Mikhail Lomonosov

• 1. Introduction

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  Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was born in a small village on an island in the frozen north of Russia, the son of a peasant fisherman who hauled cargo to places like Solovki and Lapland. He died as a State Councillor of Rank V in the Russian Empire, elected to academies in Sweden and Bologna, and credited alongside Antoine Lavoisier with one of the most foundational laws in all of chemistry. Between those two points lies a life of almost absurd range: a man who discovered the atmosphere of Venus, wrote the first Russian grammar to separate Old Church Slavonic from the living tongue, designed a helicopter prototype, and ran a glass factory that produced stained glass mosaics unseen outside Italy. The world that produced him was deeply stratified, and yet he walked from the provinces to Moscow on nothing but ambition. How did a fisherman's son who once survived on three kopecks a day, eating black bread and kvass, become the person Russians would one day call the Father of Russian Science?

• 2. A Walk to Moscow

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  In 1730, the nineteen-year-old Lomonosov walked all the way from his village to Moscow, determined, as he put it, to study sciences. Admission to the Slavic Greek Latin Academy required noble birth. He lacked it, so he lied, claiming first to be the son of a Kholmogory nobleman. He thrived scholastically despite living on almost nothing, and completed a twelve-year study course in just five years. By 1736 he was among the twelve best graduates and was awarded a scholarship at the St. Petersburg Academy. That scholarship sent him further still: a four-year grant to study abroad in Germany.

  The groundwork for that journey stretched back to childhood. Lomonosov had been taught to read by his neighbor Ivan Shubny, and he pushed his studies forward with the village deacon, S.N. Sabelnikov. For years his only books were religious texts, until at fourteen someone gave him copies of Meletius Smotrytsky's grammar and Leonty Magnitsky's Arithmetic. Those two books opened a door he would never let close. At home, a strained relationship with his stepmother Irina after his father's third marriage in 1724 made leaving feel like the only rational choice. By the time he set off for Moscow, the decision had been building for years.

• 3. Germany and the Making of a Scientist

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  The University of Marburg was among Europe's most important universities in the mid-18th century, and its central attraction was the philosopher Christian Wolff, a prominent figure of the German Enlightenment. Lomonosov studied under Wolff from November 1736 to July 1739, and Wolff's influence would prove the most consequential intellectual relationship of his life. While in Marburg, Lomonosov also encountered the works of the 17th century Irish natural philosopher Robert Boyle, mastered the German language, and began writing poetry.

  He moved on to Freiberg to study mineralogy, mining, and metallurgy with Bergrat Henckel. The arrangement soured quickly. Henckel controlled his students' finances and kept them on meager allowances, and Lomonosov had already accumulated debts in Marburg. Disputes over training and money grew fierce, and eventually Lomonosov left Freiberg without permission, wandering through Germany and Holland while trying without success to get official leave to return to Russia.

  During his time in Marburg, he had fallen in love with Elisabeth Christine Zilch, the daughter of his landlady Catharina Zilch, a brewer's widow. They married in June 1740. Supporting a growing family on an irregular allowance from the Russian Academy of Sciences proved nearly impossible, and only when his circumstances became desperate did he finally receive permission to return home. He arrived back in Russia in June 1741, after four years and eight months abroad.

• 4. The Law of Mass Conservation

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  In 1756, Lomonosov set out to replicate an experiment that Robert Boyle had performed in 1673. Boyle had claimed that metals increase in mass when heated, and the prevailing explanation was the phlogiston theory. Lomonosov sealed metals inside glass vessels and heated them, then weighed the results. He found no change in mass. His diary entry is precise: "Today I made an experiment in hermetic glass vessels in order to determine whether the mass of metals increases from the action of pure heat. The experiments demonstrated that the famous Robert Boyle was deluded, for without access of air from outside the mass of the burnt metal remains the same."

