Aarati Asundi (00:12) Hi everyone and welcome back to the Smart Tea Podcast where we talk about the lives of scientists and innovators who shaped the world. I'm Aarati. Jyoti Asundi (00:20) I'm her mom, Jyoti, and both us would like to wish all of you "Smartteas" a very, happy new year. Aarati Asundi (00:27) Yes, happy 2026! Jyoti Asundi (00:30) Yes, and I hope 2026 is a fantastic year for all of us who are science nerds. Aarati Asundi (00:38) Yes, I always say, I hope that this year is better than the last, which is always a true sentiment, always striving for improvement and to be better. Jyoti Asundi (00:47) Absolutely. Aarati Asundi (00:47) But especially so this year, I feel like 2025 was hard year for a lot of folks. And so... Jyoti Asundi (00:53) Yes, yes. Aarati Asundi (00:54) ...hopefully it gets better. Jyoti Asundi (00:55) I think we are off to a good start because I was just looking at amount of rain. We have been completely rained out this holiday season. So I was trying to find crumbs of comfort because we didn't get to do any of our hikes or anything like that. SO I thought... Aarati Asundi (01:11) Yeah, we had such great plans for the winter break to... Jyoti Asundi (01:14) Yeah, we were really thinking that we would be doing a lot of hiking, but we chickened out because it would be all muddy and sliding and we didn't want to injure ourselves. Aarati Asundi (01:22) Mostly we just didn't want to give Kyro like three baths. Jyoti Asundi (01:26) Yes, absolutely. But on the plus side, California is practically without any drought regions right now. Aarati Asundi (01:33) Woo woo! Jyoti Asundi (01:34) Which is one of the very rare occasions that happens. So, happiness. Aarati Asundi (01:38) Yes, And rain is supposed to be a great blessing in Indian culture as well, right? Jyoti Asundi (01:43) Absolutely. The Lord is showering us with blessings as we enter the new year, so we cannot complain. Gratitude all the way. Aarati Asundi (01:50) And in other good news, it is our 50th episode. So it's a very special episode this time. And I was looking for somebody that I could do that was worthy of number 50. It needs to be someone.... Jyoti Asundi (02:03) Hmm. they're all worthy scientists though. They are all worthy scientists. Yes. Aarati Asundi (02:07) They are. It's true. Yes. But it was really tough to find somebody who I was like, OK, this will be a really good 50th episode. And I finally landed on a scientist named Dmitri Mendeleev. He is a chemist, and he was responsible for organizing the elements into the periodic table. Jyoti Asundi (02:28) Oh! This is a nice big one. Aarati Asundi (02:32) Yes. Jyoti Asundi (02:33) One of those huge organizational ones, the ones who set the stage for the rest of us mortals to actually have structure as we try to navigate chemistry. Oh my goodness. Aarati Asundi (02:46) Yeah. So I'm excited. But before we get into his life, I just want to go briefly into the history of the elements and what people thought elements even were and how we even got to what an element is, which set up Mendeleev's organizing of the elements. Jyoti Asundi (03:06) Yes. Aarati Asundi (03:07) I got a lot of this history from a book called Mendeleev's Dream Strathern. He's written quite an extensive book on the history of the elements and chemistry leading up to Mendeleev. Jyoti Asundi (03:21) Would that be more like a before and after? Aarati Asundi (03:24) It's mostly before. There's like 20 chapters or something, and 18 of them are before Mendeleev, and then the last two are Mendeleev and his organization. Jyoti Asundi (03:37) I get it. Okay. Aarati Asundi (03:38) So I'm just gonna really quickly summarize the first... you know, chapters of his book. Jyoti Asundi (03:43) Because I can sense that that itself could become an entire episode by itself. Aarati Asundi (03:49) Oh absolutely. Jyoti Asundi (03:50) And we don't want to get into one of those part one, part two, part threes again. Aarati Asundi (03:54) Yes, I was like, we're not doing that, not doing that again. But yes. Jyoti Asundi (03:54) Not for a while. Not for a while. We just did the thermodynamics one. Aarati Asundi (04:01) Yes. So I'm just going to quickly just summarize the big main points of his book so that we can set up Dmitry Mendeleev's life. So he starts in ancient times, like 500 or 600 BC, when people were debating which one element was fundamental element of the world. So some people thought that everything was fundamentally made up of air... Jyoti Asundi (04:30) I see. Aarati Asundi (04:30) ...or other people had an argument for water, some people thought fire, and they're all making these different arguments for why they think it's one or the other. Jyoti Asundi (04:39) Yes. Aarati Asundi (04:40) Then in the 400s BC, a philosopher named Empedocles said, why do we have to pick one? Why can't we have multiple fundamental elements? Jyoti Asundi (04:50) Okay. Aarati Asundi (04:51) And he laid out four: earth, fire, air, and water. And this remained the prevailing theory for centuries, many, many centuries. And it even got integrated into the thinking of alchemists who were really the first true chemists because they were the ones who first started to understand that by taking certain raw materials and combining them in specific ways, sometimes with even the help of a catalyst, so they understood about catalysts and how they helped chemical reactions, they could get a new material. Jyoti Asundi (05:29) Yes. Aarati Asundi (05:30) Obviously the most notable example that we have for alchemists was turning some base metal like iron or lead into gold. That's what they were all trying to do. Jyoti Asundi (05:40) Yes, that was, they were all trying that. I remember that. Yes. Aarati Asundi (05:43) But they were also working towards making medicines and obtaining purified metals of other kinds. Jyoti Asundi (05:50) Hmm, yes. Aarati Asundi (05:50) So they were doing a lot of things. Then scientific progress slowed down through the Dark Ages. However, here is where we did get the first mentions of the philosopher's stone. Jyoti Asundi (06:01) Ooooh! Aarati Asundi (06:07) Yes, was a ruby red stone, supposedly, that could turn metals into gold or silver, it could produce an elixir of life that cured all diseases and ailments and extended one's life, and it could even, in some cases, grant spiritual enlightenment. Jyoti Asundi (06:23) Wow, that is amazing. I really don't want to go off on a tangent but just very briefly, ancient India 5,000 years ago- or even earlier than that in the vedas- ancient India laid five elements. In addition to earth, air, water, fire, there was also space. Aarati Asundi (06:45) Ah! Jyoti Asundi (06:45) Space was considered as an element. Aarati Asundi (06:48) Interesting. Jyoti Asundi (06:48) So ⁓ everything, everything, I can go off on tangents here a lot. There is... that can become a one hour thing. So I'm going to just stop right there. Aarati Asundi (06:57) But that's really cool. Yeah, it's really interesting they didn't consider space for some reason, I guess, ⁓ most of the Western scientists. Jyoti Asundi (07:06) Yes, yes, yes. you know, I tried to hold my tongue there. But then once you said spiritual enlightenment, I was like, ⁓ no, that is just it's intertwining too closely. And I couldn't keep my lips zipped anymore. Aarati Asundi (07:22) Well, that's okay, because I'm about to go off on a little tangent... Jyoti Asundi (07:26) Okay. Aarati Asundi (07:26) ...because the thing that I didn't realize was I first heard about the Philosopher's Stone, obviously from Harry Potter. That's the name of the first book, right? Harry Potter and Philosopher's Stone. In the UK, that's what it's called. Here, it's the Sorcerer's Stone. Jyoti Asundi (07:44) That's right. Aarati Asundi (07:45) But in the books, the stone did exist and it was created by a French wizard named Nicolas Flamel in the 1300s. And apparently this is based off of a true person. There was a man named Nicolas Flamel in the 1300s who was really an alchemist in Paris who many believed had actually succeeded in making the stone. Jyoti Asundi (08:07) You know, JK Rowling was very clever about these things. Everything had... then her names and all of allusions had a different connotation. Very often, there was a hidden connotation to many of her names, many of her jokes. Aarati Asundi (08:24) Mm-hmm. Jyoti