1. When Sophia Kovalevskaya came to St. Petersburg she asked for permission to attend lectures at the University. 2. Since she could not receive the permission, she was obliged to read privately. 3. As she had an unusual gift in mathematics, some progressive scientists tried to help her to get permission to attend lectures at the University. 4. Unfortunately, they were unable to change the state of things at that time. 5. Thus, Sophia was forced to leave Russia and continue her education abroad. 6. But, first, she was to get married, for unmarried women were not allowed to go abroad. 7. In Berlin, however, women were not permitted to take examinations either. 8. Yet, some years later due to her outstanding works she was granted a degree by the Gottingen University. 9. Moreover, they granted her a degree in absentia excusing her from oral examinations. 10. Soon she decided to return home to try to get a position as a Ph. D. 11. Though she was not quite sure she would be given a position, she was badly disappointed when she learnt that her application had not bееn accepted. 12. Indeed, it was this work that won her the highest prize of the Paris Academy of Sciences. 13. For a number of years Kovalevskaya translated Chebyshev's works into French. She did it to popularize the Russian mathematical school abroad. She was able to do it owing to her sound knowledge of French. 14. Only when she was 41, shortly before her death, did she win recognition in Russia.
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A Broken Vase
The young man was going to marry a beautiful girl. One day the girl said to him that the next day she would celebrate her birthday and invited him to her birthday party. The young man was eager to make her a present, so he went to a gift shop. There he saw many beautiful things. Of all the things he particularly liked the vases. But they were very expensive, and as he had very little money, he had to leave the shop without buying anything. Making for the door he suddenly heard a noise: one of the vases fell on the floor and broke to pieces. A brilliant idea came to his mind. He came up to the counter and asked the salesman to wrap up the broken vase he wanted to buy. The salesman got a little surprised but did what the young man had asked him to do.
The young man took the parcel and went straight to the girl's place. By the time he entered the room the guests had already gathered. Everybody was enjoying the party. Some of the people were dancing, others talking, joking and laughing. Saying "Many happy returns of the day", the young man told the girl that he had bought a small present for her. With these words he began to unwrap the parcel. Suddenly he got pale and said: "I'm afraid, I have broken it. There were so many people in the bus..." But when he unwrapped the parcel, he saw that the salesman had wrapped up each piece of the vase separately.
Lesson 9
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D. I. Mendeleyev
D. I. Mendeleyev, the great Russian scientist, was born in Tobolsk in 1834. After finishing school at the age of 16 he went to St. Petersburg and entered the Pedagogical Institute. He graduated from the Institute in 1855. In 1866 Mendeleyev was appointed professor at the University where he gave a course of lectures on chemistry. His lectures were always listened to with great interest and attention. Even in a class of two hundred students everyone was able to follow his discussions from the beginning to the end.
Interesting experiments were made in his classes. Both he and his student-assistants worked long hours in preparing the demonstrations so that all would go well1.
At the University Mendeleyev taught classes in the morning. In the afternoon he made experiments in his two-room laboratory. At night Mendeleyev spent much of his time working with the cards on which he put down information about each of the chemical elements.
Mendeleyev made thousands of experiments with his own hands. He made thousands of calculations, wrote a lot of letters, studied many reports. Everything in the world that was known about the chemical elements Mendeleyev knew. For months, for years he searched for missing data2. All those data were being brought together and grouped in a special way. In 1869 the description of more than 60 elements was completed, and Mendeleyev published his Periodic Table.
The Periodic Table is spoken of as the beginning of a new era in chemical thought.
In addition to this work Mendeleyev paid much attention to many subjects of an applied chemical nature He was the first to put forward the idea of studying the upper layers of the atmosphere.
Mendeleyev was elected member of many academies abroad. He died in February 1907 at the age of 75.
Mendeleyev's Periodic Table
D. I. Mendeleyev was the first to discover the law of dependence of the properties of the elements upon their atomic weights. (The atomic weight is the only property which is unaffected by chemical changes).
Mendeleyev suggested a system of classification in which the elements are arranged in the order of increasing atomic weights. The main idea of the Periodic system is that of the periodic repetition of properties with the increase of the atomic weights.
But Mendeleyev did more than that. He predicted the existence of unknown elements which he called ekaboron, ekaaluminum and ekasilikon and for which he left gaps in his table. He even described the properties of these elements.
Late one night in November 1875 while he was writing an article he heard someone running to his study. He waited... The door opened. It was professor Menshutkin, Mendeleyev's friend.
"Mitya!" he cried. "Mitya! They have found ekaaluminum! Perfect prediction! I think they are going to call it "Gallium." Here - read!" And he gave Mendeleyev the article of the Paris Academy of Sciences.
The discovery of gallium was followed by the discovery of scandium (ekaboron) in 1879 and the discovery of germanium (ekasilicon) in 1886. No gaps are left now for undiscovered elements.
With the Periodic Table at his disposal a chemist needn't learn all the properties of all the elements. When he knows the properties of one or two elements in each group, the Table will give him a very good idea of what to expect of the other elements.
The Table is, was, and will be referred to and used in solving research problems of industrial importance.
Notes
| 1 so that all would go well | – с тем, чтобы все было хорошо |
| 2 data | – сведения |
Vocabulary Exercises
