1887: Intent on observing a solar eclipse, a celebrated Russian chemist uses a hot-air balloon to make a solo ascent above the clouds near Moscow, even though he has never been in a balloon before and has no idea how to land one.

Even if Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev had never gotten around to outlining the principles of Periodic Law and ordering the original Periodic Table of the Elements — the achievements for which he is best remembered — this hare-brained balloon stunt would be enough to earn him a coveted spot in our This Day in Tech pantheon.

Mendeleev was a man of varied interests and appetites (he divorced his wife in order to marry the much younger friend of a niece), and among those interests was ballooning. Yet he never made an ascent until he decided to risk life and limb in order to get above the cloud cover for a proper look at the eclipse.

Clearing the clouds on that summer day over Klin required him to soar to an altitude of 11,500 feet. Mendeleev, who was famous for ignoring ancillary details to focus on the job at hand, stayed true to form. The eclipse was where his interest lay on this particular day, so he made the ascent over the objections of his family and without a care to navigation. His objective achieved, he finally turned his attention to landing the balloon, which he figured out, literally, on the fly.

It was very much a Mendeleevian thing to do. The same spirit that allowed him to stick his neck out for science spilled over into the political sphere as well. In 1890, by now venerated and famous and therefore at least partly bulletproof, Mendeleev resigned his post at the University of St. Petersburg. He did this over the objections of the minister of education as a way of siding with rebellious students who opposed ongoing czarist repression in Russia.

So fearful were the authorities that Mendeleev might single-handedly foment a revolt that his last lecture at the university was attended by a strong contingent of well-armed (and probably bored) police. A lesser figure might have expected imprisonment, or worse, but Mendeleev emerged unscathed.

Mendeleev was both a passionate scientist and patriot, and devoted a great deal of his scientific capital to advancing Russian technology, especially in industry and agriculture. He studied and traveled abroad as a young man, returning home grateful to have acquired new knowledge through foreign colleagues, while forging professional contacts that proved useful later on.

He was, however, generally unimpressed by Western Europe and was especially critical of the United States, finding most Americans he met uninterested in science. That didn’t prevent him, after helping to found the Russian Chemical Society in 1868, from encouraging Russian scientists to establish collegial relations with their counterparts in the West.

Mendeleev achieved much in his lifetime, making contributions in areas as diverse as meteorology, geology and hydrodynamics. One of his lesser-known contributions occurred in 1893, when he was director of Russia’s Bureau of Weights and Measures. In that capacity, he came up with a new state standard for producing vodka, mandating that it had to contain 40 percent alcohol by volume.

Nostrovia!

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Source: Various

Image: Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907) puzzles over something or other in the chemical laboratory of the University of St. Petersburg. (After a painting by N.A. Jarosenko/Corbis)

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