Every year, freshmen in Virginia Tech’s Corps of Cadets set off for a memorial hike. It is in remembrance of a student, William Addison Caldwell, who in 1872 walked 26 miles to Blacksburg from his family farm to enroll at the newly opened Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College.

If first-year students at the Lomonosov Moscow State University similarly honored the institution’s namesake, polymath Mikhail Vasilievich Lomonosov, they would miss some five weeks of classes and wear out a pair of boots. In 1730, Lomonosov covered approximately 700 miles between the town of Kholmogory in the Russian north and the capital city of Moscow with the sole purpose of enrolling in the Slavic Greek Latin Academy to receive a formal education. But this trek was just the beginning of Lomonosov’s ascent to the scientific heights of the Russian Enlightenment.

A long-running study of a mythologized figure

In a series of—so far—three articles in Physics in Perspective, Robert Crease, a philosopher and historian at Stony Brook University, and Vladimir Shiltsev, an accelerator physicist formerly at Fermilab, are reexamining Lomonosov’s heavily mythologized history. The first two articles were published in 2013 and 2018. The most recent has just appeared and zooms in on what we’d call the early-career stage of the life of the Russian chemist, physicist, poet, astronomer, mineralogist, geologist, philologist, and engineer.

Upon his return from a five-year educational tour of Europe in 1741, Lomonosov was hired at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, which had been established in 1725 and was still largely populated by foreign scholars. He was the loose equivalent to a modern-day adjunct professor, but low status at the academy and a constant shortage of funding did not deter him from expanding his expertise and building the first-of-its-kind physics and chemistry laboratory in Russia in 1748.

In Russian historiography, the opening of Lomonosov’s lab is routinely lauded as the starting point of modern science in the country. And with reason: the creation of dedicated spaces for experimentation and the demonstration of empirical knowledge were elemental to the advance of scientific inquiry in Western Europe. One cannot understand how this process played out in Russia without understanding Lomonosov, whatever myths might surround him.

Crease and Shiltsev reconstruct the creation of Lomonosov’s lab in the context of that moment in Russian history to understand its significance and why it has the reputation it does. Chemistry labs had existed within and outside the academy prior to Lomonosov, and Lomonosov’s lab neither produced earth-shattering discoveries nor developed an enduring school of thought. The authors argue that two factors are critical.

Study abroad

One important factor was Lomonosov’s rags-to-riches background and education.

He came from a peasant family of fishermen, nowhere near to a noble birth—even if one of more persistent myths about him is that he was an illegitimate son of Peter the Great. The first Russian emperor played a significant role in Lomonosov’s life, just not by siring him. Petrine reforms brought European science to Russia and, as the cliché goes, hacked a window into Europe.

Sponsoring education abroad for young men was also Peter’s legacy. In 1736, Lomonosov was selected as one of three students bound for Germany. Originally headed to Freiburg in Saxony for a study with the mining expert Johann Henckel, Lomonosov ended up receiving significantly more exposure to scientific thought, theory, and method than his sponsors meant for him.

Before starting their apprenticeship with Henckel, the three students found themselves in Marburg under the guidance of philosopher Christian Wolff, who “taught the new rationalist materialist science of Descartes and Boyle mixed with a strong dose of Leibniz.” From Wolff the students learned about the corpuscular theory of matter, postulating that all substances, including light, are composed of tiny, indivisible components and that all physical phenomena can be explained in terms of their characteristics and motion. It was a stimulating time for a young thinker.

Lomonosov had an extraordinary chance to absorb the new theories as well as new scientific practices. With Wolff he learned about Robert Boyle’s chemical experiments and Herman Borhaave’s teachings as conveyed in his Elementa Chemiae. On the way home, he stopped in Freiburg to fulfill his obligation to acquire expertise applicable to the homeland’s industry from Henckel. In addition, he treated himself to a visit to the cutting-edge assaying lab of Johann Andreas Cramer, a metallurgist and chemist in Leiden.

By his return in 1741, the thirty-year-old Russian spoke and read German, French, English, and Latin—the languages of scientific texts and debates. He was well versed in contemporary theories and research methods and developed a strong taste for experiments.

Working at home

The second factor was the purpose of Lomonosov’s lab.

It took Lomonosov four petitions in four years to be granted permission and funding from the St. Petersburg Academy to build a laboratory as he envisioned it, on par with European standards. It wasn’t until 1745—and after surviving an extraordinary academic battle that led to his imprisonment—that Lomonosov was promoted from adjunct to professor, one of the first two Russian-born academics to receive the title. This new status helped move things along, and when the building was completed in October 1748, in spite of a devastating fire, the plans for the academy’s first lab began to unfold.

But Lomonosov’s lab wasn’t the first ever to function in Russia. Private labs already existed at the time, mostly for the applied purposes of mining (analyzing ores and identifying minerals), industry (dye and other chemical production) and the apothecary trade (herbal and mineral remedies). However, it did become the first lab in the entire country devoted more to scientific inquiry than practical affairs.

With this focus, Lomonosov’s disciples brought in new energy and ideas. Experimentation provided evidence for and against hypotheses, moving research forward, and many more applications were conceived than labs with a more practical focus could generate.

Lomonosov tried his hand in what we may now call materials science and was largely successful. At the intersection of silicate chemistry and aesthetic value, he was particularly interested in creating and perfecting colored glass and mosaics. In 1754, his consummate technique for using precision quantitative methods in the lab earned him praise from a colleague, the Swiss polymath Leonhard Euler, who wrote from Germany, “I congratulate you on having produced glass of all possible colors. Our chemists consider this a great discovery.”

Euler would return to the St. Petersburg Academy the year after Lomonosov’s death, and both would eventually find their final resting place in the Lazarevskoye cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky monastery, the Russian equivalent to the tombs of Westminster Abbey.

A Russian legend

Lomonosov’s life story is so full of coincidence, exception, and symbolism that it has appealed to aspiring learners in Russia for generations. A peasant boy, who grew up among illiterate people and had almost no access to schooling, was taught to read by a rare woman who could, his mother. A poor youth, he had no means to travel to Moscow, but by luck and perseverance he found a way to join a sleigh fish convoy that got him there. By chance he was selected for study abroad and did not lose himself to boozing, brawling, and skirt chasing—activities for which European students were better known than academic excellence. His proposal for the lab was repeatedly rejected by the academy bureaucrats, and yet it was built in a relatively short time.

No one fact or story can fully account for the creation and persistence of the Lomonosov myth in Russian culture. The establishment of the lab and successes of his research certainly shed light on the phenomenon, alongside a zest for independent thought and a consistent refusal to see limits to where it could travel.

—

Anna Doel
American Institute of Physics
adoel@aip.org

---

You can sign up to receive the Weekly Edition and other AIP newsletters by email here.

---