His stroke of genius was to leave gaps for elements that were still to be discovered, predicting what their properties should be from his table. This was a tremendous publicity coup! A few years later, new elements were discovered with properties which matched almost exactly with Mendeleev's predictions - the case was won...
About This Quote
About Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Mendeleev was a 19th-century Russian chemist. Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was a Russian chemist known for formulating the periodic law and creating a version of the periodic table of elements. He used the periodic law not only to correct the then-accepted properties of some known elements, such as the valence and atomic weight of uranium, but also to predict the properties of three elements that were yet to be discovered. Read more on Wikipedia →