Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was born in the Russian province of Siberia on February 8, 1834. He was the youngest of his family of 16 who lived in Tobolosk, Siberia. His father, Ivan, was the director of a gym and his mother, Marya, came from a family that introduced glass and paper making to Siberia. Mendeleev’s father died while he was still young, and Marya had to work. Luckily, her family was able to get her a manager’s position at the Korniliev glass factory at Aremziansk.
Dmitri was educated at his father’s gym in Tobolosk, where he showed a high interest in physics and mathematics. Also, he was taught many things about glass and glass blowing from the family factory. His brother-in-law, Bessargin, taught Mendeleev about current science topics.
When Mendeleev was 14, his mother had already noticed his gifted abilities in Science and wanted to help him get a good education. All that changed when the family factory burnt down. Within a few months, Dimitri's mother and sister had died from tuberculosis.…show more content… In 1860, Mendeleev attended the first ever international chemistry conference, which took place in Karlsruhe, Germany. This conference played a key role in Mendeleev’s eventual development of the periodic table. Mendeleev’s periodic table was based on atomic weights and he watched as the conference produced an agreed, standardized method for determining these weights. Scientists had identified over 60 elements by Mendeleev's time. (Today over 110 elements are known.) In Mendeleev's day the atom was considered the most basic particle of matter. The building blocks of atoms electrons, protons, and neutrons) were discovered only later. He had a great interest in the elements, which up to his time were distinguished by only one basic property, which had been proposed by John Dalton in 1805, that each element has a characteristic atomic