific community.
It gradually gained acceptance over the following two decades with the discoveries of three new elements that possessed the qualities of his earlier predictions. In London in , Mendeleyev presented a summary of his collected research in a lecture titled "The Periodic Law of the Chemical Elements. Beyond his theoretical work in chemistry, Mendeleyev was known for his more practical scientific studies, often for the benefit of the national economy.
He was involved in research on Russian petroleum production, the coal industry and advanced agricultural methods, and he acted as a government consultant on issues ranging from new types of gunpowder to national tariffs.
Mendeleyev remained occupied with scientific activities after leaving his teaching post in He contributed numerous articles to the new Brockhaus Encyclopedia , and in he was named director of Russia's new Central Board of Weights and Measures. It was perhaps the greatest breakthrough in the history of chemistry. Now each chemical element had its number and fixed position in the table, and from this it became possible to predict its behaviour: how it would react with other elements, what kind of compounds it would form, and what sort of physical properties it would have.
Soon, Mendeleev was predicting the properties of three elements — gallium, scandium and germanium — that had not then been discovered. So convinced was he of the soundness of his periodic law that he left gaps for these elements in his table. Within twenty years, all three had been found, and their properties confirmed his predictions almost exactly.
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