We talk about folk craftsmen. Village prose

Oh, how many wonderful discoveries we have
The spirit of enlightenment is preparing
And experience, the son of difficult mistakes,
And genius, friend of paradoxes,
And chance, God the inventor...

This photo from 1912 shows the inventor of color photography, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky. The Russian authorities will provide the talented craftsman with a special car with a laboratory, ships, and boats. And Prokudin-Gorsky will go on his endless colorful travels around Russia: “The only way to show and prove to Russian youth, who are already forgetting or have not seen their Motherland at all, all the power, all the significance, all the greatness of Russia and thereby awaken the much-needed national consciousness is to show its beauty and wealth as they really appeared in nature, i.e. in true colors."

Alexander Pushkin

We present 20 Russian inventors-nuggets who have written their names and discoveries in the history of civilization

Twenty Russian craftsmen in this issue of Rodina are a drop in the ocean. Believe me. There are not even thousands of them. And around each of them there are thousands more of their assistants.

Yes, we have a whole Country of inventors!

We know how to be proud of “our own people” - and we do it right. But we are proud more often in the abstract, in general. And just dig into history, look around a little - there are tons of geniuses of different sizes, in bast shoes or glasses. Unknown, worn out and sonorous - the mental essence of the Fatherland is hidden in them.

Everyone will immediately remember Kulibin. The name of the self-taught man has also become a common noun - who is exalted with this name, and who is mocked at. One sad thing: during his lifetime, Kulibin himself was valued as a toy. You can entertain the yard with funny “automatons”, you can show it to overseas people - and we are not born with bast. But no one thought to build its useful “waterways”.

Many probably know the father and son of the Cherepanovs, Ivan Polzunov: a steam locomotive, a railway, a two-cylinder engine. But the fruits of their technical insights were used only for museums and generalized pride.

By today's standards, our great inventors, whom Rodina recalls, are “suckers” and “losers.” Careers are clumsy, foreheads are bruised and bloody. Not trained by the Unified State Exam tests - they are molded from a completely different test. Not “creative” assistants - pure poets of engineering thought.

Listen to how the turner Nartov called the collection of his machines: “Theatrum Mahinarum”. This is stronger than Goethe's Faust!

But Nartov’s “machines” were implemented with difficulty. No one raised an eyebrow at Pirotsky’s electric carriage (tram); Then we bought it from Siemens. The inventor of the stereo photo, Aleksandrovsky, proved to the navy the advantages of his combat “torpedo” - they pushed it aside and decided to take the English ones. Odessa resident Freidenberg pushed around with his automatic telephone exchange - and sold it to the Swede Erikson, for whom business immediately took off...

So it happened, our “progressives” have a bone in their throats - a different matter for the West. Let it appear later, maybe not better, but “from over the hill” - and it’s not just a matter of elegant tastes; "kickbacks" were not introduced yesterday

So in the school play "The Thunderstorm", remember, Kuligin dreamed of creating a "re-singing mobile". What was stopping you? “Cruel morals, sir, in our city, cruel.” This is our eternal whirlwind. It’s just that the craftsmen are devastated by dust, and they keep coming from everywhere. We have them at the door - they are at the window.

Benardos was cheated by his own people with the rights to electric welding. Left with nothing. And he has, like cookies in his pocket, either a “steamboat on rollers” or a “washing machine.”

Grigorovich was put in a sharashka, and there he figured out how to remove the landing gear of fighters after takeoff. Nothing can break through the craftsmen. And you can’t stop thinking freely.

Doctor Pirogov was indispensable under bullets - exactly until, out of the simplicity of his soul, he told the Tsar, upon returning from the front, the whole truth about his would-be appointees. Of course, the freethinker is out of sight. But it is difficult for the tsar to drive Pirogov out of the history of civilization. Reforging a craftsman is a piece of cake. Lefty Leskovsky, who shod the English flea, asked for one thing before his death: to tell the sovereign that the British don’t clean their guns with bricks. Of course they didn't. The Crimean campaign has begun, and the bullets are dangling in our guns.

But Lefty, whose head was broken by his own people, before his death was not angry with the offenders - he thought about loyalty to the Fatherland. “And with this fidelity he crossed himself and died.”

Maybe someday we will learn to take care of their bright heads...

Fedor Blinov (1831-1902):
CRAWLER

A self-taught Saratov peasant called his brainchild “a carriage with endless rails”

Self-taught mechanic Fedka Blinov is like a serf peasant. Born in 1831, in the family of a blacksmith in the village of Nikolskoye, Volsky district, Saratov province. At the end of the 1840s, when there was shortage of food and famine in the Volga region, the landowner Sergei Semenovich Uvarov (the one who served as the Minister of Education) gave him his freedom. He went to the Volga to work as barge haulers. And in 1850 he pulled out a lucky ticket - he was hired as a fireman on the Hercules.

