Lebedev, Sergey Vasilyevich

Sergey Vasilyevich Lebedev, (born July 25 [July 13, old style], 1874, Lublin, Pol.—died May 2, 1934, Leningrad), Russian chemist who developed a method for industrial production of synthetic rubber.

Lebedev joined the faculty of St. Petersburg University in 1902 and in 1910, while researching processes by which small molecules combine to form large ones, Lebedev produced an elastic rubber from butadiene. He founded the Laboratory for Petroleum Refining in 1925 and served as director of the Laboratory of Synthetic Rubber in Leningrad (1928–30). He was made a fellow of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1932. During World War II his process of obtaining butadiene from ethyl alcohol was used not only by the Soviet, but also the German, rubber industry.