Far more is known about Mendeleev than Meyer (the former kept all his notes, records, and letters dating from the first inklings of his periodic system’s potential). Mendeleev taught chemistry, published much, became skilled in public relations, and presented himself as a general-purpose intellectual on scientific topics, including oil production, agriculture, and even cheese making. Petersburg, where he spent the rest of his life.
He was forced to make a place for himself among the long-established elites of St. Mendeleev, however, followed anything but a predictable path for a professor of chemistry. Meyer’s education exposed him to more theoretical speculations than were usual for a chemist, certainly more than Mendeleev experienced, but to an outside observer he followed the itinerant and slightly dull university-bound life of a man establishing himself as a professor in Germany. Afterward he followed the standard path for Germans intent on becoming professors, deviating only a little in the breadth of his chemical interests and in the number of places at which he studied: Zurich for general chemistry and the German states for physiological chemistry, physical chemistry, and physics. Meyer worked as a gardener when migraines forced him out of high school for a time. Meyer, unlike Mendeleev, came from a scientifically inclined family. After a miserable two years teaching uninterested high-school students in Crimea, Mendeleev wrangled a government-subsidized postdoctoral position that took him to Heidelberg. Petersburg for his education, where he pursued the sciences, especially chemistry. His mother, in search of opportunities for her bright son, took him to St. Two ChemistsĪt age 15 Mendeleev emerged from Tobolsk, the old capital of Siberia, a most unusual place to find a budding chemist. What follows is a tale that undermines our expectations of what and who makes a great scientist and hangs as much on language as on science. Instead it reveals the changing nature of chemistry. But this is not a story of injustice, of a man who never received his due.
And while Meyer’s first version of his table appeared in 1864 and Mendeleev’s not until 1869, it is Mendeleev who has become widely known as the single parent of the periodic table. Each man created a periodic system of the elements. Edgar Fahs Smith Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania Neville Collection, the Institute Collectionsīoth men are now important names in the history of science: Dmitri Mendeleev and Julius Lothar Meyer. He too became a teacher, shifting between various German universities, and wrote chemistry textbooks, the first of which contained a simple table categorizing the elements.ĭmitri Mendeleev and his famous periodic table. Meanwhile the other man, a German, studied medicine in Switzerland and then chemistry in the German states under two of that region’s great scientists: Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff. At age 35, to make the lives of his students easier, he wrote a chemistry textbook in his native language that contained a simple table categorizing the elements. He was a devoted teacher, aware of the lack of good textbooks in Russian.
In the 1860s the now-citified provincial became a civil servant in the tsar’s government. In 1850 a teenager from Siberia began to study chemistry in St. Two young men began their professional journeys at this time. Even Russia began to bend to the winds of change despite being an autocratic, largely agricultural society where serfs were bound to the land they worked and government censorship was the norm. The not-yet-unified German states were growing into competitors to the traditional scientific powerhouses of France and Britain. In the mid-19th century in much of Europe, Britain, and the United States, the names of progress were technology, trade, and human liberty.