He studied the steamer like the back of his hand and got to the driver. Once, when the shaft that distributed the transmission to both driving wheels of the steamboat burst, he thought and suggested dividing the burst shaft into two parts. No sooner said than done. I adjusted everything so that the ship became better than before: it could turn, turn around, and it became easier to control. Fame about Blinov flowed along the Volga among knowledgeable people.

And for many years he was haunted by the thought of a self-propelled vehicle - “a carriage with endless rails.” Self-propelled cart with tracks.

I was lucky again: I met the merchant Kanunnikov, who agreed to help with money and a patent. But then there was disagreement. Blinov spat and left. He rented an iron foundry in Balakovo and spent six years building the coveted self-propelled vehicle with a steam engine. The track chain links were drilled by hand from a single piece of metal.

But everything worked out!

Blinov believed that such a useful thing would be torn from his hands if he whistled. In 1896, he took his miracle to Nizhny Novgorod to the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition. And he received a certificate of commendation “For hard work.”

A German company (he didn’t even remember the name) offered to sell Blinov the “self-propelled gun” for good money. He grunted and refused: “I’m a Russian man, I did it for Russia.” And he was supported only by Maxim Gorky, who burst out with “Running Notes” - about how folk artisans are being forced out in favor of foreigners with wallets. The word “rollback” was not used then, but the essence was still the same.

After the fair, Blinov fell ill, his legs were paralyzed from frustration. Died at age 70. And they sent their own tractors abroad - only much later.

Gvozdarev walked around the tractor, thought and climbed onto the caterpillar track to inspect the engine.
- Have you seen such a car or is it just the first time? - Evdokia Gavrilovna asked him.
- Such and such? - responded Gvozdarev. - Yes, no matter how many women there are in your village now, in their entire lives they will not give birth to as many children as the number of motors that have passed through my hands - of all systems, series, names and purposes!

A. Platonov. "Everyday matter"

The essence of the invention

Blinov’s tractor was like this: on a rectangular frame of two longitudinal 5-meter beams and transverse connecting beams, in the middle stood a boiler 1.5 m high and 1.3 m in diameter (from the fire pipe of a burnt steamship). The boiler ran on oil and was designed for a pressure of 6 atmospheres. From the same ship there were two low-speed steam engines (10-12 hp at 40 rpm), standing on the side beams of the frame. Each caterpillar was driven by its own machine. To turn the tractor, one of the steam engines and one of the tracks were turned off.

The tractive force of the self-propelled vehicle is 1100-1200 kg. The speed is three miles per hour.

Competitors

The Englishman John Heathcote received a patent in 1832 and five years later built a prototype of a machine for plowing and draining swamps. American Warren Miller presented his machine at the Marysville State Agricultural Exhibition in 1858. But their machines were not practical. The first crawler tractor was named after Alvin Lombard's machine in 1901.

Andrey Vlasenko (??-??):
COMBINE HARVESTER

The Tver sage agronomist was stopped by the minister's resolution

The strange tarataika, bristling with combs, conveyors, chests and drums, was steadily dragged onto the stubble by four horses. The name of that ingenious machine was: “horse-mounted standing grain harvester.”

There is negligible information about its young creator: no birthday, no date of death. It is only known that in 1865 Andrei Romanovich Vlasenko graduated from the Gory-Goretsky Agricultural School in the Mogilev region. And, having received the certificate, he arrived in the village of Borisovskoye, Bezhetsk district, Tver province, to the estate of I.P. Novosiltsev, for whom he worked as a manager for ten years.

The tests of 1868 were successful. At the same time, agronomist A.R. Vlasenko sent a request to the Department of Agriculture to grant him a ten-year “privilege” for the “horse-mounted standing grain harvest” he invented. Unheard of! Throughout Russia, grain was harvested with sickles and scythes, threshed with a simple flail, and in Vlasenko’s machine everything was combined: harvesting with threshing. That’s how they began to designate it: harvester-thresher.

On the first day of testing, four acres of oats were harvested. In the second, in 10 hours, more than four acres of barley were harvested and threshed. 20 times faster than with your hands! And eight times faster than the American McCormick reaper - which, moreover, does not thresh and loses 10-30 poods of grain per tithe.

The author of the first combine, they say, was modest and self-critical. I considered my car to be imperfect. A group of scientists and landowners issued an appeal to help Vlasenko in such a useful state matter. This, in fact, is where the story of another nugget ends...

Alexander Alekseevich Zelenoy, Adjutant General, Minister of State Property, who was also in charge of agriculture, nailed down the request for the production of a Russian reaper-thresher with a sweeping resolution: “The production of a complex machine is beyond the power of our mechanical factories! We bring simpler harvesting portable machines and threshing machines from abroad borders."

A year later, the Americans and British brought their agricultural machines to the Austro-Hungarian World Exhibition. Vlasenko’s car did not get there: Zelenoy refused to allocate funds for transportation. And Vlasenko, in order to smooth out the inconvenience, in April 1887 was awarded “for highly useful activities” with the gold medal of the Free Economic Society.

