Talk:Dmitri Mendeleev

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This article was externally reviewed on December 14, 2005 by Nature. It was found to have 19 errors, all of which have since been fixed.

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[edit] Date of periodic table

Mendeleev had been working on a similar idea, and on March 6, 1869,

can we put this as the date the periodic table was invented or published?

[edit] Death

a biography is not complete with out an explanation of death. please add. Kingturtle 01:33 May 6, 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Dating/calendar issues

As Russia used the julian calendar back then, the dates are not very explicit... are they julian or gregorian dates? looking at other wikipedias I see various different dates for his birth and death... someone with good russian calendar knowledge could check that? Thanks Srtxg 00:57, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The date links to February 7 which mentions only the Gregorian Calendar, so I think it can be assumed to be the new style date. Angela . 20:47, Feb 9, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Garbled name

A piece commented out, until the garbled name will be fixed.

In the same year, he married Feozva Nikitchna Lascheva.

Mikkalai 19:59, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Date of birth

eo:Dmitri MENDELEEV, de:Dimitri Iwanowitsch Mendelejew and Britannica say the date of birth is Feb 8. fr:Dmitri Mendeleïev says Feb 7. Which is correct? Angela . 20:47, Feb 9, 2005 (UTC)

State Russian Encyclopedia has Feb 8. It is an authority to be relied upon. See http:// tinyurl.com/6argz The same date is found on numerous Ru-sites. See http:// tinyurl.com/6exqv Ghirlandajo 07:11, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Don't forget how easily misinformation can be copied from a wikipedia in one language to those in others! Julian / Gregorian calendar differences have added to the confusion here. I have amended the dates to (Gregorian) 8.II.1834—2.II.1907 as shown in Russian-language sources. -- Picapica 23:15, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Who else?

...one of the two scientists who created the first version of the periodic table of elements...

So who was the other? I think we should be told! -- Picapica 23:15, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] petroleum quote

Removed the following:

Mendeleyev also studied petroleum origin and concluded that it has deep origins from earth's interior. "The capital fact to note is that petroleum was born in the depths of the Earth, and it is only there that we must seek its origin."

A direct quote must be sourced. Also, I don't see this as an achievement. Vsmith 02:50, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

I've read a copy of Mendeleyev's paper for Russian Chemistry Society meeting of 15 October 1876. This translation is very close to Mendeleyev's words.

And there is another well-known Mendeleyev's quote about petroleum: "Нефть - не топливо, топить можно и ассигнациями" ("To burn oil means to stoke a stove with banknotes" - translation taken from http://www.opec.ru/library/article.asp?tmpl=def_article_print&d_no=2021&c_no=66&c1_no=).

[edit] Mendeleev or Mendeleyev?

The title and the text spell his name in two different ways. One needs to be decided on and applied consistently. — Ливай | Ⓣ 17:46, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Fixed. 01:28, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

But why did you fix it this way? Everywhere else in Wikipedia that I've seen it (and in most other english-language publications) it is spelled Mendeleev... why are we going with the minority? +sj + 09:28, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

'Mendeleev' is a direct transliteration of a Russian name 'Менделеев' (you can install Russian fonts and check their similarity), but the correct transcription is 'Mendeleyev'. I'm a native Russian speaker, BTW.

That could be true, but "Mendeleev" seems to be the prevailing spelling. A search on Google yeilds (as of writing of this comment) 361,000 hits for "Mendeleev" and 92,500 hits for "Mendeleyev". Thus, I'd stick with "Mendeleev" Ikh (talk) 11:55, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

I depends on what transliteration system you use. Let's go with the most common one used in English; whether or not it is indicated that the last "e" is soft or not doesn't seem as important to me as people finding the right name. --Fastfission 15:36, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Nature magazine comparison

This was one of the 42 articles that Nature (journal) compared with the Brittanica version. (Link here) Somebody has already corrected the 13th child bit, but it also states that this article "incorrectly describes how Mendeleev's work relates to that of British chemist John Dalton." I don't know enough on the subject to figure out what they are talking about, but I would guess somebody here does. Cheers, Banyan Tree 20:02, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

I've requested Nature actually publish the errors in Wikipedia, hopefully, that will help us get it sorted out. In the meantime, we'll have to bear the {{accuracy}} template. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 20:55, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

