Johannes Diderik van der Waals
Early years and education

Johannes Diderik van der Waals was born on 23 November 1837 in Leiden in the Netherlands. He was the eldest of ten children born to Jacobus van der Waals and Elisabeth van den Berg. His father was a carpenter in Leiden. As was usual for all girls and working-class boys in the 19th century, he did not go to the kind of secondary school that would have given him the right to enter university. Instead he went to a school of “advanced primary education”, which he finished at the age of fifteen. He then became a teacher's apprentice in an elementary school. Between 1856 and 1861 he followed courses and gained the necessary qualifications to become a primary school teacher and head teacher.

In 1862, he began to attend lectures in mathematics, physics and astronomy at the university in his city of birth, although he was not qualified to be enrolled as a regular student in part because of his lack of education in classical languages. However, Leiden University had a provision that enabled outside students to take up to four courses a year. In 1863 the Dutch government started a new kind of secondary school (HBS, a school aiming at the children of the higher middle classes). Van der Waals—at that time head of an elementary school—wanted to become a HBS teacher in mathematics and physics and spent two years studying in his spare time for the required examinations.

In 1865, he was appointed as a physics teacher at the HBS in Deventer and in 1866, he received such a position in The Hague, which was close enough to Leiden to allow Van der Waals to resume his courses at the university there. In September 1865, just before moving to Deventer, Van der Waals married the eighteen-year-old Anna Magdalena Smit.
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