From the History of Physics

FYODOR FOMICH PETRUSHEVSKY AND HIS WORKS ON OPTICS AND COLOR SCIENCE

(On the 120th Anniversary of His Birth)

V. L. Chenakal

Russian physics of the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century left a whole series of names of which our national science may rightly be proud.

Alongside the names of such world-famous Russian physicists of that time as Aleksandr Grigor’evich Stoletov, Vladimir Nikolaevich Chikolev, Nikolai Grigor’evich Egorov, Petr Nikolaevich Lebedev, and Boris Borisovich Golitsyn, the name of Fyodor Fomich Petrushevsky—whose 120th anniversary of birth occurred this year—must also, by right, be included among its creators of that period.

Petrushevsky worked in Russian physics for more than fifty years and during that time produced many works that adorned not only physics itself but national science in general.

There is no doubt that in the future everything done by Petrushevsky for the development of our national physics will be described in full. Judging by the number and scope of the works he carried out, that task, like the reconstruction of the entire history of Russian physics in general, will require much effort and time. The present note pursues more limited aims—to revive the memory of Petrushevsky only in one area of his research: his works in the field of optics and color science.

Since, after Petrushevsky’s death, which occurred on February 17, 1904, almost no report was published about his life and creative activity,* it is not superfluous,

* Both here and below, dates are given according to the old style.

* Everything written about Petrushevsky is exhausted by the following three short notes: 1. Petrushevsky Fyodor Fomich, Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, vol. XXIII, pp. 479–480 (1889); 2. Fyodor Fomich Petrushevsky (obituary), ibid., vol. X, pp. 1–4 (1904); 3. I. Borman. In Memory of F. F. Petrushevsky, ZhRFKhO*, vol. XXXVI, pp. 51–55 (1904).

obviously, it will be necessary to pause for a few lines on his biography.

Petrushevsky was born on March 24, 1828, in Petersburg, into the family of Foma Ivanovich Petrushevsky, a translator and commentator of the ancient Greek classics well known in Russian society in those years, and later an equally well-known Russian metrologist.

Fyodor Fomich Petrushevsky
(1828–1904).

Being one of the most cultured and progressive people of Russian society of that time—people who passionately loved their people, its culture and science—Foma Ivanovich brought up his four sons in the same spirit. From childhood, F. F. Petrushevsky, as well as his brothers, developed those fundamental views on life as an uninterrupted service to one’s people, its cul-

culture and science, by which he was guided throughout his long life.

Petrushevsky’s brothers—something that should also be mentioned in order to show how great an influence his upbringing at home had on him—also later became prominent Russian figures. All of them, having received higher military education and having served for many years in military service, rose to the ranks of generals in the Russian army and navy. In addition, the eldest of them, Aleksandr Fomich, was a well-known historian who wrote a large number of works on Russian civil and military history; the younger, Vasily Fomich, was a talented military inventor; and the youngest, Mikhail Fomich, was a hero of the defense of the Shipka Pass during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878.

After finishing the 3rd St. Petersburg Gymnasium, Petrushevsky entered St. Petersburg University, from which he graduated in 1851 with the degree of Candidate of Physico-Mathematical Sciences.

Remaining at the university, in that same year, 1851, he was sent with the professor of astronomy, later Academician, Aleksei Nikolaevich Savich, to Kherson Province to observe a solar eclipse.

Upon returning from this trip, Petrushevsky taught physics in a number of gymnasiums, first in Petersburg and then in Kiev.

Having defended in 1862 his dissertation “Methods for Determining the Positions of the Poles of Magnets and Electromagnets” for the degree of Master of Physics, Petrushevsky began to lecture on physics at St. Petersburg University, at first as assistant professor of this chair to the university’s professor, Academician Emilii Khristianovich Lenz, and then, after the latter’s death and after defending in 1865 the dissertation “On Normal Magnetization” for the degree of Doctor, as its professor. He headed this chair until 1901.

