Siberia. Dmitry Mendeleev is born. He is the youngest of Maria Mendeleeva’s 14 children. Her husband, having gone blind, receives a meager pension. Maria reopens the family glassworks and manages it, the only woman in the family. The factory is then destroyed by fire. As a last resort, she turns to Dmitry, her brightest son. She puts him on a horse, and they ride 2,000 kilometers to Moscow, where she attempts to enroll him in the university, but the university rejects him because he is Siberian. She then rides another 500 kilometers northwest to St. Petersburg, enrolls him in the university there, and dies soon after. Dmitry becomes a brilliant student and continues his studies in Paris and Heidelberg. Mendeleev has a terrible temper and refuses to acknowledge the existence of atoms and other invisible objects such as electrons and radioactivity. But he understood, better than many others, that some properties of elements persist in chemical reactions. And he knew metals well, which were the most difficult to pigeonhole. And, in particular, he had the courage to predict the existence of elements in empty boxes, predicting atomic weights and densities. He also made incorrect predictions, such as the elements before hydrogen, or the existence of the element coronium, which would have been present in the solar corona.