Asundi (08:24) She's a very, she's a wonderful writer. ⁓ Aarati Asundi (08:28) Yeah, I just never knew this. I didn't realize. I don't know why I never realized that he was actually a real person. Jyoti Asundi (08:34) Yes, yes, the more broader your world worldview, the more you appreciate her subtleties. Aarati Asundi (08:39) Mm-hmm. Yes. So slowly alchemists started to create and understand different materials and these new materials that they were studying didn't quite fit into this four fundamental elements idea. Most obviously there were elements like iron, lead, tin, zinc and copper that all had different properties. Jyoti Asundi (09:04) Yes. Aarati Asundi (09:05) There were acids that seemed to have different strengths. Some were like acetic acid or lactic acid. And some were really strong, like sulfuric or nitric acid. And they could corrode other metals and other materials very quickly. And slowly, they also began to realize that even the air itself could have different properties. Jyoti Asundi (09:28) Yes. Aarati Asundi (09:28) Some air was combustible. Some air that came from fermenting liquids had a really strong, pungent smell. Jyoti Asundi (09:36) That's right. Aarati Asundi (09:38) And there were scientists who did experiments that collected air from on top of burning charcoal and found that you could not burn a candle in that air. Jyoti Asundi (09:48) Wow, very cool. The depletion of oxygen was captured in that kind of an experiment. Fantastic. Aarati Asundi (09:54) Yeah, so they're starting to realize that... Jyoti Asundi (09:58) Air is not just a homogeneous entity. It is a mixture of gasses. Yeah. Aarati Asundi (10:03) Yeah, so you can't just say "air" of just say "water" because acid is clearly not water, you know. Jyoti Asundi (10:11) Correct. Aarati Asundi (10:12) You can't just say earth because copper and iron have very different properties. Jyoti Asundi (10:15) That's right. Aarati Asundi (10:16) So rather than thinking about things in these four fundamental elements, scientists or alchemists start to realize that it makes more sense to think about the different states of matter, solids, liquids, and gases, which is what they knew at the time. And then these things can have different properties depending on what the actual substance is. Jyoti Asundi (10:38) Correct, correct. Aarati Asundi (10:40) And then scientists also realized that they could create vacuums where no matter existed, not even air. So I guess that would be space that the ancient Indians already knew about. Jyoti Asundi (10:50) Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. Ancient, ancient India had all of these thought processes in place. Yes. Aarati Asundi (10:59) Yeah. But a major breakthrough came in 1661 when Robert Boyle published a paper called The Sceptical Chymist where he proposed that since water, which is a liquid, could be evaporated into water vapor, which was a gas, that liquids must be made up of small particles that separated when they were heated. Jyoti Asundi (11:22) Good thought. Okay. Aarati Asundi (11:23) Yes. And then by extension, if liquids and gases were both made up of particles, then solids probably were too. Jyoti Asundi (11:31) Correct. Aarati Asundi (11:32) He was therefore the first person to define an element as a substance that could not be further broken down into a simpler substance. Jyoti Asundi (11:42) Hmm okay. Aarati Asundi (11:43) This paper with its name, "The Sceptical Chymist", also marks the point where alchemy kind of officially drops the A-L at the beginning of the word and becomes chemistry. Jyoti Asundi (11:56) chemistry, it becomes real science now. It's kind of gaining credibility as a science. Aarati Asundi (12:01) Yes. With this new definition, now people really start to discover true elements as we have them on the periodic table. So they didn't often know that they had discovered an element because they didn't have all the tools that we have today, like spectroscopy and stuff, to prove it. Jyoti Asundi (12:21) Yes. Aarati Asundi (12:21) They were basically just heating things up or pouring acids on things until it didn't look like it was going to break down any further. And then they were doing tests for consistency, like they were looking for, does this thing have the same melting point or same boiling point... Jyoti Asundi (12:38) Yeah. Aarati Asundi (12:38) ...the same density across all these trials that I'm putting it through? And then if it did, then it was considered a new element. Jyoti Asundi (12:48) Okay. Aarati Asundi (12:49) Then in the 1790s, an English scientist, John Dalton, proposed atomic theory, which stated that all elements consisted of tiny, indestructible atoms, and each element's atom had a specific atomic weight. Jyoti Asundi (13:05) Aha, next step. Okay, they are slowly building. Hey, this is so cool to hear about the foundations of how the elements were organized. This is very nice. Aarati Asundi (13:15) Yeah. And so now finally the stage is set and we can get into today's biography about Dmitri Mendeleev. Jyoti Asundi (13:24) Alright. Aarati Asundi (13:25) So Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was born on February 8th, 1834 in a town called Tobolsk in Western Siberia. He was the youngest of 17 children. Jyoti Asundi (13:40) Hmm. Aarati Asundi (13:41) I know. 14 of which survived long enough to be baptized. And those numbers do differ slightly depending on the source, but 17 children overall seems to be consistent. Jyoti Asundi (13:55) Those were tough times, man, for women. Aarati Asundi (13:58) Yeah, it's about to get tougher. So his father, Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev, was the headmaster of a local high school or gymnasium, as we've talked about. Jyoti Asundi (14:10) That's right. Aarati Asundi (14:12) However, the year Dmitri was born, Ivan went blind and so he couldn't work anymore... Jyoti Asundi (14:18) No. Aarati Asundi (14:18) ...leaving the burden of taking care of all the children to Dmitri's mother, Maria Dmitrevna. Jyoti Asundi (14:24) Wow. wow. Aarati Asundi (14:26) Yeah. Maria came from a family of merchants and her father had started a glass factory and Siberia's very first printing press in Tobolsk. At some point, the glass factory had been abandoned, but Maria, now with an army of kids to feed, reopened the glass factory to start generating an income. Jyoti Asundi (14:47) Wow, she's quite an entrepreneur there. Aarati Asundi (14:51) Yeah, she also set up a church near the factory for the workers to attend and a school where her children could be educated. Jyoti Asundi (14:58) Wow! Oh lady! Oh my goodness, in addition to giving birth to 17 children, she's got all this extra energy going on. It's like I have to feed them, have to do all this and so she doesn't do anything by halves. Aarati Asundi (15:12) Yeah, gets it done. Initially, Dmitri did very poorly in school. Most of his classes were learning about Greek and Latin, which theoretically was the basis for understanding deeper philosophical concepts that shape society. But Dmitri was like, this is all elitist nonsense. I'm not interested. Luckily for him, though, his education was supplemented by a private tutor named Bassagrin, who introduced Dmitri to science. Jyoti Asundi (15:39) Ooh. Aarati Asundi (15:40) And soon it became clear that Dmitri was actually a very bright kid, and he even started to do his own little science experiments. Jyoti Asundi (15:48) He had a different bent of mind. Aarati Asundi (15:50) Mm-hmm. Jyoti Asundi (15:51) He was not interested in philosophy. He was interested in practicality. Aarati Asundi (15:55) Yes. So I like that. was like, oh yeah, he was failing Greek and Latin just because he wasn't interested in it at all. Jyoti Asundi (16:03) He didn't see the point of it. Like, what am I doing here? Aarati Asundi (16:07) However, in 1847 Dmitri was 13, his father passed away. And then the next year, the glass factory that had been providing Maria with an income burned down. Jyoti Asundi (16:19) No way! Oh my goodness, so sad. Aarati Asundi (16:23) So by this time, only two of the children were still dependent on Maria... Jyoti Asundi (16:28) Okay. Aarati Asundi (16:28) ...Dmitri and his sister Elizaveta. So there was nothing really left Tobolsk for them anymore. So Maria decided that since Dmitri was showing so much promise academically that he should