A Chemist Confronts the Seance

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was born on 8 February 1834 in Tobolsk, Siberia, and built his scientific reputation on the periodic table of the elements, first presented in 1869, which organized the known elements by atomic weight and recurring chemical property into a system with predictive power: it correctly forecast the existence and properties of several elements not yet discovered. That same period of Mendeleev's career coincided with a wave of fashionable interest in Spiritualism among the St Petersburg aristocracy and, to Mendeleev's particular alarm, among some of his own scientific colleagues, most notably the chemist Alexander Butlerov and the zoologist Nikolai Vagner, both of whom had become convinced Spiritualist sympathizers.

Mendeleev regarded this as a direct threat to the authority of scientific method itself, and in 1875 he successfully pressed the Russian Physical Society to establish a formal Commission for the Investigation of Mediumistic Phenomena, which he chaired. The Commission spent months conducting controlled trials of prominent mediums, including the well known Spiritualist performers of the day, under conditions designed to rule out the concealed mechanical trickery Mendeleev suspected was responsible for the phenomena reported in ordinary seances.