Two harvesting threshing machines, built by him with his own savings, worked until they were completely worn out.

A minute later he was already holding the meek comrade by the sleeve. Borisokhlebsky and said:
- You're right. I think so too. Why build... all sorts of combines when there is no personal life, when individuality is suppressed?

I. Ilf, E. Petrov. "Golden calf"

The essence of the invention

Vlasenko’s combine had a comb for tearing off ears of grain, a bucket conveyor for feeding the grain mass to the threshing drum, as well as a large wooden chest for collecting grain that had passed through the sieves and separated from the heap of straw, weeds, earth and sand. The threshed ears and straw came off the sieve and fell into hanging bags.

The machine was driven by three horses, and when the grain was thick, by two pairs of horses and was serviced by two workers.

Competitors

The first analogues appeared in the USA in 1879. You can compare: an American car was moved by 24 mules and served by 7 workers. At the same time, the performance is the same as that of a machine

Vlasenko, who worked with three horses and two workers. Grain losses were also incomparable. By 1887, several combine harvesters appeared, improved by Benjamin Holt (he is considered the inventor of the combine harvester in the USA). In 1890, their factory production began.

Vladimir Zvorykin (1888-1982):
TV

The Murom craftsman invented it in a foreign land, but all his life he was eager to go to Russia

Why did he run away to America and never return? They usually argue (both ordinary people and important officials) in the spirit that overseas, unlike us, they know how to appreciate eccentrics, “since they are the ones who often invent something new.” This is both true and false - life is more complicated. Much can be read in Zvorykin’s unfinished memoirs. Starting with how the son of the merchant of the first guild Kozma Zvorykin, a grain merchant, owner of steamships and a banker, once got the hang of making newfangled electric bells for all Murom neighbors. And about student rallies. And about the madness later, when the country fell into gangster chaos after the February demo-revolution and never emerged. I couldn’t find anything about my adventures in finding conditions for scientific work either among the whites or the reds, so I fled to America, where it was quiet and rich. Were they waiting for the “eccentric” there?

In 1923, Zworykin, having joined Westinghouse (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), tried to patent his idea for electronic television. The patent was refused. And the company’s management laughed, asking him to “do something more useful.” He learned that the ideas here make sense when “the opportunity for profit becomes obvious to business people.” This opportunity seemed obvious a little later to the president of RCA, David Sarnov - if not for his support, who knows, Zvorykin would have been able to get through?

Already in 1933, he was invited to Russia: he came, performed and listened a lot, traveled around the country exclusively by plane (Beria personally singled him out), and went to theaters. At the same time, he was afraid and afraid. But they received him warmly. He was afraid and afraid, but a year later he flew back again and concluded a solid deal for RCA. And then I was able to fly only in 1959.

Documents have been preserved showing how the FBI was watching him all this time. Surveillance, wiretapping, opening mail, apartment searches, even denunciations from senators. In 1945, travel from the United States was prohibited, and his passport was taken away for two years. Zvorykin began to cooperate with the Foundation for Relief of War Victims in Russia.

There they were suspected of collaborating with the Soviets. They believed that he was spying for America. And he invented it for himself - fortunately there were people who saw their commercial sense in this. In 1967, having arrived as a tourist in Vladimir, he got into a taxi without permission and waved to his native closed city of Murom...

He never learned English, having lived for many years in the USA. On July 29, 1982, he gave his last telephone interview at Princeton Hospital. He remembered his youth and said that he was about to die of old age. And he died a couple of hours later.

A man took a TV to the area to have it repaired - there was no way it could be repaired any closer. They repaired it with great difficulties and difficulties - I was tired, nervous, angry... In the evening I turned it on - some nonsense was playing. The man was offended by everything in the world and kicked him on TV. Turned it off.

V. Shukshin. "Imaginary Stories"

The essence of the invention

In 1931, Vladimir Zvorykin created an iconoscope in America, a transmitting cathode-ray tube with high photosensitivity and the ability to accumulate the necessary charge of point photocells. (When the transmitted image is scanned, its elements act on the photosensitive layer in millionths of a second. In order for the picture to be clear and bright, it is necessary to strengthen the photocurrent excited by the image - this has not been possible before).

The first Soviet TV "VK" was created based on Zvorykin's designs.

Competitors

There was a self-taught Idahoan, Philo Farnsworth, who developed the Image Dissector in 1928. In the same year, Hungarian Kalman Tihanyi patented his television camera. But their developments were inferior to Zvorykin’s, especially since David Sarnov, president of RCA, for which Zvorykin worked, soon bought their patents for $1 million.