  This is the Law of Mass Conservation: in a chemical reaction, the mass of reactants equals the mass of the products. Lomonosov had articulated something close to this principle even earlier. In a letter to Leonhard Euler dated the 5th of July 1748, he had written that all changes in nature involve matter taken from one object and added to another, so that decreases in one place are always matched by increases elsewhere. He formally published that idea in his 1760 dissertation "Reflexion on the Solidity and Fluidity of Bodies." Today Lomonosov and Lavoisier are jointly credited with the discovery, though Lomonosov worked in something close to isolation and his contributions remained largely unknown outside Russia until the late 19th and especially the 20th centuries.

  His molecular thinking ran alongside that experimental work. In his unfinished 1741 dissertation "Elements of Mathematical Chemistry," he defined an element as a part of a body that does not consist of smaller and different bodies, and called a molecule a collection of elements forming one small mass. By 1748 he had shifted his terminology, using "atom" instead of "element" and "molecule" or "particle" instead of "corpuscle." He also regarded heat as a form of motion, contributed to the kinetic theory of gases, and suggested a wave theory of light.

• 5. Venus, Telescopes, and a Contested Discovery

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  In 1761, during the transit of Venus across the Sun, Lomonosov observed from a small observatory near his house in St. Petersburg and noted a bright, brief effect at the planet's edge. He is traditionally credited as the first person to discover and appreciate the atmosphere of Venus from this observation. The attribution gained wide currency in the English-speaking world largely through the popular astronomy writer Willy Ley, whose 1966 account described Lomonosov seeing a luminous ring and inferring an atmosphere "maybe greater than that of the Earth."

  In 2012, researchers Pasachoff and Sheehan went back to the original sources and raised serious questions. Lomonosov's own Russian text describes a brief brightening lasting a second or so before third contact. His German account refers to "ein ganz helles Licht, wie ein Haar breit" - a very bright light, as wide as a hair - language which, they argued, points to the solar photosphere, not the atmosphere of Venus. A group of researchers attempted to reconstruct the observation using antique telescopes during the transit of Venus on the 5th and the 6th of June 2012. Y. Petrunin suggested Lomonosov had used a 50 mm Dollond telescope with a magnifying power of 40 times. That instrument had been preserved at Pulkovo Observatory until the Germans bombed it during World War II.

  Using comparable instruments, researcher A. Koukarine on Mt. Hamilton clearly observed the thin arc caused by refraction in Venus's atmosphere. But Koukarine's sketches did not resemble Lomonosov's diagram. V. Shiltsev, observing under conditions closer to Lomonosov's own using a 40 mm Dollond at Batavia, Illinois, produced a drawing that closely matched what Lomonosov recorded. The wing of light in both drawings, however, appeared too coarse to be the atmospheric arc; it more likely represents the "black drop" optical effect. The researchers who have most carefully studied the transit of June 1769 now believe the first documented observations of the actual atmospheric arc belong to Chappe, Rittenhouse, Wayles, and Dymond.

  In 1762, Lomonosov brought a different optical achievement before the Russian Academy of Sciences: an improved reflecting telescope whose primary mirror was tilted one to three degrees off the telescope's axis, allowing the image to focus at the side of the tube rather than the center. The observer could then view through an eyepiece without blocking the beam. This design was not published until 1827, by which point a similar design by William Herschel had already given its name to the type.

• 6. Geology, Chemistry, and Arctic Ice

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  In 1759, working with his collaborator academician Joseph Adam Braun, Lomonosov became the first person to record the freezing of mercury and to conduct initial experiments on it. He demonstrated the organic origin of soil, peat, coal, petroleum, and amber, and in 1745 published a catalogue of over three thousand minerals. His explanation of iceberg formation followed in 1760.

  His most significant geological work, On the Strata of the Earth, appeared in 1763. The argument he made there placed him in priority before James Hutton, who has traditionally been called the founder of modern geology. Lomonosov grounded his approach in the unity of the Earth's processes across time and in the principle of explaining the planet's past from what can be observed in the present. He also conducted distillation experiments on crude oil that predated similar work in the West, and his findings included the biogenic origin of oil and its migration from source rocks to reservoir rocks.

