A fisherman's son walked to Moscow and spotted the atmosphere of Venus
At 19, Mikhail Lomonosov left his Arctic village on foot and walked to Moscow, lying about being a nobleman's son to get into school. He lived on black bread and kvass. Three decades later he watched Venus cross the Sun and deduced from a thin glowing arc that the planet has an atmosphere.
Lomonosov was born in November 1711 in a village on an island in the Northern Dvina, far north of Russia, to a peasant fisherman who became a prosperous shipowner. A neighbour taught him to read, but for years only church books were available; at 14 he finally got hold of a grammar and an arithmetic primer. Clashes with a stepmother pushed him toward the road in 1730.
In Moscow he packed a twelve-year course into five, won a scholarship to the St Petersburg Academy in 1736, and was sent to Germany, where he studied under the philosopher Christian Wolff at Marburg and mining at Freiberg. He also married his landlady's daughter and ran up debts. After quarrelling with his Freiberg teacher he left without permission and wandered Germany and Holland before getting home in 1741. Two years later, accused of insulting academy colleagues, he spent eight months under house arrest.
In 1745 he became the Academy's first Russian professor of chemistry and built its first chemistry laboratory. Repeating a Boyle experiment in 1756 with sealed glass vessels, he found that heated metal did not gain weight without outside air, and he rejected phlogiston; he and Antoine Lavoisier share credit for the conservation of mass. He treated heat as motion, favoured a wave theory of light, catalogued over 3,000 minerals, argued that coal, oil and amber had living origins, and in 1759 was among the first to record frozen mercury.
Watching the 1761 transit of Venus from a small observatory near home, he saw an arc of light and correctly blamed refraction in the planet's air. Astronomers in 2012, using antique telescopes, confirmed his instrument could have seen it. He also designed a tilted-mirror reflecting telescope, co-founded Moscow University in 1755, wrote influential poetry that helped shape modern literary Russian, and died in St Petersburg in April 1765. Much of his work stayed unknown abroad for over a century.
Source: Mikhail Lomonosov