Alexander Ponyatov (1892-1980):
VIDEO RECORDER

A peasant from the village of Russkaya Aisha crafted this miracle for seven years

The meeting of Nikita Khrushchev with President Nixon in the pavilion of Sokolniki Park, at the opening of the 1959 American Exhibition, was recorded by overseas guests using an Ampex video recorder. Nixon gave Khrushchev a videotape of the recording. But Khrushchev could not watch it: there was nothing else to do then.

And the name of the company "Ampex" was deciphered by the initials of its creator Alexander Matveevich Ponyatov - with the postscript experimental, experimental.

The son of a wealthy peasant who lived in logging, apiaries and trade, Alexander Matveevich was born on March 25, 1892 in the village of Russkaya Aisha, Chepchugov volost, Kazan province. He turned out to be big-headed and handy. After studying at a real school, he entered physics and mathematics at Kazan University, from there he transferred to the Imperial Higher Technical School (the current Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School) and then to the Polytechnic of the German city of Karlsruhe (he escaped punishment for participating in student unrest). Then war, revolution, Chinese emigration, France, America...

There was a case where I worked without salary. At the same time, he built a laboratory in the garage. Got up. By the age of 50, he created his own company, Ampex. For seven years, with a team of researchers (among them young Ray Dolby, who would later create dolby digital), he was engaged in the promising development of a video recorder - and at the age of 64 he was ahead of all competitors...

The inventor was showered with awards - he even received a Hollywood Oscar for his contribution to the development of video technology. By the way, the word “video” (from the Latin vide - to watch) took root thanks to his light hand. And why didn’t he return to his homeland... I tried to find my relatives, they received letters and were silent in response (as is now commonly believed: they were afraid). And before his death, Ponyatov admitted how he was suffering: he did not leave his children, “he would have passed on everything to his country, all his experience, but this is impossible. They are not even allowed to create a branch of my company in Russia.”

In his old age, the great engineer subscribed to the Soviet newspaper Izvestia. Died in 1980. After 15 years, his unsinkable Ampex also gave up life.

All his life, the inventor planted birch trees near each of his offices.

There were also several simpler computers in the room, scanners and some kind of complex video recorder with many indicators. Tatarsky was greatly impressed by one detail - the video recorder had a round wheel with a handle, like those found on sewing machines, and with its help it was possible to scroll through frames manually.

V. Pelevin. Generation "P"

The essence of the invention

On April 4, 1956, at the National Association of Radio-Television Journalists convention in Chicago, Ponyatov demonstrated the first commercial video recorder, the AmpexVRX-1000. All leading US television studios immediately purchased it.

Previously, kilometers of film were required to record a two-minute video. A television signal occupies a frequency band 500 times wider than a broadcast (sound) signal. With such a stripe, the magnetic tape flies past the magnetic head at a speed of 50 meters per second. To reduce this speed, Poniatov and his team used cross-line recording with rotating heads onto a relatively wide tape (two inches, or 50.8 mm) with four rotating heads.

Competitors

At first, Ampex's main competitor in the development of video recording devices was RCA, where Vladimir Zvorykin worked. But Poniatov was a year ahead of them.

S. Apostolov-Berdichevsky (??-??) and Mikhail Freidenberg (1858-1920):
ATS

Two craftsmen from Odessa made the whole world think about the importance of the “connector”

One day in 1881, a balloon rose above the market on Privoznaya Square in Odessa. A 23-year-old comedian waved his hat from the balloon. Or an artist. Or a designer. Or all together and at once - Mishka Freidenberg (pseudonym "Wasp") was a famous inventor. By the way, he built the balloon according to his own drawings - from binding calico. And the tickets below were sold by his young friend Leonid Pasternak, in the near future a famous artist and father of an equally famous poet...

Freudenberg, the son of a craftsman, was born in the town of Prasnysz (now Polish Przasnysz) in the Płock province. As an 18-year-old boy, he opened the first drama theater in Yevpatoria: he directed and acted. Then he plunged headlong into satire, then took part in Joseph Timchenko’s work on the first movie camera...

He seemed to grasp at everything - everything was interesting to him. On this basis, he became friends with Berdichevsky (Apostolov) - he worked in Timchenko’s workshop at the university. So little is known about Berdichevsky, the smartest inventor, that, alas, we can repeat little. But the fact remains: in the early 1890s, Berdichevsky and Freudenberg suddenly started telephone communications. The problem is not routine - it is cosmic! And the view is wider than from a balloon over the square: a world with a telephone network will be entangled in almost intimate intimacy! “Telephone Connector” is what they called their station.

By 1893, they introduced an automatic telephone exchange with 250 numbers at the Department of Applied Physics and Mechanics of the Novorossiysk University in Odessa. Such a breakthrough! But he was greeted sourly. And then... Then they went to London. The British appreciated it. And they issued a patent in 1895. And then they issued patents for all the improvements and improvements - the capacity of their PBX expanded to 10 thousand numbers...

It was not possible to organize my own business. Berdichevsky gave up on everything and returned to Odessa. And Freidenberg was cheating, and even sold the patent to Erickson’s company...