  The iceberg work fed directly into geography. Lomonosov came close to the theory of continental drift, and he theoretically predicted the existence of Antarctica by reasoning that icebergs in the Southern Ocean could only form on land covered with ice. In 1764, he organized an expedition led by Admiral Vasili Chichagov to find the Northeast Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, to be navigated along the northern coast of Siberia.

• 7. Poet, Grammarian, and Mosaic Maker

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  Lomonosov's "Ode on the Taking of Khotin from the Turks," composed in 1739, attracted significant attention in Saint Petersburg. It was modelled on a 1718 poem by the German poet Gunther and has been called the first aesthetically indisputable example of accentual-syllabic verse in the history of Russian literature. He laid out his literary theories that same year in his "Epistle on the Rules of Russian Versification." Alongside Alexander Sumarokov and Vasily Trediakovsky, he sought a system of Russian linguistic conventions that would allow a native literary tradition to develop on the basis of Western European genres.

  His 1755 Russian grammar, published in 1757, distinguished Old Church Slavonic from colloquial Russian forms. His 1748 work "Brief Guide to Eloquence" was the first work on rhetoric in the Russian language. His 1757 treatise on the usefulness of church books was the first Russian work on stylistics. He also published a history of Russia in 1760 and began but never finished an Aeneid-inspired epic about Peter the Great. His advocacy for the iamb as the basic metrical foot prevailed over Trediakovsky's argument for the trochee, and the iambic tetrameter and hexameter forms he developed left a lasting mark on Russian poetry.

  In a 1754 letter to Leonhard Euler, Lomonosov described how three years of experiments on how chemistry affects the color of minerals had drawn him into the art of mosaics. In 1763, he set up a glass factory that produced the first stained glass mosaics made outside Italy. Forty mosaics have been attributed to him, of which twenty-four have survived. Among the finest is a portrait of Peter the Great paired with the Battle of Poltava, measuring 4.8 by 6.4 meters. In July of that same year 1754, he had also presented the Russian Academy of Sciences with a working model of a small helicopter with a coaxial rotor, a design concept that would not be independently developed elsewhere until much later.

• 8. Legacy in Stone and Name

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  Moscow University, which Lomonosov helped found alongside his patron Count Ivan Shuvalov in 1755, was renamed M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1940, while marking its 185th anniversary. The Lomonosov Gold Medal, established in 1959, is awarded annually by the Russian Academy of Sciences to one Russian and one foreign scientist. The floating nuclear power station Akademik Lomonosov, the first of its kind, began operation on the 19th of December 2019.

  His name is attached to a lunar crater, a crater on Mars, the asteroid 1379 Lomonosowa, and the underwater Lomonosov Ridge in the Arctic Ocean, named in 1948. The Imperial Porcelain Factory in Saint Petersburg bore his name from 1925 to 2005. On the 19th of November 2011, Google marked his 300th birthday with a Google Doodle.

  His family line extended into Russian history in notable ways. His granddaughter Sophia Konstantinova married General Nikolay Raevsky, and his great-granddaughter was Princess Maria Volkonskaya, wife of the Decembrist Prince Sergei Volkonsky.

  A statue of Lomonosov that replaced one of Catherine the Great in Dnipro, Ukraine in 1919 stood for over a century before being removed on the 6th of January 2023, following the city council's decision in December 2022 to remove monuments to figures of Russian culture in the context of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In Tallinn, a street named for him during the Soviet era was renamed after Estonia restored its independence in 1991, taking instead the name of a 19th-century local alderman and lawyer. The Lomonosov Bridge in Saint Petersburg, built between 1785 and 1787, remains one of only two moveable stone bridges of its original seven to survive on the Fontanka River more or less intact.