Abstract

BASCUNAN BLASET, Aníbal. Mendeleiev, the one that could've been and was not. Educ. quím [online]. 2008, vol.19, n.2, pp.152-158. ISSN 0187-893X.

The life of Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleiev is revisited in this paper. After studying based on the support of his mother, he managed to receive a fellowship to make work with the best European chemists of that time: Bunsen, Dumas, Kirchhoff, Liebig, Würtz and Erlenmeyer. Dimitri attended the Karlsruhe Conference in 1860, fact that he afterwards revealed as key to the proposal of his Periodic Table in 1869, when he was as young as 35 years old, and he proposed a whole set of predictions about unavoidable undiscovered elements and its properties, that were confirmed one by one as time went through. He was characterized as a very good lecturer by that time. The final part of his life is remarkable in the study of the application of chemistry to his country industry. He made several contributions to the oil and steel industries and that is why the title of this essay, because he could have been a nationalist chemist but the periodic table took him away into the world dimension.

Keywords : Mendeleiev; periodic table; biography; predictions of elements; oil industry.