The paragraph about this article says "The most error-strewn article, that on Dmitry Mendeleev, co-creator of the periodic table, illustrates this. Michael Gordin, a science historian at Princeton University who wrote a 2004 book on Mendeleev, identified 19 errors in Wikipedia and 8 in Britannica. These range from minor mistakes, such as describing Mendeleev as the 14th child in his family when he was the 13th, to more significant inaccuracies. Wikipedia, for example, incorrectly describes how Mendeleev's work relates to that of British chemist John Dalton. "Who wrote this stuff?" asked another reviewer. "Do they bother to check with experts?"" [1] WAS 4.250 05:40, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

As best that I can make out about the Dalton comment: Dalton pointed out that compounds (two or more elements) arose from fixed ratios. For example, water was some fixed ratio of hydrogen to oxygen. In contrast, a single-phase solution can cover a wide, continuous range of concentrations, from zero to saturation, thus no fixed ratio of solute to solvent applies. In metalurgy, you can make "solid solutions" or alloys where you can go between all of one metal and all of some other metal. One example: brass, which is copper and zinc. There is no brass "molecule", thus no fixed ratio. -- Pinktulip 02:32, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Order of birth

Nature says 14 is an error, but what is the source for the supposedly correct 13? What are the names of the previous 12? Also were there any still-births in the family and do they get counted? My grandmother had a still-born girl and she was given a name, Anna, I believe, before she was buried. Hackwrench 01:50, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

I agree we should check this very carefully.

[edit] Errors/omissions corrected

'patented modern vodka recipe' -- actually, afaict, he just wrote about mixing alcohol and water in his doctoral thesis; which related to the standard proof of vodka (something noted correctly later in the article).

Not quite corrected yet:

His birth order. Before it was stated, perhaps incorrectly; now it is elided. Not certain that "13th" is correct as the Nature.com review suggests; needs sourced verification and perhaps subtletly in explaining source variations.
The relationship of his work to Dalton's.
Was DM really the only one to predict the properties of unknown elements?
Was DM's questioning of accepted atomic weights correct in each instance? only in some? Was he the only one to so question?
Is he really 'given credit for' introducing the metric system to Russia? These all sound like the stuff of legend, with a kernel of truth but rather far from fact.

It seems likely that many of the 'mistakes' found in both EB and WP are significant omissions [both in this and in other biographies]. We should be able to get closer to 19 than the above list, however. +sj + 04:47, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure about the English tradition, but St. Petersburg was then known as Peterburg (Петербург) in Russia.--ACrush ^?!/_© 14:21, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Periodic table

It would be nice to have an image of one, don't you think so? Unfortunately, Periodic table seems to have a nice table - but no picture. If you know of one we can use on Wiki, or can make one - it would be a nice addition.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 04:52, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Electronegativity has a good one.the1physicist 23:06, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

It's another table, I am afraid. Pretty, but rather too large for this article.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 23:15, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sourcing

I can understand why this has 19 errors: the sourcing is positively terrible! I know that people took some time on this, however they must have gotten their material from somewhere! I suggest that we cite all the facts in this article using {{ref}} and {{note}}. - 211.30.173.113 04:16, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Well said.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 23:15, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Errors ID'd by Nature, to correct

The results of what exactly Nature suggested should be corrected is out... italicize each bullet point once you make the correction. -- user:zanimum

Reviewer: Michael Gordin, Assistant Professor of History of Science, Princeton University, New Jersey, USA.

They say Mendeleev is the 14th child. He is the 13th surviving child of 17 total. 14 is right out.
Between 1859 and 1861 Mendeleev spent no time in Paris beyond a brief visit. He was in residence the entire time in Heidelberg.
He also did not work on gases at all, but instead the capillarity of liquids in this period.
He did not study the spectroscope with Kirchhoff.

I notice that the correction simply removes mention of Kirchhoff. Are we sure he studied the spectroscope at all? —Steven G. Johnson 21:35, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

He got the job at the Technological Institute in 1864, not 1863.
His first wedding is in 1862, not 1863.
Mendeleev was not actually dismissed from the University because of political activities. This contention has been invalidated by recent research.
M did not work out the 40% by volume standard for Russian vodka (it was established earlier by the British for gin), and he certainly never patented it.

Removed, but not replaced with a clarification or correction. The statement was "Mendeleev is often credited for the scientific justification of the "optimal" ratio of alcohol of 40% (80 proof) used in vodka. The source for the attribution was his doctorate thesis "On Composing Alcohol with Water". The thesis dealt primarily with the physical properties of water-alcohol solutions, such as density." That would need verification for what his paper actually said and support for "often credited. - Taxman ^Talk 23:36, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Newlands published his work first in 1864, not 1866.