Connect with the "Slavic Bazaar"! - I ask.
- Finally! - the hoarse bass answers. - And Fuchs is with you?
- Which Fuchs? I ask you to connect me to the "Slavic Bazaar"!!
- You are in the Slavic Bazaar! Okay, I’ll come... Order me, my dear, a portion of sturgeon selyanka... I haven’t had lunch yet...
Ugh! God knows what! - I think, moving away from the phone. - Maybe I don’t know how to handle a phone, I’m getting confused... First you need to twist this thing, then take this thing off and put it to your ear... Then hang this thing on these things and turn this thing three times... It seems So!

A. Chekhov. "At the phone"

The essence of the invention

The main element of a ten-step automatic telephone exchange is an electromechanical device that automatically analyzes incoming pulses. Each pulse corresponds to a number that is dialed during pulse dialing. The contact field is divided into 10 rows, 10 contacts each (deka - Greek "ten"). Stepping - because the ratchet mechanism moves the rotating contact brushes through ten fixed positions on the contact field step by step.

Competitors

The first telephone exchange was built in 1877 according to the design of the Hungarian engineer T. Puskas. However, the quality of communication was so low that the examination recognized that it was possible to speak “only over distances of up to 10 kilometers.” In 1889, the American A. Stringer patented a decade-step finder. And the first automatic telephone exchange of the ten-step type was created by Freidenberg and Berdichevsky. 3 years after the British, they were issued a patent in Russia.

Fyodor Pirotsky (1845-1898):
ELECTRIC TRAM

The only one who immediately appreciated the prospects of the horned “devilishness” was the cunning German Siemens

Pirotsky was the son of Apollo, a military medic. The life of Fyodor Apollonovich was spent in uniform, in full swing. But he, apparently, was not a “hard-toothed” and a desperate campaigner. I thought more and more not about ranks, but about the good of the Fatherland.

He studied at the cadet school, at the artillery school, and served in the artillery. But he suffered from “electricity”. While serving in St. Petersburg, he tormented the governing bodies with irrepressible undertakings. He developed a special system of blast furnaces and bakery furnaces. He showed off his article “On the transfer of the work of water, as a mover, to any distance by means of galvanic current.” The talk was actually about creating a network of hydroelectric power stations, which “in Russia... can have enormous application, which is not difficult to see by looking at the map.” (I suggested starting with the Narva Falls).

And in 1875-1876 he conducted experiments by running a trailer on the railway near Sestroretsk. An electric motor and a gearbox were suspended from the frame of the horse-drawn carriage, which transmitted rotation to the wheels. The newspapers were seething with enthusiasm, the owners of the horse-drawn cars angrily denounced the “devilry.” But the authorities shrugged it off and didn’t give money to improve the design...

They say that only Carl Siemens was immediately interested. A well-connected man, favored by the St. Petersburg authorities, he already had a lucrative contract to create a Russian telegraph network. And in the case of Pirotsky, I realized that the matter was worth the candle. I asked the inventor, studied the drawings...

In 1881, the Siemens brothers' company began manufacturing carriages that suspiciously resembled the design of a Russian engineer. Their trams ran - and Russia began to buy them from Siemens in 1892. What about Pirotsky?

Nothing. Fed up with his fantasies, he was sent into retirement with a reduced pension, which you couldn’t live on in St. Petersburg. I checked into a hotel in Alyoshki (Tsyurupinsk, Kherson region). In May 1898, the newspaper "Yug" reported that on February 28, the useless Fyodor Apollonovich had died. There was nothing to bury him, no money was found on him, so his junk was auctioned off on the square for the funeral. We gained 65 rubles. Nobody wanted to buy five chests, four suitcases and three boxes with some papers, paintings and books.

Berlioz did not listen to the beggar and the regent's talk, he ran up to the turnstile and grabbed it with his hand. Having turned it, he was about to step onto the rails when red and white light splashed in his face: the inscription “Beware of the tram!” lit up in the glass box. Immediately this tram flew up...

M. Bulgakov. "Master and Margarita"

The essence of the invention

In September 1874, at Volkovo Pole in St. Petersburg, Fyodor Pirotsky showed how a six-horsepower dynamo, driven by a steam locomotive, produces a current that, through wires at a distance of 50 meters, drives a second dynamo. In 1876, a trailer with an electric motor was tested. The power supply was supplied through rails, one of which served as a forward wire, and the other as a reverse wire (at a DC voltage of 100 V). A carriage with 40 passengers was traveling at a speed of 10-12 km/h. After modifications, the demonstration took place in August 1880 in St. Petersburg.

Competitors

Pirotsky's experiments remained experiments. Werner von Siemens is considered to be the inventor of the tram. After the Berlin Exhibition, the brothers demonstrated their train throughout Europe until the first Siemens & Halske tram was launched on a purpose-built railway between Berlin and Lichterfeld in 1881.

