The Last Sorcerers The Path from Alchemy to the Periodic Table (2003) / Chapter Skim
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9. The Periodic Law
9. The Periodic Law
Pages 157-175
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From page 157... ...
"Ich bin Mendeleev." Ramsay related later that, "He is a nice sort of fellow, but his German is not perfect. He said he was raised in East Siberia and knew no Russian until he was seventeen years old.
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From page 158... ...
This enabled him to predict the existence of as-yet-undiscovered elements, to predict their atomic weights, and to describe their chemical and physical properties as well. It was Mendeleev who found the natural order in the elements that his predecessors Newlands, Chancourtis, and Odling had been seeking.
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From page 159... ...
But his visits to the Mendeleev home continued, and he continued to tutor Mendeleev in the sciences. In 1849, the same year that Dostoevski was arrested and sentence(1 to a Siberian labor camp, (lisaster struck the family again.
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From page 160... ...
Petersburg Pedagogical Institute, a college that trained teachers, was Ivan Pletnov, an old friend of her late husband. Pletnov allowed Mendeleev to apply for admission to the Institute and to take the scholarship examinations, which he passed.
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From page 161... ...
STUDIES IN EUROPE Six weeks later the 22-year-old Mendeleev won an appointment at the university as a privat-4ocent, a kind of unsalaried assistant professor who received part of the fees paid by his students. During the mid-nineteenth century, Russia was somewhat backward scientifically, so Mendeleev had no contact with leading chemists.
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From page 162... ...
One of these was the novelist Ivan Turgenev, who might have had Mendeleev in mind when he later wrote of"a young Russian chemist living in Heidelberg who was praised by all who knew him as an uncommon talent." One of the other people Mendeleev encountered in Heidelberg was his friend Borodin, who had come to Western Europe for further study after receiving his (loctorate in chemistry in 1859. Men(leleev and Boro(lin took short trips to Italy together (luring university holi(lays, but then Men(leleev began to see less and less of his friend.
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From page 163... ...
In 1862 he reacted to the spread of radical doctrines by instituting repressive police measures. After an assassination attempt in 1866, the role of the secret police was increased even more.
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From page 164... ...
He became interested in scientific agriculture and analyzed soil samples for the Imperial Free Economics Society. In addition to all this, he somehow found the time to travel to Baku on the Caspian Sea to study the methods of producing oil in order to make recommendations to the owner of a refining company.
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From page 165... ...
Thus he got information from the Belgian chemist lean Servais Stas, the French scientist Tean-Baptiste Dumas, the English scientist Sir William Crookes, the Swedish chemist Kruss Nilson, and a professor at Prague University, Bohuslav Brauner. Mendeleev wrote the weights on his cards as he received them.
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From page 166... ...
Mendeleev called these missing elements eke-aluminum and eke-silicon. The positions of the missing elements in his table allowed him to estimate their atomic weights and also to (1escribe their chemical and physical properties accurately.
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From page 167... ...
A PREDICTION CONFIRMED In 1875 the French chemist Emil Lecoq de Boisbau~ron discovered Men(leleev's eke-aluminum and named it gallium after the ancient name for France (the right to name an element is the discoverer's even if its existence has already been predicted)
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From page 168... ...
While he was in Pennsylvania, Mendeleev visited refineries, interviewe(1 people who worked in the local oil industry, and stu(lie(1 the rock formations in regions where of] was found.
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From page 169... ...
He believed in the possibility of reform and never advocated overthrowing the monarchy. So the tsarist government employed the strategy of sen(ling him away on some government mission whenever his complaints caused too much embarrassment.
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From page 170... ...
When Mendeleev came to England to receive these honors, the English called him"Faust"; he was the magician who had predicted the properties of elements that no one had ever seen. He received numerous other honors also, including awards and honorary degrees from the German and American chemical societies and from the universities of Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford, and Gottingen.
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From page 171... ...
Opposed to education for women, he closed the Women's Medical College, an institution founded by Borodin. Wishing to deny higher education to the "children of coachmen, footmen, laundresses and small shopkeepers," Delyanov eliminated many of the government scholarships like the one that had allowed Mendeleev to obtain an education, and he raised tuition fees.
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From page 172... ...
This allowe him to continue to perform experiments and to submit papers to scientific journals. Although Mendeleev's resignation was an act of political protest, the Russian government continued to consult him on various matters.
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From page 173... ...
Petersburg experienced a series of strikes, and the organization that had fomented some of them, the Assembly of Russian Workingmen, decided to present a request for reforms to Tsar Nicholas II. The Assembly's leader, a monk named Georgy Capon, arranged a demonstration before the tsar's winter palace.
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From page 174... ...
But in the end, the revolution failed. The government arrested most of the revolutionary lea(lers, and the military suppressed revolts in Georgia, in the provinces bordering the Baltic Sea, and in Poland.
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From page 175... ...
Mendelevium was added to the periodic table as element number 101.
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