Although the story of Mendeleev’s failure at the 1880 elections to the Imperial Academy of Sciences was widely discussed by his contemporaries as well as historians of science in the later years, its circumstances still require a more detailed analysis and re-examination of popular versions. This article reconstructs the detailed course of the 1880 election process and provides a conceptual framework that helps appreciate the main reasons of Mendeleev’s failure.
The history of Mendeleev’s famous discovery has long been a matter of lively debate among the students of his work. This article proposes a new reading of this history, which differs from the well-known interpretations made by B. M. Kedrov, A. A. Makarenya, and D. N. Trifonov.
All these interpretations tend to reduce the discovery process to a single crucial event, namely, the appearance of Mendeleev’s “Attempt at [Establishing] a System of Elements Based on Their Atomic Weights and Chemical Properties” (dated February 17, 1869). However, the detailed study of Mendeleev’s work makes the author conclude that this event neither was the day of “one great discovery” (according to Kedrov), nor indicated the essential “completion of the discovery process” (as stated by Trifonov).By considering Mendeleev’s discovery of Periodic Law together with his painstaking search for the natural system of elements, the author identifies the three principal stages in his work on the Periodic System:(i) the discovery of the periodic character in dependence of the elements’ properties on their atomic weights (late 1868 - early 1869);(ii) the creation of “Attempt” as a temporary version of the system of elements (February 1869);(iii) the composition of the “Natural System of Elements” (fulfilled by November 1870).As argued by the author, the appearance of “Attempt” marked the beginning of a new phase in Mendeleev’s work: by that that time, he had already come to the conclusion that “the arrangement of elements according to their atomic weights does not contradict the natural similarity between elements, but points exactly to it.” At that point, Mendeleev was already able to formulate the first fundamental conclusions that would become the essence of his doctrine of Periodicity and even to make a graphic representation of the all-encompassing system of elements. At the same time, the “Attempt” revealed a lack of clear criteria for unifying elements of different classes into one group, and therefore was to be what the author calls a “compromise version” of Mendeleev’s Periodic System. The most difficult part of his work was still ahead; it was only by November of 1870 that Mendeleev finally solved the “unification problem,” formulating the basic principle of his system: “the natural distribution of elements into groups in accordance with their atomic weights corresponds to the quantity of oxygen that elements can bear in the highest degrees of their saline oxides.”Scopus
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