Ivan Alexandrovsky (1817-1894):
STEREO CAMERA

The master's favorite invention was torpedoed by submarines and bureaucracy

He was clearly an artistic person. And if he got carried away, he dived headlong into any new business. This happened with the previously unknown daguerreotype art. (Photography began with the daguerreotype, which used silver-plated copper plates).

In 1851, his announcement appeared in the Yaroslavl Provincial Gazette: he was ready to take portraits (of any size) for the townspeople. And just a couple of years later, St. Petersburg newspapers informed the venerable society about a newfangled daguerreotype studio that opened on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and Bolshaya Sadovaya. “Petersburgsky Vestnik” sang enthusiastically: “A good painter and a very knowledgeable chemist, Aleksandrovsky devoted himself to light painting and became an experienced daguerreotypist and photographer... and achieved a significant degree of perfection. His collodiontypes on glass and paper, prepared according to a new, improved method, are especially remarkable way..."

He worked non-stop. I went to the Caucasus for landscape photography. At the Nizhny Novgorod Fair he made a daguerreotype portrait of the popular critic N.A. Dobrolyubov with his father. He photographed the family and entourage of Alexander II a lot. In 1852, Aleksandrovsky made the first stereoscopic photographs with a camera invented by himself. In 1859 he received the title of "Photographer of His Imperial Majesty"...

It seemed like what more could you want from life! And in the early 1860s, an artistic person suddenly designed the first submarine in Russia (in the form of a triangle with a round base, in the shape of the body of a sturgeon fish with a sharp back). Next he developed underwater mines - “torpedoes”. And in 1866 he recklessly sold his photographic studio in connection with his enlistment in the naval department...

Well, then everything was as almost always. They did not allow the submarine to be completed, and they completely refused to make torpedoes (the British soon acquired them). In 1880, Aleksandrovsky was removed from work, and two years later he was fired from service. The money they promised to return was his own! - not returned.

The forgotten, bankrupt 77-year-old inventor of torpedoes, submarines and cameras died in 1894 in a hospital for the poor.

Two provincial girls, who did not recognize the “best poet of Russia”, but mistook him for a beach photographer, began persistently asking how much he charged for a photograph against the backdrop of the Karadag ridge. One good friend of Yana went crazy: “Don’t you recognize the great poet?.. But where did you see such equipment among hucksters?

V. Aksenov. "Mysterious Passion"

The essence of the invention

Previously, “a daguerreotype apparatus was used, which had one objective glass. Objects were removed either in two steps using one machine or two machines placed at a distance from one another; but both of these methods did not give satisfactory results.”

In Aleksandrovsky's stereo camera these shortcomings are eliminated. It consisted of two wooden boxes, one of which was inserted into the other. The inner box is divided into two halves by a wooden partition. Its back is a cassette type: frosted glass was inserted into it for focusing, and then a cassette with a plate. The front of the outer box had two holes into which two lenses were inserted.

Competitors

The principle of operation of the two-lens apparatus was described by the English optical physicist David Brewster. However, Ivan Alexandrovsky was the first to create it. In 1875, Russian designer D.P. Ezuchevsky improved a stereoscopic camera.

Joseph Timchenko (1852-1924):
CINEMA CAMERA

The son of a village shoemaker was showing films two years before the Lumiere brothers

In 1872, the world was alarmed: was the traveler Miklouho-Maclay really eaten by the natives? A corvette was sent to rescue the scientist. And on the banks of the Kharkov Lopan River, optical mechanic apprentice Osya Timchenko was grieving. Two years later, he and his friends moved to the sea, to Odessa. Alas, it was impossible to get to Oceania. He got a job at a ship repair yard. I made it little by little. And when the Novorossiysk (current Odessa) University announced a vacancy for a mechanic in training workshops, Timchenko was chosen from four applicants.

In a two-story workshop, the second floor was reserved for Joseph himself with his wife and children (there will be eight of them). For more than forty years he would be in charge of the entire mechanical economy of the university, where outstanding minds worked and created - Mechnikov, Sechenov, Shvedov. He built devices for the observatory and mud baths, instruments for surgeons and meteorologists. And one fine day, a prominent Russian physicist Nikolai Lyubimov, who was studying stroboscopic phenomena, approached him. He asked the mechanic to come up with a kind of “snail” - a jump mechanism that allows you to intermittently change frames in the strobe.

A month later the device was ready. And off we go! To entertain his friends, Joseph built a “kinetoscope” (or “electrotachiscope”). On November 7, 1893, the Odessa Leaflet reported: “An art exhibition of “living photographs” set in motion by an electric machine has opened in the house of the France Hotel.” For ten days they showed two “films” filmed at the hippodrome - “The Javelin Thrower” and “The Horseman”. The Lumiere brothers were still sleeping quietly in distant Paris...