receive the very best education possible. Jyoti Asundi (16:45) Nice. Aarati Asundi (16:45) And that meant traveling to Moscow to hopefully enroll him in a university there. Jyoti Asundi (16:51) She is determined. She's got a fierce spirit. Aarati Asundi (16:55) Very determined because Tobolsk is about 1400 miles away from Moscow and the only way get there is to walk basically. Jyoti Asundi (17:06) Really? Aarati Asundi (17:08) They did hitch rides on wagons when they could, but otherwise Maria, who is 57 years old at this point and has two young kids, they made the journey basically on foot all the way. There's no train, there's no airplane, there's no cars. There's no other way for them to get there. Jyoti Asundi (17:24) Wow. This is amazing, amazing story. Aarati Asundi (17:29) Crazy, right? Crazy. Jyoti Asundi (17:31) Absolutely. Yeah, I would have been crying down on the side of the road somewhere. Aarati Asundi (17:36) I know. I know. Jyoti Asundi (17:37) Or like, hey, this school is good enough for you. Go here. And if you want to, you can go by yourself to Moscow later when you're 18. Wow. Wow. Aarati Asundi (17:44) Yeah, enjoy. Yeah. So they make this journey, they finally make it to Moscow, and Dmitri, with the help of his mother, applied for entry into universities. But he was rejected everywhere because the universities mostly only admission to local students. Jyoti Asundi (18:04) Okay. Aarati Asundi (18:04) And so they didn't recognize Siberian school credits. He lived too far away. Jyoti Asundi (18:10) Oh! Aarati Asundi (18:10) Yes. I can't imagine you travel all that way, you get there, and it's like... Jyoti Asundi (18:14) Seriously, that's very sad. That is really you know, it's like a big blow. Aarati Asundi (18:20) But Maria didn't give up. Jyoti Asundi (18:23) Wow, okay. Aarati Asundi (18:23) She took Dmitri and Eliza and traveled a further 400 miles to the city of St. Petersburg, where Dmitri's father had studied. Jyoti Asundi (18:34) Ahh! Some kind of- hopefully some sort of connections, some sort of recognition, like, Hey, yeah, we know, we know these people kind of deal. Aarati Asundi (18:44) Exactly. And again here, Dmitri was rejected from the University of St. Petersburg for the same reasons. Jyoti Asundi (18:50) Mmm... oh no. Aarati Asundi (18:52) But like you said, Maria did find an old friend of her husband and he managed to pull some strings and got Dmitri a spot and even a scholarship at the Main Pedagogical Institute. Jyoti Asundi (19:05) Wow, goodness, after all that, after all that, she kept going until she got something, got him into a school. Aarati Asundi (19:14) Made it happen. Would not let his talent die. Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (19:17) That's beautiful. Wow. Aarati Asundi (19:19) Very sadly though, within weeks of Dmitri being accepted into the school, Maria fell ill with tuberculosis and died. Jyoti Asundi (19:27) But at least she knew that he was set on a good right path. Aarati Asundi (19:31) Yes. Years later, Dmitri dedicated his doctoral thesis to her saying, "Conducting a factory she educated me by her own word. She instructed by example, corrected with love, and to give me the cause of science, she left Siberia with me, spending thus her last resources and strength. When dying, she said, be careful of illusion, work, search for divine and scientific truth." Jyoti Asundi (20:02) Oh wow. This is deep, man. This is so deep. Aarati Asundi (20:07) I know, a mother's love. Jyoti Asundi (20:09) A mother's love. And also the message that she gives at the very end of her life is the most profound message. Aarati Asundi (20:19) Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (20:19) Beautiful Aarati Asundi (20:21) A year after his mother's death, his sister Elizaveta also died of tuberculosis. Jyoti Asundi (20:28) I was about to ask what happened to the sister because now she's what like 13-14 years old at this point and she's basically... Aarati Asundi (20:36) She'll be a little bit older. So, Dmitri is the youngest, and if he's old enough to go to university, that means he's at least 15 at this point. So, she's probably maybe 17. Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (20:43) Okay, so okay, she's a couple years older, let us say. Yeah. But still, that's so young. And I was, I was in the back of my mind, as soon as you said, mother died, I was worried about her. But okay, she also died. Very sad, very sad. So she's all his older siblings have gone off and set up their own lives and parents have gone. The only sister who was close to him is gone. And now he's basically an orphan for all real purposes because the rest of his family is still back in Siberia. Aarati Asundi (21:16) And that's exactly what Paul Strathern, the author of that book, Mendeleev's Dream said. He said, was now an orphan adopted by science. Jyoti Asundi (21:26) Oh, this is so deep and profound. are starting the new year with such deep, deep sad concepts, very, Oh my goodness. It fills the heart. fills the heart. Aarati Asundi (21:41) It really does. Jyoti Asundi (21:42) Yeah. Tugs at the heartstrings. Aarati Asundi (21:44) However, Dmitri's health was also declining... Jyoti Asundi (21:48) No. Aarati Asundi (21:48) ...and he was also diagnosed with TB. Doctors said Dmitri had barely months left to live, but Dmitri continued to study becoming fascinated by chemistry. So even this like death sentence hanging over his head doesn't stop him. In 1855, Dmitri graduated at the top of his class and qualified as a teacher. Jyoti Asundi (22:11) In spite of having TB or has he overcome it? Aarati Asundi (22:13) Well, you'll see. So... Jyoti Asundi (22:16) Okay. Aarati Asundi (22:17) So he was given a position in the city of Simferopol on the Crimean peninsula. Supposedly, he was given this position because the warm weather was thought to be good for the health. But Paul Strathern thinks that something more nefarious was afoot. So many historians say that Dmitri was a very emotional man. He was prone to losing his temper, but then calming down just as quickly. Apparently in one of his outbursts, he yelled at the minister of education who took offense and made sure that Dmitri got sent to Simferopole which was right in the middle of the Crimean War. Jyoti Asundi (22:54) Ha! Okay, okay. Aarati Asundi (22:56) So when Dmitri got there, he realized that Simferopol had been transformed into an army camp and there was no school for him to teach at. Jyoti Asundi (23:03) Oh I see, I see. These kind of politics is always detrimental to science. This is terrible. Aarati Asundi (23:11) Yeah. However, there was one bit of good news. He got checked out by a doctor at the military hospital who told him actually that he wasn't dying. You'll be fine. Jyoti Asundi (23:23) So maybe because he was young and strong, maybe he was strong enough to recover on his own, he beat it? It's a bit odd, but. Aarati Asundi (23:28) Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe it wasn't quite tuberculosis. It could have been.... Jyoti Asundi (23:33) Yeah, maybe it went into latency or something. Aarati Asundi (23:36) Yeah. So Dmitri, of course, was thrilled. Jyoti Asundi (23:39) He's got a new lease on life. Yeah. Aarati Asundi (23:40) So he returns to the University of St. Petersburg, and he got a teaching position there, which relied on the students paying him for his lectures, because he wasn't a job from the actual university. The university was not paying him a salary. And he was also able to continue with his research using the university labs. Jyoti Asundi (24:01) Yes. Aarati Asundi (24:02) However, St. Petersburg was not a very happening place for science at the time. So in 1859, Dmitri got a grant to travel for two years and study abroad. He first went to Paris where he studied under Henri Regnault who discovered that absolute zero equals -273 degrees Celsius. Jyoti Asundi (24:22) Oh the connection between the two. Okay, yeah, yeah, okay. Aarati Asundi (24:25) Yep. And then he went on to Heidelberg, Germany, where two scientists, Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen, creator of the Bunsen burner... Jyoti Asundi (24:37) I was about to say that. Yes. Wow, we are we are just going right into all these fantastic names that are household names today. All right. Aarati Asundi (24:47) Yeah, and they're all living at the same time and doing