The Royal Society awarded Mendeleev the Davy Medal in 1882. He shared the award with Julius Lothar Meyer for their work identifying periodic relationships among the atomic weights of the elements.
The Davy Medal was established by the Royal Society in 1877 and was named after the English chemist Humphry Davy. Its early recipients included Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff, recognized for their research in spectrum analysis.
Mendeleev and Meyer had independently developed important systems for organizing the elements, and their priority became a subject of scientific debate. The 1882 award recognized the underlying periodic relationships rather than only Mendeleev’s later predictions. Mendeleev subsequently received other major honors, including the Copley Medal in 1905.