The years of Petrushevsky’s work at the chair of physics of St. Petersburg University were the best years in the pre-revolutionary history of this faculty as a whole. In addition to creating an excellent course in physics—Course of Observational Physics (2 vols., St. Petersburg, 1874)—on the basis of which, for almost forty years, the principal sections of physics were taught to students, and to developing a number of supplementary courses, such as An Experimental and Practical Course in Electricity, Magnetism, and Galvanism (St. Petersburg, 1876), which also played no small role in students’ study of these questions, Petrushevsky organized at the university a physics laboratory for students’ practical work, introduced demonstrations of physical experiments into his lectures, as a result of which students’ classes, from the very beginning of his teaching activity, became very lively and interesting.

Petrushevsky paid exceptional attention to his physics laboratory. The doors of the latter were always thrown wide open

before young physicists who wished to carry out their experimental work in it.

The splendid physical institute that exists to this day at Leningrad University was founded in 1879 on the initiative and under the direction of Petrushevsky himself.

Simultaneously with lecturing on physics at St. Petersburg University, Petrushevsky for some time also taught the same subject at the Technological Institute, at the Institute of Railway Engineers, and at the Vladimir Courses. For several years he also lectured on physics in the Mine Officers’ Classes in Kronstadt. Here, as at St. Petersburg University, thanks to his efforts a splendid physics laboratory was created.

In addition to the pedagogical activity mentioned above, Petrushevsky also did much for the organization of the Russian scientific community. On his initiative and under his direct leadership, the Russian Physical Society was created at St. Petersburg University; it later merged into the Russian Physico-Chemical Society, which united all the best Russian physicists. From 1872 to 1901 Petrushevsky was the permanent chairman of this Society, and from 1901 until his death its honorary chairman.

How great the significance of this Society was for the development of Russian physics is known to anyone at all acquainted with the history of Russian science. It is enough to point out that before Petrushevsky’s death alone, the Physical Section of this Society held 274 meetings, at which all current as well as fundamental questions of Russian physics were discussed; published 36 volumes of its journal, which printed almost all the work on physics and related disciplines carried out in Russia in those years; held several congresses of Russian physicists, etc.

In 1891 Petrushevsky was invited to work on the editorial board of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, which had begun publication in 1890, where he served as its chief editor for the departments of exact and natural sciences and remained there until his death.

His exceptionally broad scientific outlook and enormous organizational abilities enabled him to attract the best Russian scholars to work on this dictionary, thanks to which it remains to this day one of the best publications of its kind in the Russian language.

Petrushevsky began to engage in scientific work while still a teacher of physics in the St. Petersburg and Kiev gymnasiums.

His first work, which was at the same time the first of those of his works to which the present note is devoted, i.e. a work on optics, was a new design of an optical micrometer for a refracting telescope, developed by him in 1859.

Petrushevsky was led to take up these questions by his participation, mentioned above, in Savich’s expedition to observe a solar eclipse.

After a break of more than ten years, during which he worked on his dissertations and on other investigations concerned mainly with magnetism and electricity, he again resumed his work in the field of optics.

During 1872–1873 he was intensively occupied with questions of the spectrophotometry of celestial bodies, as a result of which he developed a special “lunar spectrophotometer.”

Whether this spectrophotometer was used by Russian practical astronomy immediately after its invention is not known. It is known only that, returning in 1884 once again to the question of the study of celestial bodies, Petrushevsky developed a special, extensive plan for the physical investigation of the surface of the Moon, in which, among the other instruments intended for these purposes, this spectrophotometer of his was also included.

In creating, in the period from 1872 to 1876, his courses in “observational” and “elementary” physics, he constructed the sections relating to the theory of light in a way no author before him had done. In these sections he collected and, in a highly original form, systematized all the information then known to science concerning the theory of light. Until the appearance of O. D. Khvolson’s world-famous Course of Physics, Petrushevsky’s course remained the best manual in Russian for all who studied optics or worked in it.

In the period from 1876 to 1878, on the advice of his younger brother Vasily Fomich, a lieutenant general of the coastal service of the Russian Navy and a member of the Naval Technical Committee, Petrushevsky undertook the study and improvement of the “optical side of lighthouse work.”