their work at the same time. Jyoti Asundi (24:50) Amazing! What amazing times for science! Aarati Asundi (24:52) Yeah. So Kirchhoff and Bunsen had spectroscopy tools that could be used to identify new elements. Jyoti Asundi (25:00) We are getting into that now. Okay, mm-hmm. Aarati Asundi (25:04) Yeah. So basically their discovery was that when you heated an element, the light it emitted produced its own unique spectrum. So each element had its own unique kind of fingerprint, so to speak. Jyoti Asundi (25:19) Yes. Aarati Asundi (25:20) So Dmitri set up his own laboratory in the rooms where he was lodging to study and do chemical experiments, where he continued to study the different characteristics of the known elements. He also at this time had the opportunity to attend the first ever International Congress of Chemistry in Karlsruhe, where he was just completely overwhelmed by how passionately scientists would argue their points of view. Jyoti Asundi (25:45) Yes, first exposure to really broad viewpoints from various scientists. Aarati Asundi (25:51) Yes. And the big question at this conference, was how do we assign each element the proper atomic weight? So kind of back to John Dalton's ideas of like each element has its own atomic weight, but how do we everybody on the same page as to what each element's atomic weight is? Jyoti Asundi (26:12) Yes. Aarati Asundi (26:12) And this was decided at this conference and it helped unify the scientific community moving forward. Jyoti Asundi (26:19) What an exciting conference that must have been. Aarati Asundi (26:22) Yes. Jyoti Asundi (26:22) Can you imagine being part on an effort where you're laying down that this is how we are going to evaluate things. This is how we are going to build the foundations of chemistry. Aarati Asundi (26:34) Yeah, these are the rules that were all... that the world is going to follow. Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (26:37) Yes. Yeah, we are all going to follow the same set of rules. So then each of us knows what the other one is talking about. Aarati Asundi (26:44) I can only imagine he was thrilled to even just be there and listen. So. Jyoti Asundi (26:49) Absolutely. such exciting times! Aarati Asundi (26:52) In 1861, Dmitri returned to St. Petersburg and he took a teaching position at the Technological Institute. He was shocked to find that St. Petersburg was way behind the times when it came to chemistry, especially after all his traveling. He was like... Jyoti Asundi (27:07) Yes. Wait, we have to catch up. Aarati Asundi (27:10) Yeah, so no one in St. Petersburg had even heard of Kirchhoff and Bunsen's spectroscopy experiments. They didn't know about the debate on how to accurately measure atomic weights. And there were even some elements that had been discovered that people had never heard about. Jyoti Asundi (27:26) Not yet heard about. wow. Aarati Asundi (27:26) So people are just way behind the times in St. Petersburg. He also discovered that there was no organic chemistry textbook written in Russian so he sat down and wrote 500 pages in just two months. Jyoti Asundi (27:40) Wait a second, what is he translating it from though? Aarati Asundi (27:44) I don't know if he's translating it. He's just like, is all the knowledge that I have. Jyoti Asundi (27:47) Oh he's just writing down information. my goodness. Aarati Asundi (27:49) Yeah. This is everything we know about these elements. Organic chemistry is obviously the elements that are the kind of the basis of living creatures. So carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. And he's just writing everything that he has learned about these elements of life. Jyoti Asundi (28:06) Oh my God! What an effort and with such speed! It's like it's got to be done! Aarati Asundi (28:12) Yes, he's just like, we need this textbook. Jyoti Asundi (28:13) We need this! Yes! Jyoti Asundi (28:16) This effort earned him the Demidoff Prize in the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Jyoti Asundi (28:22) Absolutely well-earned. Another big science communicator working on disseminating science to the best of his abilities. Fantastic. Aarati Asundi (28:32) In 1862, due most likely in part to his older sister's meddling, Dmitri got married to a woman named Feozva Nikitichna Leshcheva. Jyoti Asundi (28:46) Yes. Yes. Aarati Asundi (28:47) Okay, that's as good as it's gonna get. Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (28:48) If you got your Russian wrong, I'm sure your audience will forgive you. Aarati Asundi (28:54) I hope so. Jyoti Asundi (28:54) The audience will forgive You're doing such a good job with everything else, bringing this beautiful story to us. These are minor points where we should be forgiven. Aarati Asundi (29:04) But the marriage wasn't a happy one, unfortunately. Jyoti Asundi (29:07) Because he was already married to science. He was already married to chemistry. Aarati Asundi (29:10) Exactly. Jyoti Asundi (29:10) He was already married to chemistry. Aarati Asundi (29:11) He was always working. And as we mentioned before, he was prone to emotional outbursts that I'm sure his wife did not appreciate. Jyoti Asundi (29:22) Yeah, yeah. Aarati Asundi (29:24) The couple had a son, Vladimir, and a daughter, Olga, but his wife and children would often stay in a different city completely than him so as to not cross paths. So they were basically estranged for most of their marriage. Jyoti Asundi (29:37) Okay, okay, she might have found it easier to live near her parents where she had more support or something. Aarati Asundi (29:44) Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (29:44) And he of course wants to be at the cutting edge of science wherever that's occurring. Yeah. Aarati Asundi (29:48) Whatever, away from you. I'm just getting away from you. Jyoti Asundi (29:49) Yeah, this is, this is the thing when you have different life goals, basically, you know, so... Aarati Asundi (29:55) Yes. In contrast to this though, Dmitri's emotional personality made him a brilliant teacher. He was deeply invested in helping improve Russia's socioeconomic status. And so he started spending a lot of time educating local workers around him. He helped farmers figure out which fertilizers would work best for their crops and how to improve milk production. Jyoti Asundi (30:19) Yeah, probably the triple nitrogen, potassium and all that that we do now, we know we have all the three phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium, he must have figured that part out. Like hey the plants need these three elements make it happen. Aarati Asundi (30:36) Yeah, apparently he did experiments on his own land of like, you know, putting different elements and different fertilizers Jyoti Asundi (30:43) Different proportions. Yes. Aarati Asundi (30:43) And seeing how the plants would grow and then spreading that information to the people who needed it. Jyoti Asundi (30:49) such dedication. So what his mom said before she died, search for the scientific truth, you know, he stuck to it. Aarati Asundi (30:56) Oh yeah. I read that he basically regarded those last words as sacred from his mom and just lived by it. Jyoti Asundi (31:03) Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, lived by it. Yeah, and made sure that he passed that on to as many people as he could. Aarati Asundi (31:10) Yes. Jyoti Asundi (31:10) Such a beautiful person, such a beautiful soul. Aarati Asundi (31:14) He was also one of the first people to suggest building fuel pipelines in Russia and even helped build an oil refinery. Jyoti Asundi (31:21) Oh wow! Okay. Aarati Asundi (31:23) Yep. After completing his doctorate in 1865, he became a full professor at the University of St. Petersburg at just 32 years old. Jyoti Asundi (31:33) Hang on, what? He's just completing... you are at a point in the story where he's just completing his doctorate now. Aarati Asundi (31:40) Yes, correct. Isn't that crazy? Jyoti Asundi (31:42) Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Aarati Asundi (31:45) Yeah. So now he's a full professor and he's teaching university students who loved him, most of them. He was very enthusiastic and a bit eccentric and would often go off on tangents about astrophysics or zoology that was sometimes confusing in a chemistry lecture. But it made him interesting to listen to. And it also, if you could follow him, helped