Mikhail Lomonosov

Mikhail Lomonosov (1711 to 1765) was a Russian polymath, scientist and writer, widely regarded as the Father of Russian Science. Born to a prosperous fishing family in the far north near Kholmogory, he walked to Moscow in 1730 to study, entered the Slavic Greek Latin Academy and won a scholarship to the St Petersburg Academy, then studied at the University of Marburg under Christian Wolff and at Freiberg under Henckel. Returning to Russia in 1741, he became in 1745 the first Russian professor of chemistry at the Academy of Sciences, where he set up its first chemistry laboratory, and in 1755 he joined Count Ivan Shuvalov in founding Moscow University. In 1756 he repeated Robert Boyle's sealed-vessel experiment, found that the mass of burnt metal does not change and rejected the phlogiston theory, a result that anticipated Lavoisier's law of conservation of mass. He regarded heat as a form of motion and suggested a wave theory of light. Watching the transit of Venus in 1761 from his house in St Petersburg, he discovered the atmosphere of Venus from the arc of light around the planet. He was also a poet who influenced the formation of the modern Russian literary language.