Dimitry Mendeleyev Bulgarian Postage Stamps, Postcard, and Postal Cover Collection

Born on February 8, 1834 in the village of Verkhnie Aremzyani, near Tobolsk in Siberia, Dimitry Mendeleyev was a Russian chemist and inventor. Raised in an Orthodox Christian household, Mendeleyev was the youngest of several siblings. Following the death of his father, Mendeleyev’s mother took him to Moscow in 1849 to enroll him at the Moscow University. After being rejected by Moscow University, Mendeleyev moved to Saint Petersburg in 1850, where he was accepted at his father’s alma mater, the Main Pedagogical Institute.

After graduation in 1855, Mendeleyev contracted tuberculosis and moved to the Crimean Peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea. After recuperating from his illness in 1857, he returned to Saint Petersburg. From 1859 to 1861, he worked on the capillarity of liquids and the workings of the spectroscope, research that resulted in his publishing a textbook titled Organic Chemistry that won him the Demidov Prize of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

Mendeleyev then became a professor at the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute in 1864 and Saint Petersburg University in 1865. He additionally received his Doctor of Science in 1865 and was awarded tenure at St. Petersburg University in 1867, where he taught inorganic chemistry. By 1871, Mendeleyev had transformed Saint Petersburg into an internationally recognized center of chemistry research thanks to his formulation of the Periodic Law which helped him create a version of the periodic table of elements and earned him his reputation as the Father of the Periodic Table.

Dimitry Mendeleyev passed away on February 2, 1907.

Sources

Dimitry Mendeleyev Bulgarian Postage Stamps, Postcard, and Postal Cover Collection, Science History Institute Archives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.