Dmitri Mendeleev Trivia
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50 free Dmitri Mendeleev trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Dmitri Mendeleev was the youngest of a huge Siberian family, walked across Russia with his mother to find a university, and in 1869 arranged the 56 known elements into a table that left gaps for elements nobody had seen, then described them so precisely that gallium and germanium fitted perfectly when they turned up. He also married twice at once, was blackballed from the Nobel Prize by a grudge, and did not, despite the legend, invent 40 percent vodka. This quiz covers the chemistry and the man. Easy questions ask what he is famous for and which element bears his name. Harder ones want the town near his birthplace, the prefix he borrowed from Sanskrit for the missing elements, the German rival who published a near-identical table months later, the element whose atomic weight he doubled, the poet who married his daughter, the Swedish chemist who blocked his Nobel, his last words and why the vodka story is a myth. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Dmitri Mendeleev, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Made for chemistry teachers, students and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Chemistry, Periodic Table and Famous Scientists.
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Q 01Mendeleev wrote each element on a card and laid them out like which card game until a pattern emerged?
Solitaire
Solitaire, called patience in Europe: he kept rearranging the cards by weight until elements with similar properties lined up at regular intervals.
Q 02Mendelevium, element 101, was first made in 1955 by a team at which Californian university?
Berkeley
Berkeley's team made it one atom at a time by firing alpha particles at einsteinium, detected just seventeen atoms, and named the element for a Russian chemist at the height of the Cold War.
Q 03Which three elements, unknown in 1869, did Mendeleev correctly predict the properties of?
Germanium, gallium and scandium
Germanium, gallium and scandium all turned up within 17 years; when gallium's discoverer reported a lower density than forecast, Mendeleev told him to measure again, and was proved right.
Q 04Mendeleev was born in Tobolsk, a town in which region of the Russian Empire?
Siberia
Siberia: he was the last child of the headmaster of the local school, and left the region at fifteen when his widowed mother took him west in search of a university.
Q 05How did Mendeleev's father, born Ivan Sokolov, come by the surname Mendeleev?
Assigned to him at seminary
Assigned to him at seminary, where priests' sons were routinely renamed: his was borrowed from a neighbouring landowner, and two of his brothers were given new surnames of their own.
Q 06Which Russian composer, a chemist by profession, joined Mendeleev at the first international chemistry congress in 1860?
Alexander Borodin
Alexander Borodin, later the composer of the opera Prince Igor, became Mendeleev's lifelong friend; the congress's debates on atomic weights gave Mendeleev the numbers his table needed.
Q 07What business did Mendeleev's mother restart to support the family after his father went blind?
A glass factory
A glass factory: when it burned down in 1848, she staked what little she had left on getting her youngest son into a university far from home.
Q 08Which institution refused Mendeleev in 1849 after his mother took him across Russia to enrol?
Moscow University
Moscow University turned him away because pupils from his home district could apply only to Kazan, so mother and son pressed on to St Petersburg, where she died soon after he won a place.
Q 09Why did the newly graduated Mendeleev head for southern Russia in 1855?
For the sake of his health
For the sake of his health: he had been ill as a student, possibly with tuberculosis, and sought a warmer climate, but his first school, in Crimea, lay beside a war zone and he left within two months.
Q 10At Heidelberg in 1859, Mendeleev left which German chemist's laboratory to set up his own?
Robert Bunsen
Robert Bunsen ran the university's laboratory, but Mendeleev found it ill-equipped for his delicate experiments, so he turned his rented flat into a private lab and piped in gas to run it.
Q 11Long before the Texas boom, Mendeleev crossed the Atlantic to study the oil fields of which US state?
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania: he wanted its methods for Russia's own young oil industry, and came home to write a book comparing the two.
Q 12Which newly discovered gas did Mendeleev at first dismiss in the 1890s as just a three-atom form of nitrogen?
Argon
Argon had no gap waiting for it in his table, so he doubted it was an element at all; he came round once William Ramsay showed that a whole family of inert gases belonged there.
Q 13Which English chemist's 'Law of Octaves' likened the elements to musical notes a few years before Mendeleev's table?
John Newlands
Q 21Which pair of elements did Mendeleev correctly order even though the heavier one came first?
Tellurium and iodine
Tellurium and iodine: he trusted his table over the scales and insisted tellurium's weight had been mismeasured; the weight was right, and its unusually heavy isotopes are to blame.
