What was the title of Mendeleev's doctoral dissertation?
Answer
On the Combinations of Water with Alcohol
The title of Mendeleev’s doctoral dissertation was “On the Combinations of Water with Alcohol.” He completed the work in 1865 while investigating how mixtures of ethanol and water behave at different concentrations and temperatures.
The dissertation examined the physical properties of alcohol–water mixtures, including changes in volume and density when the two liquids are combined. These experiments belonged to the broader 19th-century effort to measure chemical substances precisely and establish reliable standards.
This work predates Mendeleev’s periodic table, which he presented in 1869. A common mix-up links the dissertation to vodka because Mendeleev later worked on weights and measures. However, the dissertation concerned scientific properties of alcohol and water, not the invention or official formulation of modern Russian vodka.