Nikolai Zelinsky, a well-known Russian scientist in the field of organic chemistry, who created an entire scientific school, was born in Tiraspol on February 6, 1861.
Many people know that Zelinsky, who stood at the origins of petrochemistry, the founder of organic catalysis, became the "father" of the first gas mask based on a carbon filter, which appeared just in time - in the midst of World War I. But not everyone knows that he deliberately did not patent a product that saves millions of lives. He considered it unworthy - to cash in on something that could save a person from death.
Childhood
At the age of 10, little Kolya entered the Tiraspol district school, where he completed the two-year preparatory courses for the gymnasium ahead of schedule. Already at the age of eleven, a smart, talented boy entered the second grade of the Odessa classical Richelieu school. After graduating from it in 1880, Nikolai Zelinsky in the same place, in Odessa, becomes a student at Novorossiysk University at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, while the emphasis in teaching was placed on the natural sciences.
Having graduated from high school inIn 1884, he decided to go deeper into his studies, and after 4 years passed the exam for a master's degree with flying colors, a year later, he graduated from it, and in 1891 he also defended his doctoral dissertation.
From 1893 to 1953, the biography of Nikolai Zelinsky was written within the walls of Moscow University, where he worked with a break for six years - from 1911 to 1917, during this period he was absent from the university. It was then that he left the university in protest, along with a group of scientists who did not agree with the policy of the reactionary Kasso, the Minister of Education of Tsarist Russia.
In St. Petersburg, Zelinsky was in charge of the Central Laboratory of the Ministry of Finance and headed the department of the Polytechnic Institute.
In 1935, the biography of Nikolai Dmitrievich Zelinsky was marked by an important event. He took an active part in organizing the Institute of Organic Chemistry of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In this educational institution, he later directed several laboratories. Since 1953, this institute has been named after Nikolai Zelinsky.
Proceedings
Peru scientist owns about 40 works, the main of which are devoted to the catalysis of organic substances and the chemistry of hydrocarbons. He also has papers on amino acid chemistry and electrical conductivity.
Scientific activity
Man devoted his whole life to chemistry. In the summer of 1891, Nikolai Zelinsky took part in a scientific expedition, the purpose of which was to survey the waters of the Black Sea. As a result, he proved that hydrogen sulfide in water is of bacterial origin.
According to Zelinsky, oilalso has an organic origin. During the research, the scientist tried to prove this. From 1895 to 1907, Nikolai Zelinsky became the first to synthesize a number of reference hydrocarbons for the study of petroleum fractions. Already in 1911, he conducted experiments that formed the basis of an industrial method for obtaining aromatic hydrocarbons from oil, which are used in the production of plastics and medicines, pesticides and dyes.
He developed a new method for producing gasoline - by cracking solar oil and petroleum with the participation of aluminum chloride and bromide, this method has gained an industrial scale and played an important role in providing our country with gasoline. When creating benzene, Zelinsky was the first to propose using activated carbon as a catalyst.
But this is not what this great man really became famous for, because he is called the savior of human lives for a reason. The key in the biography of Nikolai Zelinsky was the work on the creation of a gas mask in 1915 based on a carbon filter, which was adopted by the armies of Russians and our allies in the period from 1914 to 1918 during the First World War.
Teacher
Nikolai Dmitrievich is the creator of a large school of scientists whose works have significantly influenced the development of the chemical field of our country. An invaluable contribution to Russian science was made by Academicians of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR L. F. Vereshchagin and A. A. Balandin, K. A. Kocheshkov and B. A. Kazansky, as well as Nesmeyanov and Nametkin. Corresponding members of the Academy of Sciences of the Union K. P. Lavrovsky, N. A. Izgaryshev, B. M. Mikhailov and many other professors.
The Mendeleev All-Union Chemical Society was created with the active participation of Nikolai Zelinsky, who since 1941 has acquired the status of an honorary member of this organization.
Since 1921, Nikolai Dmitrievich was a member of the Moscow Society of Naturalists, and in 1935 he was assigned to lead it.
Legacy
Zelinsky's house in Tiraspol, where he spent his childhood, today is a museum of the great scientist. School No. 6, where the future great chemist studied, today is a humanitarian and mathematical gymnasium, on the facade of which there is a memorial plaque. The monument to the great Russian scientist stands in front of the building of the educational institution.
A street in Tiraspol is named after Zelinsky. Nikolai Dmitrievich left a truly huge legacy, but in fact he was a very modest person in life, everyone who knew him, including his son, said so. In Chisinau, a street in the Botanica district is named after the academician. Nikolai Zelinsky Street in Tyumen with an index of 625016 and 20 houses in 2017, according to the plans of the city authorities, was renovated.
Private
Nikolay Zelinsky was married three times. With his first wife Raisa, who died in 1906, he lived for 25 years. The second wife of the scientist Yevgeny Kuzmina-Karavaev was a pianist, their marriage also lasted 25 years. The third wife - Nina Evgenievna Zhukovskaya-God was an artist, and with her NikolaiZelinsky also lived for a long time - 20 years.