Q 22Mendeleev wrote up the findings of an 1875 scientific commission that investigated which fashionable craze?
Spiritualist séances
Spiritualist séances: he published the commission's conclusions himself and went on attacking 'the apostles of spiritualism' as peddlers of superstition.
Q 23Which element, predicted by Mendeleev as 'eka-manganese', became the first to be made artificially, in 1937?
Technetium
John Newlands saw his paper refused publication in London; only after Mendeleev and a German rival were honoured for periodicity did he win the same Royal Society medal, in 1887.
Q 14Which textbook was Mendeleev writing for his students when the periodic pattern of the elements struck him?
Principles of Chemistry
Principles of Chemistry: with the first volume at the printer and a deadline looming, he was stuck on how to arrange the remaining elements, and the search for an order gave him the periodic law.
Q 15How did Mendeleev claim to have envisioned the complete arrangement of the elements?
In a dream
In a dream, by the story he told a friend: he saw every element fall into place, woke and wrote the table down at once, later changing it in only one spot.
Q 16In 1887 Mendeleev went up alone in what to rise above the clouds and observe a total solar eclipse?
A balloon
A balloon: rain had left it too heavy to lift two men, so the pilot climbed out, gave him a hasty lesson in handling it, and Mendeleev sailed off to watch the eclipse alone.
Q 17Which German chemist published a strikingly similar table of the elements within a year of Mendeleev's?
Lothar Meyer
Lothar Meyer and Mendeleev then spent years disputing who came first, yet in 1882 the Royal Society simply split its Davy Medal between the two of them.
Q 18Which element's atomic weight did Mendeleev double, from about 120 to 240, to fit his table?
Uranium
Uranium: chemists had assumed the wrong combining power for it, so Mendeleev doubled its weight to make it fit; later measurements settled on 238, bearing him out.
Q 19From which language did Mendeleev borrow the prefixes eka, dvi and tri for his predicted elements?
Sanskrit
Sanskrit: eka, dvi and tri mean one, two and three, so 'eka-aluminium' was the first unknown element below aluminium; the choice may have been a nod to a Sanskrit scholar among his friends.
Q 20Despite his world fame, Mendeleev was voted down in 1880 for full membership of which Russian body?
The Academy of Sciences
The Academy of Sciences rejected him by a single vote and never did elect him; the outcry was such that universities and learned societies abroad rushed to honour him instead.
Technetium takes its name from the Greek for 'artificial': the gap Mendeleev left below manganese in 1871 stayed empty for 66 years, until the element was made in a laboratory.
Q 24Why was Mendeleev's 1882 marriage to Anna Popova technically bigamous?
The Church required a seven-year wait
The Church required a seven-year wait after a divorce; Mendeleev married anyway, defying the clergy and Anna's parents, and legend has the Tsar shrug that he had 'only one Mendeleev'.
Q 25Which famous Russian poet married Mendeleev's daughter Lyubov?
Alexander Blok
Alexander Blok married Lyubov Mendeleeva in 1903 and wrote for her the cycle of poems that made his name, Verses About the Beautiful Lady.
Q 26Which Royal Society honour, its oldest and earlier won by Darwin and Faraday, went to Mendeleev in 1905?
The Copley Medal
The Copley Medal reached him 36 years after his first table, and a year before the Nobel Prize in Chemistry slipped past him by a single vote.
Q 27Appointed to run Russia's Bureau of Weights and Measures in the 1890s, Mendeleev broke with custom by hiring whom?
Women
Women: to take on Olga Ozarovskaya in 1898 he went to the finance minister for special permission, as the civil service did not employ women, and he then brought in several more.
Q 28Mendeleev is credited with saying that burning oil as fuel was like stoking a stove with what?
Banknotes
Banknotes: to Mendeleev oil was too valuable a chemical raw material to burn, and he pressed Russia to refine it into other products instead.
Q 29Which Swedish scientist, said to bear a grudge, lobbied against Mendeleev's 1906 Nobel Prize?
Svante Arrhenius
Svante Arrhenius is said to have resented Mendeleev's attack on his theory of ions in solution; though not on the chemistry committee, he pressed the academy in Stockholm to reject him.
Q 30Who was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Chemistry instead of Mendeleev, by a margin of one vote?
Henri Moissan
Henri Moissan, honoured for isolating fluorine, edged the vote, then died in February 1907, two months after collecting the prize and eighteen days after Mendeleev himself.