Dmitri Mendeleev gave the world the periodic table, yet the popular story that he set Russian vodka at 40 percent alcohol is false. This deep dive traces his journey from a large family in a Siberian village, through his father’s blindness and death, the burning of the family glass factory, and his mother’s grueling journey west to secure his education in St. Petersburg before she died.

The episode explains how frustration with the lack of a good chemistry textbook led him to arrange elements by atomic weight and valency, leave gaps for undiscovered elements and predict their properties. It then covers the discoveries that proved him right, his scandalous second marriage, the Nobel Prize he lost by a single vote, his work on petroleum, and his flawed attempt to place the ether in his table.

• How surviving tuberculosis and family tragedy shaped his relentless drive to find order in nature
• Chemical solitaire, the dream legend, and why leaving blank spaces set him apart from Newlands and Meyer
• How gallium, scandium and germanium matched his predicted eka-elements, including a corrected density for gallium
• Why Svante Arrhenius helped block his Nobel Prize in 1906 and 1907
• His warning that burning petroleum for fuel was like heating a stove with bank notes, and the element mendelevium named in his honor