Is it true that Dmitry Mendeleev saw his table of periodic elements in a dream?

It is widely believed that the discoverer of the table of chemical elements saw it in a dream. We decided to check if this is actually true.

You can learn about such a dream discovery from various media: Gazeta.ru, "World 24" And "Public Television of Russia". About this version of the invention writes Faculty of Chemistry of St. Petersburg State University, also about it they tell for schoolchildren as part of a chemistry course. This story is also popular in materials dedicated to horoscopes and prophetic dream. Chemist attributed to the following phrase: “I saw in a dream a table in which the elements were arranged as needed. I woke up, immediately wrote down the data on a piece of paper and went back to sleep.”

By the middle of the 19th century, humanity already knew more than 60 chemical elements; attempts to systematize this knowledge were made several times before Mendeleev. French chemist Alexandre Emile Chancourtois in 1862 published work called “The Tellurium Screw,” in which he proposed a screw or spiral structure for systematization, which visualized the patterns of the chemical properties of various elements. However, the idea did not attract the attention of the scientific community. Three years later, British chemist and musician John Alexander Newlands tried it discover musical harmony in the elements of the surrounding world and published his work - this is how his “law of octaves” was born, which was met with extreme skepticism by the Chemical Society of London. German chemist Julius Lothar Meyer tried it group elements according to their valencies, however, such a table was doomed in advance, since the same element can have different valences in different compounds.

Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev published the first version of his periodic table of chemical elements on March 14-15 (March 26-27), 1869 in the first edition of the textbook “Fundamentals of Chemistry”. The hypothesis that the scientist dreamed of the table in a dream is refuted by the fact that in the Mendeleev Museum-Archive at St. Petersburg University are stored three versions of a draft of this work, dated February 1869.

Where did the version come from that the scientist could have dreamed of the table? 40 years after the publication of the periodic table, in 1919, Mendeleev’s friend Alexander Aleksandrovich Inostrantsev published his memoirs, in which he said that he heard the version of the dream from the chemist himself. During Mendeleev’s lifetime, such a story did not appear in print, nor was it noted in the archive, the maintenance of which the scientist paid much attention to. However there is mentions, that Inostrantsev, even during the life of the great chemist, told this story, in particular, to his students. The scientist’s reaction does not support the version of a dreamed discovery. He was offended: “I’ve been thinking about it for maybe twenty years, and you think: I sat and suddenly... it’s done” (the phrase appears in the memoirs of O.E. Ozarovskaya, who personally knew the scientist). Most likelythat Inostrantsev could have visited the chemist while he was dozing off over a manuscript, this curious situation could well form the basis of the story he was telling.

Thus, there is no documentary evidence in favor of the version of the scientist’s brilliant dream; the presence of drafts in the archives contradicts this version. It is likely that a funny story about the great chemist was written and told by his friend, but judging by the words of the scientist himself, such a joke did not resonate with him.

Most likely not true

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. 40 degrees by Dmitry Mendeleev. Igor Dmitriev. Scientists against myths-8-9 (video)
2. Is it true that Mendeleev invented vodka?