This has been "corrected" in this article (but not Newlands') without citation. According to this site Newland's first paper was published in 1863 in Chemical News. His paper actually titled "On the Law of Octaves" was published in 1865, though what is now known as that may have been in an earlier paper, and may be part of the confusion. - Taxman ^Talk 23:36, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Mendeleev's work was also produced in the course of writing a textbook, and not originally a classification of the elements, as Newlands was. The classification emerged by accident, not as the result of a deliberate search for a system.
Also, Meyer's table was indeed a categorization by both weight and valence in 1864, not just by valence alone. (All 2-dimensional tables include weight as one axis in the 1860s.)
- This was my mistake (?). I rephrased the following excerpt from Julius Lothar Meyer article: In 1864, Meyer published an early version of the periodic table, containing 28 elements classified into 6 families by their valence—the first time that elements had been grouped and ordered according to their valence. Work on organising the elements by atomic weight had hitherto been stymied by inaccurate measurements of the atomic weights. into and classified not by atomic weight, but only by valence. Cmapm 23:49, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
In the paragraph on the chemical ether, they make it sound like the lighter of the two proposed new elements was meant to be chemically inert. Actually, the other proposed, slightly heavier element (coronium), was *also* supposed to be chemically inert.
The paragraph on solutions research gets M's position exactly backwards: he is trying to show that Dalton's laws *don't* apply, not that they do.
M's version of gunpowder is "pyrocollodion," not "pyrocollodium."
It was not in fact adopted by the Russian navy, which commissioned it.
Omission: No mention at all of his importance as a public intellectual in late Imperial Russia. There is also no discussion of his role as an economic thinker, his work on the theory and practice of protectionist trade, his work on agriculture, etc.
In the first paragraph, the entry states that there were two competing versions of the periodic table. There were at least five competing variants by different people during the 1860s. Throughout the entry, there is a collapse to just M's and Lothar Meyer's. These are the last two and the most complete, but it is an unfair reduction of the historical picture, and it tends to overdramatize the story (as this entry often does).
This first paragraph also makes it sound like the correction of the atomic weights was more radical than the prediction of new properties of elements. It was the latter which was far more controversial. Essentially all periodic systems proposed revisions of existing accepted atomic weights, which were much less fixed than the entry suggests.
M's weddings are presented a bit misleadingly. He was indeed married to two women, but for a period of time (a few months) was married to both of them, leading to accusations of bigamy -- although no prosecution.

In general, please don't simply blindly make the correction. For one thing, reviewers can sometimes make mistakes. For another thing, you could end up correcting the symptom but not the disease—if a particular statement was added without checking, then it could be that the problems in the surrounding text go deeper than what the reviewer pointed out. —Steven G. Johnson 21:37, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Please note corrected error at /Wikipedia:External_peer_review/Nature_December_2005/Errors#Mendeleev.2C_Dmitry.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 01:38, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Anybody knows, whether some sources were cited in that "Nature" article or not? Cmapm 23:49, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] in the news!

This article was in the New York Times! [2] (Who was that "numbskull" quoted here?)

[edit] Mendeleyev the bigamist

"... he married Feozva Nikitichna Leshcheva; the marriage ended in divorce, though not before he had married Anna Ivanovna Popova." If this is true, I think we need to state explicitly that he was a bigamist. Bigamy is hardly an insignificant or trivial matter in Russian society. JackofOz 21:46, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Number of siblings

I am adding this here because this note is too big for the article. -- Pinktulip 16:28, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

The number of Mendeleev's siblings is a matter of some historical dispute. When the Princeton historian of science Michael Gordin reviewed this article as part of an analysis of the accuracy of Wikipedia for the December 14, 2005 issue of Nature, he cited as one of Wikipedia's errors that "They say Mendeleev is the 14th child. He is the 13th surviving child of 17 total. 14 is right out." However in a New York Times article from January 2006, it was noted that in Gordin's own 2004 biography of Mendeleev, he also had the Russian chemist listed as the 17th child, and quoted Gordin's response to this as being: "That's curious. I believe that is a typographical error in my book. Mendeleyev was the final child, that is certain, and the number the reliable sources have is 13." Gordin's book specifically says that Mendeleev's mother bore her husband "seventeen children, of whom eight survived to young adulthood," with Mendeleev being the youngest. See: George Johnson, "The Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the Experts" New York Times (January 3, 2006) (online); "Supplementary information to accompany Nature news article 'Internet encyclopaedias go head to head' (Nature 438, 900-901; 2005)", posted on the Nature website December 22, 2005 (PDF); Gordin 2004, p. 178.