Nikolai Dmitrievich has three children: sons Andrei and Nikolai and daughter Raisa Zelinskaya-Plate, who lived from 1910 to 2001.
Awards, prizes
In 1924, the Russian scientist was awarded the A. M. Butlerov Prize.
Lenin Prize issued by the National Economy Committee in 1934. The chemist Nikolai Zelinsky won the Stalin Prize in 1942, as well as in 1946 and 1948. The title of Hero of Socialist Labor was awarded to him in 1945.
Nikolai Dmitrievich was awarded 4 orders of V. I. Lenin, was the owner of 2 Orders of the Red Banner of Labor and medals in honor of the 800th anniversary of the capital and "For Valiant Labor in the Great Patriotic War".
War
Some facts of the brief biography of Nikolai Dmitrievich Zelinsky evoke a feeling of pride in his compatriot. During the First World War, the Germans launched a global chemical war, threatening to take on a planetary scale.
The first use of chemical weapons was recorded on April 22, 1915. Early in the morning, near the Belgian Ypres, chlorine was used against the Anglo-French troops preparing for the offensive. Despite the fact that it is not a chemical warfare agent, the losses of the French First Army were significant. After all, there is no escape from the caustic gas that provokes a terrible choking cough, it is able to penetrate into any gap. About five thousand soldiers and officers died right on the positions, twice as many became permanently crippled and disabled with the losscombat readiness.
A month later, and the Russian troops were exposed to a gas attack. This happened near Warsaw in the Bolimov region. The Germans sprayed a front section 12 kilometers long with 264 tons of chlorine. More than a thousand people died, there is information about the victims that their number was close to 9 thousand.
Even in the 19th century, the first protective masks were invented, which were a material impregnated with a special compound. Both French and English gas masks proved to be ineffective during the war, but they protected well from mosquitoes.
We should have looked for a remedy against gas. Otherwise, the war was destined to end in favor of the German side.
An interesting fact is that during the First World War, thanks to the research of Nikolai Zelinsky, the Russian army managed to increase the yield of toluene, which was used to make explosives. Toluene is obtained by refining petroleum products.
Absorption of poisons
But back to the beginning of chemical warfare… Zelinsky understood that chlorine is the most harmless gas that the German enemy can use, and the worst is yet to come. He looked into the water - soon dichlorodiethyl sulfide, the so-called "mustard gas" or "mustard gas", was used in battle. Nikolai Dmitrievich Zelinsky could not remain uninvolved, he sincerely wanted to help his homeland, to pay his debt as a true patriot. Moreover, the scientist himself became the first victim of this gas thirty years earlier.events.
How did he know this substance? In 1885, while on a business trip, he worked in the laboratory of the University of Göttingen and invented a new substance - the same dichlorodiethyl sulfide, which caused him severe burns, after which he lay in the hospital for a long time.
Zelinsky considered it a mistake to create a chemical absorber for a certain substance - for another it may not work, therefore, in order not to waste time on inventing a useless one, it is necessary to find a substance that would purify all the air, no matter what the composition of what was sprayed and what needs to be destroyed.
Saving Coal
Zelinsky discovered such a substance, it turned out to be charcoal, it remains only to understand how to increase its ability to absorb substances, in other words, how to activate it as much as possible.
Many tests he conducted on himself. In the summer of 1915, poisons - chlorine and phosgene - were introduced into the St. Petersburg laboratory of the Ministry of Finance. Zelinsky wrapped 50 grams of crushed activated birch charcoal in a handkerchief and was able to stay in the poisoned room for several minutes with his eyes closed, pressing the handkerchief to his mouth and nose, and thus breathing.
Gas mask
The world's only sample of the very first gas mask equipped with a carbon filter is presented in the former Moscow apartment of Nikolai Zelinsky. His son, Andrei Nikolaevich, said that this device was proposed to Nikolai Dmitrievich by an engineer from St. Petersburg named Kummant. The gas mask is a rubberized mask with glasses glued in.
In orderfight against toxic substances on February 3, 1916, the Supreme Commander in his Headquarters near the city of Mogilev, obeying the personal order of Emperor Nicholas II, ordered to test Russian and foreign samples of anti-chemical protection. In a special mobile laboratory Stepanov Sergey Stepanovich - the laboratory assistant of Nikolai Dmitrievich - tested the Zelinsky-Kummant gas mask on himself, he spent more than an hour in the closed room of the car filled with chlorine and phosgene. The Emperor awarded S. S. Stepanov the St. George Cross for his courage.
Protection turned out to be effective, and immediately after the tests, the gas mask entered service with the Russian army. At the request of the allies, the Russian command gave them samples of the new development - the Entente countries were also saved. The product of the Russian nobleman Zelinsky became the property of the whole world. Between 1916 and 1917, more than eleven million copies of this truly effective device were produced in Russia.
Nikolai Dmitrievich did not patent a gas mask, considering it absolutely immoral to cash in on items that serve to save human lives.
Nikolai Dmitrievich Zelinsky died in the summer of 1953 in the Russian capital and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.