After a thorough study of the lighthouse apparatus existing in those years—chiefly their light sources and the optical, mirror, and lens devices concentrating the luminous flux, the question of the transparency of the atmosphere to light under various meteorological conditions, and other details of lighthouse work—Petrushevsky introduced a whole series of improvements into the illuminating devices of lighthouses and beacons, which were soon used by the coastal service of the Russian Navy for its needs.

The results of all these works on lighthouse optics were set forth by him in the remarkable work “The Present State of Lighthouse Illumination and the Physical Questions Relating to It,” published in 1878 first in the Naval Collection and then as a separate book. Petrushevsky was also engaged in another field of military optics. His brother mentioned above, Vasily Fomich, who made many inventions and improvements of various kinds in the field of military

...technology, at the end of the eighties, he built a coastal optical rangefinder. The idea for the design of this instrument, as well as all the calculations for its optical part, were given to Vasilii Fomich by his brother, the physicist. This rangefinder, it is true, did not come into practical use, owing to certain circumstances in no way connected with its design.

In the eighties Petrushevskii carried out extensive work on the development of methods of photometry and of photometric apparatus. In 1884 he created an original design of a photometer for comparing the illumination of surfaces lit by daylight and by artificial light.

Originally applied to the study of the illumination of objects in school classrooms, this photometer received the name “school-hygienic,” and under that name it continued to exist. In 1885 Petrushevskii introduced a number of substantial improvements into this photometer, after which, by order of the Ministry of Education, it began to be manufactured in large quantities by the Frantzen workshop of physical instruments, well known in those years in Petersburg.

In 1889 this photometer was adapted by F. Ya. Kapustin for measuring the brightness of the coronal rays of the sun, thus finding a new field of application in astronomy. To this section of Petrushevskii’s work also belongs his very original study on the transparency and color of water, carried out in 1896, and his work on the distribution of light and shadow on bodies illuminated in various ways, carried out in 1900.

An exceptionally large section of Petrushevskii’s optical works is made up of his studies in color science.

All these works give grounds for calling Petrushevskii the first Russian color scientist, in the full sense of the word, since before him no one had dealt with questions of color science on such a scale and with such depth.

The motives that led him to engage deeply with questions of color science undoubtedly arose from the fact that, in addition to his principal pursuits in physics, he devoted much and not without success to landscape painting.

Setting himself the goal of putting the doctrine of light and colors at the service of painting, its improvement and scientific foundation, he began to study the theory of colors and the practice of its application to this field.

When he began these studies is not precisely known. It is known that already in the spring of 1883, in Petersburg, in the hall of the Pedagogical Museum of Military-Educational Institutions, he delivered six public lectures on light and colors and on their role in painting, which aroused lively interest not only among physicists and artists, but also in broad circles of the educated Petersburg society of that time in general.

In the same year, 1883, his lectures were published as a separate book under the title Light and Colors in Themselves and in Relation to Painting.

The chief merit of these lectures by Petrushevsky, which made them so popular, was that for the first time in Russian science they considered questions of color science exceptionally broadly and, moreover, not in the abstract manner in which this was done in those years with many other particular questions of physics and the other natural sciences, but in close connection with the needs of public practice in this field of knowledge.

In subsequent years these lectures served Petrushevsky as the basis for the creation of the excellent monograph Paints and Painting, which appeared in its first edition in 1891 and in its second in 1901. How thoroughly Petrushevsky set forth the questions of color science in this work may be judged from the fact that much of what he developed on these questions has not lost its significance down to our own day.

The material for this work consisted not only of investigations on these questions by other scholars, but also of numerous experimental works on color science carried out by Petrushevsky himself. The most interesting of Petrushevsky’s works were his studies on the colors of bodies under artificial illumination, on color light scattering, on complementary colors, and several others.

In working on questions of color science, Petrushevsky created a whole series of new methods and original instruments for studying various color phenomena. Even in our own time, in the practice of color science, use is often made of the methods he developed for determining the coefficients of reflection of light by colored surfaces, of his graphical techniques for determining the angle of scattering of light by prisms, of his instruments for studying complementary colors, for determining the average color tone of multicolored objects, and so on.

