SES 99-11014 - Nathan M. Brooks (New Mexico State University) "A Biography of Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907)"
This award supports research for a book manuscript examining the life and career of Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907), who is best known as the originator and developer of the Periodic System of the Chemical Elements. One of the high points of nineteenth-century science, the Periodic System had a profound impact on the development of chemistry and physics.
Mendeleev was the most important scientist in pre-revolutionary Russia and a leading figure in nineteenth-century European chemistry. He also conducted extensive research in many other fields of science, including work on the boundaries of chemistry and physics, meteorology, geology, geophysics, technology, metrology, the physics of gases, solution theory, and many others. In Russia, Mendeleev's influence spread far beyond science. He acted as a consultant and took an active role in a wide variety of areas, including agriculture, industry, economic policies, and many others. He also served as an informal "science advisor" to many important officials in the Russian government and headed the Russian Central Bureau of Weights and Measures for the last 15 years of his life. In addition, he worked assiduously to promote the authority of science and to create the conditions necessary for the development of a civil society in Russia. In sum, Mendeleev was an important cultural figure who, in various ways, bridged the worlds of science and the wider society in Imperial Russia.
However, despite Mendeleev's evident importance to both Russian and world science, there exists no satisfactory biography of Mendeleev in any language, including Russian. The aim of this project is to produce a thorough, archive-based biography of Mendeleev that will bring together the many diverse strands of his work and activities. The biography will situate Mendeleev in the contexts of both Russian history and the history of sciences, based on up-to-date scholarship and original research. Mendeleev's efforts to modernize Russia will be used as a general framework to link together many of the various threads of his life and work, and in turn they will help show the relationship between these threads and the development of science in Russia. The biography will argue that Mendeleev's many cultural, bureaucratic, and scientific activities were grounded in his desire to create a "civil society" in Russia that would replace the crumbling autocratic structure of society. This project will be of interest to a wide audience, including historians of science, Russian historians, natural scientists, and others.
