Mendeleyev, Dimitri

What is the world made of The ancient Greeks speculated about earth, air, fire, and water today we turn to the periodic table for more reliable information. The story of how we got from there to here is full of fascinating people, and in this elegant, entertaining book, Paul Strathern introduces us to ancient philosophers, medieval alchemists, and the earliest chemists—and to dimitri Mendeleyev, the card-playing nineteenth-century Russian who claimed that the answers came to him in a dream"... 

Gallium was discovered in 1875 by Paul-Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran at Paris, France, when he examined the spectrum of a zinc sulfide ore from the Pyrenees and saw a faint blue-violet line which told him a new element was present. Its existence had already been predicted six years earlier by the Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleyev, the man who drew up the first periodic table and saw there was a missing element below aluminium in his group III. 

Figure 1.4 Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleyev invented the periodic table of elements in 1869. The scientist left gaps in the table, correctly hypothesizing that new elements would be discovered.

Chugaev, L. Ber. 1899, 32, 3332. Lev A. Chugaev (1873-1922) was bom in Moscow, Russia. He was a Professor of Chemistry at Petrograd, a position once held hy Dimitri Mendeleyev and Paul Walden. In addition to terpenoids, Chugaev also investigated nickel and platinum chemistry. He completely devoted his life to science. The light in Chugaev s study would invariahly hum until 4 or 5 a.m. 

Five years later working separately, Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleyev and Meyer arranged the elements into seven columns relative to the elements known physical and chemical properties. The differences in their work were slight, but each added to the current knowledge. 

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