Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765) left his peasant family when he was nineteen years old, taking only two books and three rubles, to study science in Moscow. He studied at a boarding school for four years before being admitted to the Saint Petersburg Academy of Science. He went on to become an academician (or professor), and fought to get more Russian students into the foreign scientist dominated school.
As a scientist, Lomonosov thought that the nature of things could be explained through the interactions between "corpuscles", which he called “minute, insensible particles”. We now know these corpuscles as molecules. Through this idea, he created the term "physical chemistry".
In addition, Lomonosov was the first to experimentally confirm the law of conservation of matter. According to Vladimir Shiltsev, "That metals gain weight when heated—now a well-known consequence of oxidation—confounded British chemist Robert Boyle, who had famously observed the effect in 1673. The result seemed to implicate that heat itself was a kind of matter. In 1756 Lomonosov disproved that notion by demonstrating that when lead plates are heated inside an airtight vessel, the collective weight of the vessel and its contents stays constant."
Other than these two most famous accomplishments, Lomonosov was the first person to freeze mercury, contributed to the kinetic theory of gases, got very close to the modern theory of continental drifts, created the first chemistry laboratory in Russia, and was the first to hypothesize that Venus has an atmosphere. He went on to have numerous more accomplishments in the sciences as well as literature and arts. Sadly, the great scientist contracted pneumonia and died at the young age of 53, but his legacy lives on in the names of towns and museums, and through all of the scientific advancement that he paved the way for.
Mikhail Lomonosov and the Dawn of Russian Science
Colloquium at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab
Russiapedia--Mikhail Lomonosov
http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/mdenner/Demo/poetpage/lomonosov.htm