In addition to purely research work in the field of optics and color science, Petrushevsky also did much to popularize these branches of physics among broad circles of the Russian people.

Almost no congress of Russian physicists and naturalists in Petrushevsky’s time, almost no meeting of the physical section of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society, took place without his appearing there with one or another report or communication relating to optics or color science.

This activity of Petrushevsky’s acquired especially broad scope after he assumed leadership of the department of the exact and natural sciences in the editorial office of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary.

Entrusting the writing of articles of physical content for the dictionary he edited to the first-rate Russian physicists of that time—Nikolai Grigorievich Egorov, Aleksandr Lvovich Gershun, Iva-

…to Ivanovich Borgman, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Gezehus, and others,—he himself also wrote many articles for this dictionary.

Many of his articles, and especially those dealing with optics and color science, have not lost their interest to this day. In addition to purely survey and reference material, in these articles he, as a rule, also set forth his own observations and views on the question described.

The most interesting in this respect are his articles “Rotation of the Plane of Polarization,” “Goethe and His Theory of Colors,” “Telescopes,” “Interference,” “Color,” “Weightless Substances,” “Transparency and the Color of Water,” “Luminous Shadows,” “The Color of Bodies,” and several others.

What we have said here about Petrushevsky’s works on optics and color science by no means exhausts everything he accomplished in these fields. These are, in fact, only milestones. Yet even these milestones alone are quite sufficient to show how great his contribution was to Russian optics and color science, and to Russian physics in general.

LIST OF WORKS BY F. F. PETRUSHEVSKY

ON OPTICS AND COLOR SCIENCE*)

1. Optische micrometer. Poggendorffs Annalen. 1859.
2. Notes on a lunar spectrophotometer. ZhRFKhO**), vol. V, 401, 408 (1873).
3. Course of observational physics, vols. I, II, St. Petersburg, 1874.
4. Elementary textbook of physics, St. Petersburg, 1876.
5. The present state of beacon lighting and the physical questions related thereto. Morskoi sbornik, 1878, Nos. 8 and 9.
6. The same, as a separate edition, St. Petersburg, 1878.
7. Light and colors in themselves and in relation to painting. (Six public lectures), St. Petersburg, 1883.
8. School-hygienic photometer, ZhRFKhO, vol. XVI, 295–303 (1884).
9. Colors in fire. Ibid., vol. XVII, 35–42 (1885).
10. School-hygienic photometer. Pedagogicheskii sbornik, 1885.
11. Paints and painting, St. Petersburg, 1891.
12. Rotation of the plane of polarization, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron, vol. VII, 349–352 (1892).
13. Goethe and his theory of colors, ibid., vol. VIII, 595–596 (1893).
14. Telescopes, ibid., vol. XII, 690–693 (1894).
15. Interference, ibid., vol. XIII, 269–277 (1894).

*) The list includes only Petrushevsky’s principal works on the indicated questions. Many minor notes from ZhRFKhO, the Encyclopedic Dictionary, and other periodicals have not been included in the list.

**) Here and below ZhRFKhO means the Journal of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society. Physical Section.

1. Coloration, ibid., vol. XV, 757—758 (1895).

2. Paints, ibid., vol. XVI, 535—542 (1895).

3. Note on color light scattering, ZhRFKhO, vol. XXVIII, 91—92 (1896).

4. Two instruments for mutually complementary colors, ibid., vol. XXIX, 1—6 (1897).

5. Weightless Bodies, Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, vol. XX, 811—813 (1897).

6. Perspective, ibid., vol. XXIII, 399—400 (1898).

7. Transparency and the color of water, ibid., vol. XXV, 370—371 (1898).

8. Chiaroscuro, ibid., vol. XXIX, 234—235 (1900).

9. Paints and Painting, 2nd ed. St. Petersburg (1901).

10. The color of bodies, Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, vol. XXXVII, 874—880 (1903).