Abstract
ON December 22 occurs the centenary of the birth of the Russian chemist Wladimir Markownikoff, whose investigations in the latter part of last century were of great importance to the petroleum industry. He was born in the neighbourhood of Nijni-Novgorod and was a student at the University of Kasan, where he came into contact with Alexander Mikhailovitch Butlerow (1828-1886), whom he succeeded in 1869 when the latter had been transferred to the chair of chemistry in the University of St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, Markownikoff had been sent to Germany, where he worked under Kopp, Baeyer and Kolbe. After his return to Kasan he published his memoir “Ueber die reciproke Beeinflussung der Atomie im Molecule”. In 1871, with five colleagues, he resigned his post for political reasons, but received an invitation to the chair of chemistry at Odessa, whence he was transferred to Moscow in 1873. Here he began his long and arduous investigations of Caucasian petroleum. In 1893, without · any reason being assigned, he was deprived of his chair, his emoluments, and his official residence, but nevertheless he continued to carry on his researches in his own house, assisted by his faithful servant Mikhailo. He died suddenly on February 11, 1904. He wrote some sixty memoirs relating to petroleum, army disinfection practice, the plague and the chemical industry in Russia. In 1898 he was elected a foreign member of the Chemical Society, in the Proceedings of which E. J. Mills wrote of him as a conscientious man of science of unremitting industry, and in political affairs an outspoken patriot.
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Wladimir Markownikoff (1838–1904). Nature 142, 1068 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/1421068c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1421068c0