This article examines the scientific work of Dmitri Mendeleev in the years prior to his discovery of the periodic law in 1869, paying special attention to how he addressed the issues of the concept of elements and their atomic weights. Mendeleev’s early work for his undergraduate and master’s theses on isomorphism and specific volumes was almost exclusively based on the existing literature on these topics with little original research. The knowledge that Mendeleev gained through this work, however, proved to be useful when he was elaborating his periodic law. Mendeleev attended the International Congress of Chemistry in Karlsruhe in 11860 and wrote that he was greatly impressed by Cannizzaro’s work and presentations at the congress. Mendeleev did not consistently adopt Cannizzaro’s atomic weights and continued to rely mainly on Gerhardt’s and Laurent’s values, with slight modifications. Mendeleev devoted much of his attention during his early scientific career to organic chemistry, including publishing a textbook in which he elaborated his “Theory of Limits” as an organizing principle. While this theory was quickly eclipsed by the Structural Theory of Organic Chemistry, it was influential to Mendeleev in his thinking about the organization of the elements. In the years immediately prior to the formulation of the periodic law, Mendeleev began to develop an abstract definition of an element, which proved important for his thinking about the periodic law.
...MoreBook Eric R. Scerri; Elena Ghibaudi (2020) What Is A Chemical Element? A Collection of Essays by Chemists, Philosophers, Historians, and Educators.
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