Mendeleev's and Our Path to the Periodic Table: Mendeleev, Meyer, and Winkler (Russia and Germany)

Abstract

Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner (“Law of Triads”), John Newlands (“Law of Octaves”), Julius Lothar Meyer and others preceded Dmitri Mendeleev's publication of his first periodic table in 1869. Several Döbereiner and Meyer sites are noted. Mendeleev is regarded as the prime originator of the table because he predicted the existence of three then unknown elements that he called eka-boron, eka-aluminum and eka-silicon. These elements (gallium, scandium and germanium) were subsequently discovered by Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran (1875), Lars Frederick Nilson and Per Teodor Clève (1879), and Clemens Winkler (1886), respectively. We visit the de Boisbaudran sites in Cognac, France and two striking sites in Freiburg, Germany including the Clemens Winkler Memorial and the Clemens Winkler Collection. Mendeleev also accurately predicted the properties of his eka-elements and when these were found to be astonishingly accurate, he became world-famous. We explore the D. I. Mendeleev Museum and Archives and the Museum of Metrology in St. Petersburg as well as several places in Mendeleev's native Siberia. We finish the chapter with sites related to Mikhail Lomonosov, the father of Russian science who goes largely unrecognized in the history of science. This includes the M. V. Lomonosov Museum in the Kunstkamera.