[edit] Adultry should be pointed out clearly

It is not perfectly obvious from the text that good 'old Dmitri committed adultery. It is a service to the reader to make this clear. -- Pinktulip 23:10, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

It already says clearly that he married the one before divorcing the other; sexual misconduct is not the kind of detail encyclopedic articles about scientists go out of the way to draw attention to, unless it is relevant to his career. If I remember correctly, I think this actually did cause some political trouble for him, but unless the context is included, I find it unnacceptable (but I'm not sure of that, so don't use that without a source). The phrasing of the line about adultery seems to make an implicit judgment that in fact he should have been prosecuted, without any context on the laws and culture he was living in. How about instead, something to the effect that what he did was illegal? As it is now, it is definitely out of place, so I'm removing it again.--ragesoss 23:30, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

And wasn't the issue about bigamy, rather than adultery? --Fastfission 23:43, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

If you want to add that info back in, here is some background to make it not so awkward (paraphrased from Michael Gordin's book, pp 137-138):

(note that all dates are in the old Russian style, using the Julian calendar) Because his first marriage had "started to sour", when he moved Petersburg to be at the center of the Russian scientific world at St. Petersburg University, he left his family at their estate near Moscow. He began courting Popova in August of 1876, becaming despondent and even contemplating suicide when she left for Italy in December of 1880. He followed her to Rome in 1881 and threatened to commit suicide if she didn't agree to marry him. His wife then sued for divorce on the grounds of adultery; their marriage ended officially on February 23, 1882. (His first child with Popova was born December 1881, but "postdated to the spring of 1882). However, his second marriage was technically illegal because the Russian Orthodox Church required a period of seven years before remarriage after divorce, making him "a publicly acknowledged bigamist". His failure to be elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences (he was being considered in the late 1870's into the early 1880s) was partly (among many other reasons) a result of his divorce and the surrounding controversy.

As Gordin describes it, it was more an issue of religion and public morality than law, per se.

I hope that helps.--ragesoss 23:59, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

I've fixed that part. I'll try to rework the whole biography section some time soon; looking over Gordin's book made me remember how interesting his life was (and basically none of the cool stuff is in the article).--ragesoss 03:32, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Vodka - 'Russian Standard'

Many Russians I have talked to have said that the Russian vodka "Russian Standard" is actually the formula for 'the best' vodka, as developed by Mendeleev.

Has anyone else heard this claim? And how likely is it to just be the company’s propaganda and/or simply obliquely related to his work? --Jowe 01:11, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Reply on Vodka -- if someone can make this more suitable for the article (minus the sarcasm), please go ahead. It is all true: -- We all know that he discovered the periodic table of elements, on which all modern science is based. But few people know how his scientific career began and the "inspiration" (as in "spirit") that preceded the invention of the periodic table. He single-handedly invented...vodka! For his doctoral dissertation in 1865, young Mendeleev decided to study in detail the process of mixing water and alcohol. (Hmmm?!) I guess he spent a great deal in "research" and found out that there was a "compression of mixture", i.e. that the volume of the solution was smaller than the sum of two original volumes (Ha!) I guess the combined volume was smaller, even before all the tasting and sipping :-) The largest compression of the mixture was reached when 45.88% (mass units) of anhydrous alcohol and 54.12% of water were mixed. This is what is now called 40° vodka (80 proof). As a result, 1 liter of 40% vodka weighs 951 grams and vodka in Russia is often measured and sold not by volume (ml), but by weight (grams). To be precise, Mendeleev thought the perfect percentage to be 38%, but since spirits were taxed on their strength, the percentage was rounded up to 40% to simplify computations. As 40% vodka was considered optimal by the professor, the emperor of Russia made him a head of a special commission, a patent was filed and this was introduced as the national standard for vodka which was put in place around 1894-1896. Look it up, if you don't believe me! Bibliographical reference: О соединении спирта с водою "O soedinenii spirta s vodoi" ["On Mixtures of Alcohol with Water"], St. Petersburg, 1865, reprinted in D. Mendeleev, Sochineniia [Collected Works], Izd. Akademii Nauk SSSR, Leningrad, 1949, Vol. 4, 1-52.

The top bar says all the 19 errors have been fixed but under the "Errors ID'd by Nature, to correct" only the first error is Italized. So are they really fixed or did they just forget to Italize the list of errors in the discussion page? ..-Random viewer.

[edit] French?

Is it likely that Mendeleyev would have written in French? Carcharoth 10:27, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

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