connect chemistry to the real world. Jyoti Asundi (32:13) Yeah. Chemistry is not just this isolated little in its own bubble kind of thing. He's connecting it to the universe around him. He's connecting it to the world around him because everything in the world is made up of chemical elements. So it makes perfect sense that he sees chemistry wherever he goes. Makes very good sense. Aarati Asundi (32:34) Yeah. And so then while he's lecturing, he's like, you know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of the lactic acid that's produced in your muscles when you're working out. And people sometimes didn't follow that jump but if you did follow it was like, wow, Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (32:51) Yeah, when very, very brilliant minds, they are able to go from thought to thought to thought. And you have to pay very close attention to how the monkey branching is happening, actually, because it's just going from one branch to another branch of thought. And there is there is a very clear method to where they are getting. But you have to be agile enough. Your own mind may not be agile enough to keep up with such genius. Aarati Asundi (33:14) Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (32:15) Yeah, that makes sense. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Aarati Asundi (32:23) Hi everyone, Aarati here. I hope you're enjoying the podcast. If so, and you wish someone would tell your science story, I founded a science communications company called Sykom, that's S-Y-K-O-M, that can help. Sykom blends creativity with scientific accuracy to create all types of science, communications, content, including explainer videos, slide presentations, science, writing, and more. We work with academic researchers, tech companies, nonprofits, or really any scientists. To help simplify your science, check us out at sykommer.com. That's S-Y-K-O-M-M-E-R.com. Back to the story. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Aarati Asundi (34:09) But while he's teaching, he realized once again that there was no textbook that his students could use to study inorganic chemistry this time. Jyoti Asundi (34:19) Like iron and all the others. Yeah the iron and silver and copper Aarati Asundi (34:21) All the metals and gasses. Yeah so what does he do? Jyoti Asundi (34:25) Write another book. Aarati Asundi (34:27) Yes. So he begins to write one. But here he starts to run into a problem. So while he's writing this textbook, he starts to try and group the elements into categories so that he can write chapters. So for example, he writes one chapter on halogens, which at the time the ones that were known were fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine. All of these chemicals combined with sodium to produce salts, and therefore their name comes from the Greek word halos, which means salt. Jyoti Asundi (35:01) Okay. Aarati Asundi (35:02) So all the halogens have similar properties to each other. They fell really nicely into one chapter. He then moved on to alkali metals, which consisted of lithium, sodium, potassium, and rubidium. Jyoti Asundi (35:15) Okay. Aarati Asundi (35:16) These all, again, had the same kind of combining power. They could easily combine with hydroxide to form bases like sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide. And they could also easily combine with the halogens, like we said. Like can get sodium chloride, which is table salt. So the alkali metals were another really clear category that he could write a chapter on. But then after that, he got stuck. So by this time, there are about 63 elements that had been identified. And so far, he's covered eight of them in his two chapters and then even after accounting for the organic elements that he wrote about before, that still leaves around like 45 to 50 elements that are not forming really obvious groups. Jyoti Asundi (36:04) How do you... so basically he's looking for a pattern where he can combine and say, here are these fellows who behave the same way. So let's categorize them as such, whatever it is. Aarati Asundi (36:17) Yes. Other scientists had also thought about this question of how to organize the elements. The two main ways people used was either by using increasing atomic weight or by the different properties that the elements had, either alone or how they behaved in a reaction. Jyoti Asundi (36:38) Mm-hmm. Aarati Asundi (36:39) But scientists were like, wouldn't it be great if we had some sort of way to organize the elements that took everything into account. Like we could just look at it and see increasing atomic weight, we could see which ones salts, which ones to explode, which ones were, like, can we organize this in a way that's really easy to figure this out? Jyoti Asundi (37:00) Yes. Aarati Asundi (37:01) But no one could really figure out the pattern. Because if you looked at the atomic weights of the elements that have similar characteristics, For example, if you take the halogens, fluorine has 19 atomic mass units. Chlorine is 16 units heavier at 35. Bromine is 45 units heavier at 80 atomic mass units. And iodine is 47 at 127 atomic mass units. So there's like no pattern there. Jyoti Asundi (37:35) There's still no pattern. Aarati Asundi (37:36) Yeah. There was a British scientist, John Newlands, who found that when the elements were arranged according to atomic weight, there seemed to be a repeating pattern every eight elements, which he called the law of octaves. Jyoti Asundi (37:51) Okay. Aarati Asundi (37:52) However, after calcium, which was the 20th element, the pattern fell apart. Now we know that the thing that threw it off was the big group of transition metals that happens in the middle of the periodic table. Jyoti Asundi (38:05) Okay, yes, yes. Aarati Asundi (38:06) Yeah. But he didn't know that. And so because of that, his ideas were kind of scrapped. Dmitri Mendeleev didn't know about Newland's ideas at all because he was in Siberia or he was in Russia. So he didn't hear about what was happening in Britain. But he also was like, listen, nature is not that random. There has to be a pattern. And sometimes he thought he could almost see it, but it always just didn't quite work out. Jyoti Asundi (38:30) Eluded. Aarati Asundi (38:31) Then comes the fateful day of February 17th, 1869. That morning, Dmitri was due to take a train to the city of Tver to give a lecture and take a tour of their cheese making centers. Jyoti Asundi (38:46) Oh nice. Aarati Asundi (38:47) He's helping the local cheese makers, because of course he is. He was all packed up and ready to go, probably, by the way, in suitcases that he made himself, because on top of everything, he had gotten into luggage making when he was studying adhesives at one point in his life. Jyoti Asundi (39:02) Oh wow! Nothing is half measured here. Aarati Asundi (39:07) No. However, after breakfast, he went to his study and he started taking notes on the back of a letter, trying again to figure out how to organize the elements. And as he's listing out the group of elements, he's reminded of his favorite card game, Solitaire, you know, we used to play that all the time on our, it was like one of the games. We had Tetris and Solitaire and I think Spider on our computer PC at home in the nineties. Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (39:31) Absolutely. Yes. Yes. The first PCs ever. Yes. You're dating yourself, Aarati, when you say all that. Aarati Asundi (39:39) I know. Not, not as old as him though. What is this? What did I say? 18.... Jyoti Asundi (39:45) 1869. Aarati Asundi (39:46) 1869 they were playing Solitaire. It's classic, classic game. Jyoti Asundi (39:52) Yes. Aarati Asundi (39:52) If you haven't played Solitaire, basically you take the cards and organize them according to their suit, starting with ace and going up to the king. And so he's like, maybe that's what I need to do. I need to kind of organize these elements based on their suit or their properties. How can I do that? So he told the carriage driver who was waiting outside to take him to the train that he would take the afternoon train instead and come back later. He then took some blank cards and on each card, he wrote down an element and its atomic weight and its properties. And he started to play around with them, just like playing cards. But he still couldn't quite get it to work out. He ended up missing the afternoon train too. And as night fell, Dmitri finally became exhausted and he laid his head down on his desk and he fell asleep. Dmitri later said, quote, I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, end quote. Jyoti Asundi (40:59) This is exactly like Kekule. don't know if I'm saying the name right, but August Kekule, he's the one... until then, all chemical structures, when you think of a molecule that contains carbon, you always thought of carbon as a chain. And he's the one who thought of carbon as a ring. And he got that idea from a dream- and unkind people or maybe more accurate people, don't know, it depends on your point of view, think he was in an opium haze when he got this idea... Aarati Asundi (41:30) Oh interesting. Jyoti Asundi (40:31) But he dreamt of snakes putting their tail into their mouth. Aarati Asundi (41:38) Oh okay. Jyoti Asundi (41:39) And when he woke up, he thought of carbon is not necessarily a chain but a carbon can be arranged as a ring. And he's the one who came up with the concept of a benzene ring. Aarati Asundi (41:53) Oh wow, I hadn't heard this story. That's super cool. Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (41:55) Oh my God, yeah, it's a very cool one. It's like a fundamental structural change in the way you think about molecules that contain carbon because it's not, know, chain versus ring, the whole thing changes. It becomes organic chemistry. There's a huge, entirely different class, Aarati Asundi (42:12) Yeah, I think in organic chemistry, we had an entire class on benzene rings just dedicated to chapter four, benzene rings. That's what we're studying this time. Jyoti Asundi (42:18) Yes, yes. So that's, that's when I learned about it. When I was first introduced to benzene rings, I was introduced to the name August Kekele, although you know me and my pronunciations, they're all very wrong. Aarati Asundi (42:30) Oh that's really cool though! Jyoti Asundi (42:31) But, but yes, Dmitri sounds exactly like that where he's got it, he's really got it, but his brain is too exhausted. And then once he falls asleep, his subconscious puts the pieces together. Or ⁓ like a bird's eye view kind of thing. And then it falls into place. Aarati Asundi (42:50) Yeah and something about relaxing the brain also I feel like... Jyoti Asundi (42:53) Relaxing and giving and giving distance. You view that same problem from a bit of a distance and immediately things fall into place. So Dmitri has his breakthrough now with Aarati Asundi (43:05) Yes, in a dream. Basically what he realized was that if he listed all the order of atomic weight, their properties repeated in periodic intervals. he therefore wrote all the elements down in a table that he called the periodic table of elements. Jyoti Asundi (43:22) Woohoo! Periodic table! Yes yes Aarati Asundi (43:26) He published the table two weeks later in an article called, A Suggested System of the Elements. And Dmitri was convinced that he had cracked the code because not only were all the elements grouped according to their characteristics and all the elements were in order of increasing atomic weight, but also other patterns that people hadn't really considered too strongly were emerging. And so for this point in the story, I thought it may be useful if you have it handy to look at a periodic table. And that's why I kept that little book next to you on the back cover, on the very back cover There is a handy dandy periodic table. Jyoti Asundi (44:06) Oooh! Yeah! Aarati Asundi (44:07) Yeah. So there you go. I'll put one up for people who are listening there so that they can follow along. But some of the patterns he saw were emerging, was, for example, the metal alkalis, which is the lithium, sodium, potassium, and rubidium column on the left-hand side. Jyoti Asundi (44:30) Uh-huh. Aarati Asundi (44:31) They could all form a single bond to another element. But in the next column, which starts with beryllium and then magnesium and calcium, they could all have two bonds. The next column starting with boron could have three bonds. And then the next column starting with carbon could have four. And then it started to go back down again. So it went one bond, two, three, four, and then three, two, one. Jyoti Asundi (44:58) Ooh this is amazing! Aarati Asundi (45:00) So he was like, I'm totally on the right track, like, you know? Jyoti Asundi (45:03) Yes, absolutely! Strong validation right there. Yes. Aarati Asundi (45:07) Remarkably, Dmitri also found holes in his table. So for example, according to his organization, Dmitri thought that there should be an element just below aluminum on the table, which would have an atomic weight of about 68 and should have similar properties to aluminum. But no one had discovered it yet. Jyoti Asundi (45:26) Okay. Okay. Okay. Aarati Asundi (45:29) So when he arranged his table, there was nothing to put in that spot. Jyoti Asundi (45:32) Got it. Got it. Aarati Asundi (45:32) But he said there should be. According to my table, there should be. And a side note that I thought you specifically would be interested in, he named this unknown element, eka- aluminum. And he had two other similarly predicted elements, eka- boron and eka- silicon. And that word "eka" came from the Sanskrit word for "one". Jyoti Asundi (46:00) Huh! Eka! Aarati Asundi (46:01) Yeah. For one place below, yeah, for one place below aluminum. Jyoti Asundi (46:03) One place below. Oh wow! Oh my goodness! How did he know Sanskrit? How did he come up with that? Aarati Asundi (46:11) I asked that question and... Jyoti Asundi (46:13) Yes. Aarati Asundi (46:13) ...apparently it's because Sanskrit was a highly respected language at the time, especially among scientists. And European scientists who had studied Sanskrit found it to be very highly systematic and rules-based, which was very appealing to any scientist. Jyoti Asundi (46:28) Yes. Yes. Aarati Asundi (46:30) The reason that Dmitri specifically used it was that it was not as overused as Latin and Greek were in science nomenclature. Jyoti Asundi (46:38) He had an allergy to those languages right from his childhood. It's like, am going to go to this completely different continent, to a completely different language. Aarati Asundi (46:49) Exactly. Jyoti Asundi (46:50) But this is so cool. And it is sad in a way that it has become an ancient language now because it is truly remarkable. And the amount of wisdom that is lost because we have lost the language of Sanskrit and it is no longer a commonly taught language. It is quite astonishing. Aarati Asundi (47:12) I think my aunt, your sister, was studying Sanskrit at one point, or is she still studying it? Jyoti Asundi (47:18) Yes, she still studies it, yes, and she teaches it as well. Aarati Asundi (47:22) I've heard her talk about how complex and deep the language is. Jyoti Asundi (47:25) Yes. Yes. You have like eight different words would all flatten out to the word mind in English. But then in Sanskrit, there will be connotations to memory or to the subconscious or to the existence or some things like that intellect like they touch on different flavors. Aarati Asundi (47:47) Yeah. So I thought that was a fun little tidbit for why he named those things. So there were a few other holes and discrepancies in his table, but Dmitri was very sure that he was right. many other scientists were critical of his so-called periodic law because they were like, how can you be so sure of something when there are holes? You say this element has yet to be discovered or this property that this element seems to have because it falls in this column, is yet to be explained. But then how can you make a law about something that you don't have these answers to? Jyoti Asundi (48:25) Right. Aarati Asundi (48:27) Then in August 1875, a French scientist named Paul Lecoq de Boisbaudran announced that he had discovered a new element which he called gallium. Jyoti Asundi (48:40) Ooh! That filled the hole in... the eka-aluminum was filled by Gallium. Cool! Aarati Asundi (48:46) Yes, so the word gallium came from the Latin word gallia for France. And gallium had an atomic weight of 69 and had the same properties as Dmitri had predicted eka- aluminum would have. Jyoti Asundi (48:59) Ooh, so now it's like the unknown is now validating what we know already. Aarati Asundi (49:06) Yes. And as other scientists brought more