Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was born in the town of Tobolsk, Russia on February 8, 1834 into a large, struggling family of sixteen (some say nineteen). His parents worked constantly to try to support their family. He was incredibly smart and hardworking which allowed him to complete high school when he was just sixteen years old. Because his parents could not afford to hire private tutors, Mendeleev learned science from a brother in law who was exiled to Siberia. Later on in his life, he became a very successful chemist that impacted the scientific world immensely. Sadly, he died from a flu on February 2, 1907 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, but he died with many scientific recognitions and awards including having an element named after him. When …show more content…
Before he resigned, though, Dmitri wrote his own textbook because he did not find one suitable for his students’ needs (Principles of Chemistry). Having an extensive amount of free time after quitting his job, Mendeleev accomplished many things. His biggest achievement is developing the order of periodic table of elements. Virtually all previous attempts failed as they were either too simplistic or they were too inconsistent. He organized the sixty-three known elements at the time by atomic mass. Intent on finding a way to organize the sixty-three previously know elements of the periodic table, Dmitri deliberately set out to look for a logical way of arranging the elements. He first started by recording the element’s atomic mass, valence, and by other physical/chemical properties and sorting them by these characteristics. His system succeeded, in which the elements showed a pattern when laid out by atomic weight. His periodic table had a few “mistakes” that was later proven to be correct. He even was able to predict elements that had yet to be discovered such as gallium, scandium, and germanium. One crucial problem of his original periodic table outline was that tellurium and iodine should have been reversed, which he later