On January 9, 1894, Professor Lyubimov demonstrated these first-ever films to Moscow spectators - at the 9th Congress of Russian Naturalists and Doctors. Collective gratitude was expressed to mechanic Timchenko. This is where the story of the first movie camera ended. A fully working Timchenko kinetoscope is kept to this day in the Moscow Polytechnic Museum under the sign: “The first cinematography for filming, printing and showing tape.”

Until the end of his days, Osip Timchenko lived in Odessa and continued to invent.

The projectionist pulled on two hooks stuck into logs, a canvas that, by all appearances, had once been white. The movie camera stared at this canvas with one eye. For adjustment, logs, lumps, scraps, chips were placed under the device... And then brother Azary turned the dynamo, a buzz, a click, a crack was heard, and a spot appeared on the dirty gray canvas, and then faded letters.
Everyone read at once: “When the dead awaken,” and immediately shouted at each other: “Sha!” Read about yourself!

V. Astafiev. "Pass"

The essence of the invention

How did the jump mechanism operate in Timchenko’s kinetoscope? The "snail" provided intermittent movement of the tape so that the image paused when projected before being replaced by the next frame. This was achieved by a special gear design in the mechanism.

Competitors

Two years after the premiere of Joseph Timchenko's films - on December 28, 1895 - Auguste and Louis Lumière held the first commercial screenings of films. The Lumiere device appeared later than the Russian one, but they were the first to put cinema on stream, make it fashionable and commercially successful.

Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944):
COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY

A chemist from Funikova Mountain dreamed of exhibiting star showers

One day on March 29, 1908, Tolstoy received a letter in Yasnaya Polyana. A certain Prokudin-Gorsky told the classic: the other day I had the opportunity to develop someone’s (“I forgot his last name”) color photographic plate on which someone photographed the writer. So, this someone shot Tolstoy simply horribly. While the author of the letter “succeeded, after many years of work, in achieving excellent reproduction of images in true colors.” The author allows himself to ask Lev Nikolaevich “to come for one or two days in order to take several photographs in color of you and your wife.”

Lev Nikolaevich read it gloomily and ordered the secretary not to respond to the letter, to “keep silent.” “I don’t want to be photographed, but Sofya Andreevna would like it.” In a word, by morning Tolstoy changed his mind and agreed.

In May, Prokudin-Gorsky arrived for three days in Yasnaya Polyana.

The whole world now knows this shooting.

Very little time will pass before he will be called “the creator of true homeland studies.” He was born in 1863 in the family of a retired officer in the village of Funikova Gora, Vladimir province. Him, who studied with Mendeleev himself. Him, who married the daughter of a Russian metallurgist, director of the Gatchina copper smelters and steel mills A.S. Lavrova. And already at the end of the 19th century, he gave reports “On photographing star showers”...

The Russian authorities will provide him with a special car with a laboratory, ships, boats, they will bring him a Ford, and they will order him to do everything in his favor. And Prokudin-Gorsky will go on his endless colorful journeys. As if for us today, he wrote about the significance of his works: “The only way to show and prove to Russian youth, who are already forgetting or have not seen their Motherland at all, all the power, all the significance, all the greatness of Russia and thereby awaken the much-needed national consciousness is to show it beauty and wealth as they really appeared in nature, that is, in true colors."

After the revolution, Prokudin-Gorsky was appointed professor at the Photo and Film Institute, but in the summer of 1918, having learned about the execution of the royal family, he left Russia. Sergei Mikhailovich died in Paris in 1944. He was buried in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois.

Of the 3,500 surviving negatives, he took away about two thousand. The heirs sold them for next to nothing. Today they are kept in the US Library of Congress...

It doesn’t matter, they took it off, dear. Disfigured. Am I really like that?
Photographer says:
- I photograph operetta performers, and they are not so offended. And then I found one like that - he has a lot of wrinkles... The lens takes too sharply, too sharply... You don’t know the technique, but you’re also trying to be a critic.

M. Zoshchenko. "Photocard"

The essence of the invention

Prokudin-Gorsky managed to select a complex composition that increases the photosensitivity of the silver bromine plate and makes it evenly sensitive to all colors.

If previous methods required exposure “in bright sunlight” for up to 30-40 minutes (and in the pavilion from one and a half to three and a half hours), then the Prokudin-Gorsky method made exposure almost instantaneous. Moreover, it was possible to make any number of copies from negatives and print photographs on paper.

Competitors

In 1907, the Lumiere company patented the Autochrome photographic plates, but Lumiere also had a long exposure, the color negative disappeared when turned into a slide (which means it was impossible to print pictures), and the slide faded and cracked under the projector's flashlight.

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915):
LIGHT MUSIC

The great experimenter knew that sounds can be seen and felt by all senses

Scriabin was not of this world. He came out like an elf to the piano, and the exalted poets felt “some kind of light horror.” He didn’t seem to argue: “Everything that surrounds me, and I myself, is nothing more than a dream.” That's how life flew by.