information and discovered more elements and new properties, Dmitri's table largely proved to be correct. He did have to make some small tweaks here and there, but overall he had really hit the nail on the head. Jyoti Asundi (49:22) Fantastic. Aarati Asundi (49:24) And although that would probably be it for most of us, we would probably just spend the rest of our lives, you know, making small tweaks to our amazing table... Jyoti Asundi (49:30) We're like, woohoo, yes, I have fulfilled the purpose of my life. I have validated my existence here, done something good. Aarati Asundi (49:37) Yeah, we'd just be sitting back collecting awards like, yeah, you know, we did it. Jyoti Asundi (49:41) Yeah giving lectures, humble bragging. Aarati Asundi (49:44) Yeah, exactly. But Dmitri did not do that. Just two years after publishing his table, he switched his scientific focus entirely to studying the behavior of gases at various pressures. Jyoti Asundi (49:56) Hmm wow. Aarati Asundi (49:58) This work was funded by the Emperor's Russian Technical Society, as this was of particular interest to the military. Dmitri was not very successful in this area. He actually didn't make a great experimental scientist, I have to say. So many times he didn't measure things out as precisely as he should have, or he jumped to conclusions too fast. And it was like his mind was just constantly jumping around, which was really great for coming up with really novel out of the box ideas like the periodic table. Jyoti Asundi (50:32) Correct. Yes. Aarati Asundi (49:34) But it wasn't great when you needed to rigorously test and focus on a problem. Jyoti Asundi (50:37) Yeah, that method and that discipline is required. Aarati Asundi (50:42) Yeah, he got bored with stuff like that really fast. Or was just like, good enough, you know, really fast. Jyoti Asundi (50:47) Yes. Absolutely. Aarati Asundi (50:49) The government started to lose faith in his work and himself soon stopped accepting their funding because he just wanted to study other things. And he was like in good concience, I cannot, you know, accept your money. Jyoti Asundi (51:00) Yeah, and also it's like it was not interesting to him at all. So... Aarati Asundi (51:04) Yeah. Then in 1876, at the age of 42, Dmitri met a woman named Anna Ivanovna Papova. Jyoti Asundi (51:13) Mm-hmm. Aarati Asundi (51:14) Even though he was still married, he started courting Anna and soon became obsessed with her. She was a young artist studying at the Imperial Academy of Arts, and she also had a very romantic and emotional personality, which apparently meshed really well with Dmitri's equally dramatic personality. Jyoti Asundi (51:33) Oh ok. Hmmm. Aarati Asundi (51:35) Apparently, Dmitri threatened to kill himself if she did not agree to marry him. Jyoti Asundi (51:40) But did she know he was married already? Aarati Asundi (51:43) I think she might have known, you know? But I'm not 100 % sure of like when she knew or how that happened. But yeah, apparently he threatened to kill himself if agree to marry and when I first read that I was like, well, that's a red flag. But now after learning about him and his dramatic personality, I kind of think he was just very prone to these like Shakespearean levels of drama and like.. Jyoti Asundi (52:06) Outbursts. Yes, Outbursts. He was that kind of- that was his personality. Yeah. Aarati Asundi (52:12) Yes, and she also probably thought it was highly romantic, like, I will die for you. And she's like, my heart, you know, so it's like, okay. Jyoti Asundi (52:21) Each to his own man. Aarati Asundi (52:23) Yes. Jyoti Asundi (52:24) Yeah, I would in today's world, I would really consider that to be emotional manipulation. And if any young lady came to me and told me that this is what my beau is threatening me with, I would advise her to tell him to go ahead and bring the popcorn. Aarati Asundi (52:41) Like that Tom Sawyer thing. I'll die and then they'll be sorry. Jyoti Asundi (52:45) And then they'll be sorry. But then you have an audience for the dramatics that you thrive on. Aarati Asundi (52:51) Yeah. But I think she also was like highly dramatic and was like, my God, you know, like, no, no! Jyoti Asundi (52:56) Amazing, he loves me. Aarati Asundi (52:58) He loves me so much. Jyoti Asundi (52:59) She probably took it as a proof of his love. Aarati Asundi (53:01) Probably. Jyoti Asundi (53:01) Hmm, okay. Aarati Asundi (53:04) But in order to get married to Anna, he first had to get divorced from his first wife... Jyoti Asundi (53:09) Yes. Aarati Asundi (53:10) ...whom he was estranged from. This topic of divorce was heavily frowned upon in Orthodox Russia. And Dmitri made it even worse by marrying Anna one month before his divorce was actually finalized. Jyoti Asundi (53:24) Man. Aarati Asundi (53:25) And even then, the Orthodox Church had a seven-year waiting period before a divorced person could remarry. Jyoti Asundi (53:31) Oh! Oh, wow, and he marries... Not only does he not even, it's not even, it's overlapping. Instead of having a seven year separation period between two marriages, they in fact overlap. Oh excellent, excellent. This must really his popularity with the powers that be there. Aarati Asundi (53:53) So even after the divorce was finalized Dmitri was considered a bigamist, technically. Jyoti Asundi (53:59) Correct. Because obviously he's got it all lined up beforehand. Aarati Asundi (54:02) Mm-hmm. It caused a huge scandal and public uproar and impacted his career as well. The Russian Academy of Sciences refused to accept him as a member because of the controversy. However, Dmitri and Anna were happy together and they had four children, including a set of twins. Jyoti Asundi (54:19) Okay. Aarati Asundi (54:20) I was like, you know, this all could have been avoided if that meddling sister... Jyoti Asundi (54:24) If the meddling sister had not meddled to begin with, he could have found his true love much later in life. Aarati Asundi (54:30) The first wife would not have been unhappy, you know... Jyoti Asundi (54:33) Correct. Aarati Asundi (54:33) He would have been happier. Everything would have worked out. Some people just take some time. It took him until the age of 42 to find the person he... Jyoti Asundi (54:42) Yes, yes, which is very young by today's standards. Aarati Asundi (54:47) As he got older, Dmitri's interests started to get broader. In 1887, he flew a hot air balloon by himself to view of solar eclipse, even though he had never flown a balloon before and didn't know how to land it. Jyoti Asundi (55:01) Oh no way. No way I can see this. He's so excited. He hops on and then after he gets what he wants out of it, he's like, oops, I actually need to find a way to come back down to wow. Aarati Asundi (55:15) How do I do this? I'll figure it out. Jyoti Asundi (55:16) Yes. How do I do this? Exactly. Aarati Asundi (55:19) In 1890, he retired from St. Petersburg University and he got into shipbuilding and designed the world's first Arctic icebreaker, the Yermark, for the Imperial Russian Navy, which had a strengthened hull shape that could ride over and crush ice. Jyoti Asundi (55:38) Oh wow. So periodic table, luggage maker, now ship builder. OK. Aarati Asundi (55:44) Yes. Then in 1893, he was appointed to be the director of the Bureau of Weights and Measurements, which works to provide a single coherent system of measurements throughout the world. So everybody has the same standard for an inch or a pound or a, you know, whatever. Jyoti Asundi (56:00) Yes, yeah, standardize it, correct. Aarati Asundi (56:05) With this position, Dmitri was able to introduce the metric system to Russia. Jyoti Asundi (56:10) Wow! He... two textbooks now the metric system, the periodic... how much can one person do in one lifetime? Wow! Aarati Asundi (56:18) And he also continued to work on ways to industrialize Russia and improve agriculture. However, he did have some strong and incorrect notions on science as it moved forward. He completely rejected the idea of electrons because he thought there couldn't be anything smaller than atoms. Atoms were the smallest thing. Jyoti Asundi (56:37) Okay, the smallest thing possible, got it. Aarati Asundi (56:41) Yeah. He distrusted the discovery of X-rays, who we talked about William Rontgen in a previous episode who discovered X-rays. But he didn't believe that discovery because that implied that