Dmitri Mendeleev

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Dmitri's Life Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was born on the eighth of February, 1834 in a small town called Verkhnie Aremzyani in Tobolsk, Siberia to Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev and Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva. His grandfather was a priest of the Russian Orthodox church. Dmitri was raised as a Christian but later in his life departed from church life and became a bit of a deist. He is believed to be the youngest of somewhere between 11-17 siblings in his family. His father was very intelligent and taught philosophy, fine arts and politics at a local school. Unfortunately though, he soon went blind and as a result lost his teaching position. His mother was forced to go back into the workforce and open her parent's abandoned glass factory again, which went up in flames just one year after work had started up there again. Dmitri's father passed away when he was thirteen and he began attendance at the Gymnasium in Tobolsk. When Dmitri turned fifteen in 1849, his mother left his siblings behind in pursuit of a better education for him. She saw his promise, motivation and skill and felt it her duty to assure his future. She knew of his intellectual skill, quick memory and his interest in math and physics. She bought a horse with the last of her funds she had put away and set the two of them on the back of it across the entire state of Russia. They rode 1200 miles to a university in Moscow. After his mother pleaded and cried and tried her best to convince the administrator at the university, Dmitri was rejected. Moscow was in a state of political unrest, people were distrusting of others and due to this the school was reluctant to accept a foreigner from their province. The two Mendeleev's continued on horseback 400 miles to St. Petersbu... ... middle of paper ... ..., and the best example of such was his aerostat flight that he created in 1887. His hydrogen aerostat was intended to lift him high enough to have an unimpeded view of a solar eclipse. However, on the day of this event, there was a massive downpour which caused his balloon to get wet and too heavy to lift him and the pilot. There's an unreliable claim that Mendeleev threw out the pilot from the basket, then the furniture, and saw the eclipse nevertheless. Dmitri was a fond smoker, often joking that the smoke killed any germs in his lungs. His students knew him also as an obsessive tea drinker, often ordering leaves from China and brewing it on his own. In 1907, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev died when he was 72. He was residing in Saint Petersburg as a director of weights and measures. He contracted influenza and only lived for one week with it before he died.

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