Arrhenius had been an excellent scholar from a very early age. He taught himself to read when he was three, and he was the youngest student in his high school graduating class. Arrhenius's ancestors had traditionally been farmers, but his father, a surveyor and administrator on a Swedish estate, moved the family to the city of Uppsala in the early 1860s to take a position as a supervisor at the University of Uppsala.

Arrhenius entered the University of Uppsala at age seventeen where he studied mathematics, chemistry, and physics and earned his bachelor 's degree in 1878. After three years of graduate study, he became disenchanted with the university because its physics department concentrated on the study of light, a subject in which Arrhenius had little interest. In 1881, he transferred to the Swedish Academy of Sciences, where he studied electrical theory under Erik Edlund (1819-1888). After three years of...