there was some invisible thing that could pass through solid matter, which is something that he had worked very hard to discredit that there were like invisible ethers or like, you know, you know, invisible fluids, you know, he was like, no. Jyoti Asundi (57:10) So he's just walked away from all of that thought process so now it's "No don't take me back there." Yes. Aarati Asundi (57:17) Yes. And he was opposed to the idea of radioactivity, which for him was too close to alchemy, with chemists saying that certain elements could decay or transform into another element. Jyoti Asundi (57:28) Yes. Oh yes, yes. Aarati Asundi (57:30) Yes, and that was too close to those old notions of transmutation and... Jyoti Asundi (57:34) Yeah, it's basically he's throwing the baby out with the bath water in these cases. Aarati Asundi (57:41) Yes. Okay, so there's one kind of last chapter, I would say, to Dmitri's life. So in 1905, Dmitri was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and received three nominations for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the periodic table. Jyoti Asundi (57:59) Wow, Aarati Asundi (58:00) However, that year the prize went to Adolf van Baeyer synthesizing indigo dye, which was enormously valuable and had been difficult to obtain and for his work on hydroaromatic compounds. Jyoti Asundi (58:15) Okay. So the focus was different on that that particular year. Okay. Aarati Asundi (58:19) Yeah. In 1906, Dmitri received four nominations and was actually recommended by the committee to the Academy, which usually means that that's the winner. The committee has chosen a winner. The Academy just has to approve the committee's decision. However, in this case, a member of the Academy, Peter Klason, unexpectedly stood up and said that he thought another chemist, Henri Moisson, who isolated fluorine, which was a highly toxic and reactive gas, and had worked on developing a high temperature electric arc furnace should be the one to win the prize. Jyoti Asundi (58:59) I see. Aarati Asundi (59:00) And then Svante Arrhenius, who was also on the committee, also spoke out against Dmitri's nomination, saying that the discovery of the periodic table, while it was amazing, was over 30 years old and so therefore too dated for the Nobel Prize, which was supposed to go to more recent discoveries. Jyoti Asundi (59:18) Which is not true, actually. If I'm not mistaken, Barbara McClintock discovered transposons much earlier. Their value came to light and their practical applications came to light much later. And so then she got awarded the Nobel Prize. But if I'm not mistaken, have to go check that out. Yeah, I think that's more politics. If you are against something, you find a way to derail the nomination. Aarati Asundi (59:42) Yeah. I remember from our very first episode Alfred Nobel, he had something in his will that said that the Nobel Prize was supposed to go to the person who had created the most benefit for mankind in the previous year. And so I feel like Svante Arrhenius probably really relied on that phrase. And so I think, can make a case for, yeah, it was discovered many years ago, but today is when we found a really good application for it. Jyoti Asundi (1:00:12) That's right. Aarati Asundi (1:00:12) Or today is where we realized its full potential and we should, give the award to this person, even though they made the discovery many years ago. But he used it in the opposite way. Dmitri was nominated again in 1907, but was again rejected by Arrhenius. So in the end, Dmitri never actually won the Nobel Prize, although he was nominated for it three times. Jyoti Asundi (1:00:35) Sometimes you can't fight the system. Aarati Asundi (1:00:38) Yep. Jyoti Asundi (1:00:39) For whatever reason- maybe it was his emotional nature, maybe it was the fact that he was considered a bigamist. Maybe it was the fact that he was Russian. You never know what it was. Aarati Asundi (1:00:51) Who knows? Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (1:00:52) I mean, the world recognizes him today as the father of the periodic table. Nobody can take that away from him. Aarati Asundi (1:00:59) And I think I did actually read an anecdote now that I'm thinking about it in my research that Dmitri might have yelled at Svante Arrhenius at some point during some emotional outburst. Jyoti Asundi (1:01:07) There you go. There you go. Yeah, is some sort of a... yeah. Absolutely Aarati Asundi (1:01:10) There was like some sort of personal vendetta there that... yeah. Jyoti Asundi (1:01:13) There is a personal vendetta going on there. Yeah. Aarati Asundi (1:01:15) Or was highly critical of his work or something. Jyoti Asundi (1:01:19) This goes to show you that intelligence and wisdom do not necessarily go hand in hand. There are lot of intelligent people who still hold on to personal little petty vendettas and can't rise above that. They don't have the wisdom to rise above little, little petty grudges. Aarati Asundi (1:01:38) Yeah, because if you think about it, it is kind of shocking that the guy who organized the periodic table, which is in every chemistry classroom in the entire world, has not won the Nobel Prize. Jyoti Asundi (1:01:49) Yeah. And it has completely defined how we think about our chemicals today, how we organize it, how we look at them, how we classify them into different families, or based on their properties or their bonds or whatever. And that seminal work did not get recognized by the Nobel committee. It actually speaks badly of the committee rather than of the scientist who discovered the periodic table. The Nobel committee looks bad when they don't recognize the right work. Nobel Prize still has a very big value because this doesn't happen as often. So you really need to, in order to that weight for the Nobel Prize itself, it should be awarded appropriately. Otherwise, the prize itself less meaningful. Aarati Asundi (1:02:39) Yes. But I don't think Dmitri really knew about the last nomination, the one in 1907, because in January 1907, he contracted influenza and died at the age of 72. Years after his death, his name was given to the Mendeleev Institute for Metrology in St. Petersburg with a monument that has a statue and a depiction of his periodic table. In 1955, element 101 was discovered and named Mendelievium in his honor. Jyoti Asundi (1:03:13) Mm-hmmm. Nice. Aarati Asundi (1:03:14) And ironically, it is radioactive. So yes. Jyoti Asundi (1:03:20) That is ironical. That is truly ironical. Life slaps you back, Aarati Asundi (1:03:27) Yep. There's also apparently a large crater on the moon that is named after him. And the good old Google Doodle in 2016 celebrated his 182nd birthday. And that is the story of Dmitri Mendeleev. Jyoti Asundi (1:03:42) Nice. You know, it doesn't matter whether he got the Nobel Prize or not, because the world recognizes and appreciates the structure of the periodic table. Nobody can take away from that. I talked about Feynman in a previous episode where he was given the Nobel Prize and he said exactly the same thing he said a bunch of people who pat themselves on their back and they decide that they are the arbiters who did good work and who did not. Who appointed them to be the decision makers? And I don't value that. I don't value them as the decision makers of what true science is or what true benefits to humanity is. So if a bunch of self-appointed people say you're good, what does that mean? It's the science. It's your bond of the scientists and the science. That cannot be broken. Aarati Asundi (1:04:41) Yeah, that spirit, these two inconsequential hosts of the Smart Tea podcast have bestowed the honor of the 50th episode on him. So you know... Jyoti Asundi (1:04:54) Yes. So we give him, we give him, we give the periodic table its due. And he is a huge deal. The periodic table is a huge deal. The world will always be appreciative. It's a permanent part of the way we look at chemistry now. Aarati Asundi (1:05:09) Yeah. Thanks for listening. If you have a suggestion for a story we should cover or thoughts you want to share about an episode, reach out to us at smartteapodcast.com. You can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky at smartteapodcast and listen to us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating or comment. It helps us grow. New episodes are released every other Wednesday. See you next time.