Vladimir Mikhelson

Born June 18 (30), 1860, in the city of Tul’chin, present-day Vinnitsa Oblast; died Feb. 27, 1927, in Moscow. Soviet physicist and meteorologist.

A student of A. G. Stoletov, Mikhel’son graduated from Moscow University in 1883. In 1887 he was sent abroad to Berlin and Paris, where he attended lectures by H. Von Helmholtz, A. Kundt, and G. Lipmann; he returned home in 1889. In 1894 he became a professor at the Moscow Institute of Agriculture, where he set up a physics laboratory and a meteorological observatory.

Mikhel’son was the first to apply the methods of statistical physics to a determination of the energy distribution function in the blackbody radiation spectrum. He generalized the Doppler effecjt to the case in which light passes through a medium having a variable index of refraction. Mikhel’son established the dependence of the propagation velocity of an ignition front on the composition of the gaseous fuel mixture. He laid the foundation for the theory of explosive combustion and developed the theory for the combustion of a gaseous mixture in a Bunsen burner.

Mikhel’son was one of the founders of Russian actinometry. He invented a number of actinometric instruments, including the ice pyrheliometer and bimetallic actinometer. He also worked on the application of meteorology in agriculture.