In the twenties of the last century, a Luminous Monk suddenly appeared in Moscow. This is how Muscovites called this mysterious ghost, who for some time now began to meet a whitish figure that exuded an unusual bluish light at night. There is nothing surprising in the fact that soon the ghost flickering in the dark was given an appropriate name, and this whole story was overgrown with all kinds of gossip. However, it is reliably known that a crowd of onlookers constantly followed the Luminous Monk, since Muscovites quickly realized that a ghost was harmless.
The "ghost" was actually harmless, it even often stopped and turned to passers-by, begging them not to mistake him for something supernatural, since, they say, he is the same Muscovite, like all these people. People, of course, did not believe the "ghost", although the Luminous Monk, in fact, had not the slightest relation to the other world.
It was just a Soviet scientist Semyon Isaakovich Volfkovich, Doctor of Chemical Sciences, who at that time was studying the processes of electrothermal sublimation of phosphorus in order to develop the technology for the production of the corresponding mineral fertilizers. But here's the catch: all these experiments with phosphorus were carried out by Wolfkovich in an electric furnace, which released vapors of this substance glowing in the dark (as we all know today), impregnating the scientist's clothes with them.
There is a well-established version of why the scientist did not protect himself from these vapors. First, he did not know about the dangers of phosphorus on the human body, which every schoolchild knows about today (by the way, the scientist lived 84 years and never complained about his health; maybe he knew a lot about phosphorus more than our school ideas about this element?) and secondly, he apparently found it amusing to entertain the rustic inhabitants of Moscow in such a harmless way (after all, he could not help but notice from the first time that his clothes glow in the dark).
Be that as it may, but great people are also not devoid of a sense of humor, moreover, more often than not they have a much larger supply of it and, most importantly, the ability to joke so that these jokes are then passed on from generation to generation, like anecdotes. It is to such an anecdotal case that the case of the Luminous Monk, in which the talented Soviet chemist Semyon Isaakovich Volfkovich once played …