The five-year-old Muscovite (the boy Sasha was born in December 1871, according to the new style on January 6, 1872) already played the piano well, but he was sent to study in the cadet corps - the son of a prominent diplomat, according to family tradition, was being prepared for the military. And yet, having said goodbye to the cadetship, Scriabin went to the Moscow Conservatory. Here one of the brightest (in the future) composers of the century was expelled from the composition class for poor academic performance. And he completed the piano course with a small gold medal.

Friend Konstantin Balmont, listening to Scriabin’s music, felt “the smell of ancient witchcraft.” Both sank deeper and deeper into thoughts about the God-man, about the struggle between light and darkness. Time has strained my nerves. Scriabin began to “see” his works either in the form of luminous spheres or crystal garlands. I thought more and more deeply about how to enchant unknown time - by ordering chaos with music...

Against this background, his “Prometheus” appeared, the symphonic “Poem of Fire” for piano, orchestra (including organ), voice (or choir) and Luce (Italian - light) part. Professor A. Moser, based on his sketches, created a special color-music apparatus. Engineer P. Millar is another. But the apparatus went wrong, the public remained cold...

Why did Scriabin need this? Each tonality for him had its own color and characteristic. Red (C major) is hell. Blue (F-sharp major) and purple (C-sharp major) - mind. The key of D major is yellow like the sun. And G major is orange... The synthesis of sensory associations (he also dreamed of influencing the sense of smell, touch, and everything) should control the listener’s imagination...

The one who had great things ahead of him died from a terrible absurdity: he unsuccessfully squeezed out a boil, resulting in sepsis. He was buried at Novodevichy. Dying, the magical Scriabin warned: “Humanity will have to go through a terrible era; all mysticism will disappear, spiritual needs will fade away. The age of machines, electricity and purely mercantile aspirations will come. Terrible trials are coming...”

Sunny bunnies jumped on the barrel tart's cheeks, wrinkles smoothed out, cheerful and harmonious balalaika music swept across the skies.

V. Aksenov. "Overstocked barrel"

The essence of the invention

The Scriabin Museum in Moscow houses a light apparatus made by physicist A. Moser specifically for Prometheus. Twelve light bulbs on a wooden circle. The seven alternate according to the colors of the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). Five additional ones connect the extreme spectral colors, forming a transition from violet to red, pink, rose-red... This circle corresponds to the circle of fifths: red - do, orange - salt, yellow - re, green - mi...

Competitors

The Russian composer N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov attached great importance to the color symbolism of tonalities. The poet K. Balmont even assigns a double name to the “unified color-sound system”: Scriabin - Rimsky-Korsakov.

Andrey Nartov (1693-1756):
LATHE WITH SUPPORT

Peter the Great's personal turner gave lessons in craftsmanship to European monarchs

Lathes are usually thought of as a monster that screams, mischievously, grins and barks. But you can think like that only until you see Nartov’s machines (there are ones in the Hermitage). It seems that they are not meant to work, but to dance cotillions. All in monograms, with patterns of birds and Achilles, twisted legs and quirks in the Russian Baroque style. Neither before nor after Nartov there were such lathes. They also have a personal engraving on them: “Mechanic Andrey Nartov. St. Petersburg.”

Peter I noticed this craftsman in 1712: he pulled 16-year-old Andrei Nartov from the workshops of the Moscow School of Mathematical and Navigational Sciences to the capital - and promoted him to become his “personal turner.” A “turning shop” was set up right in the royal palace, in which Nartov worked and lived, and Peter was not separated from him until his death.

Nartov first solved the main problem: the previous machines were still suitable for wood, but not for metal. To cut metal, you need to firmly fix the cutter and not manually move it along the workpiece. Nartov solved this problem already in 1717. To celebrate, Peter sent him to Europe to spy on the new products there and to show off his own. Europe was impressed by Nart machines. In Berlin, Friedrich Wilhelm I asked to see Nartov for a stream. It’s a pity that the turner Nartov shared the secrets of his craft with the Prussian “soldier king”.

For a long time Nartov was held in such esteem. Peter I himself baptized his son. But Peter died in January 1725. And Nartov was “asked” from the palace to go to Moscow to establish coinage technology. Nartov took up the gurtile machines (for notching the “edge”, the edges of coins). Helped in some way in making the Tsar Bell. I came up with “machines for the observatory”...

In the end, Nartov was returned to St. Petersburg to look after the former royal workshop, the “Laboratory of Mechanical Affairs.” Then Nartov realized himself as the keeper of the Legacy of the great king! Work wrote: "Reliable narratives and speeches of Peter the Great." Apparently he was terribly self-important. His enemy, Ivan Danilovich Schumacher, secretary of the Academy of Sciences, puffed that this interpreter of covenants was uncouth and “knew nothing except the art of turning.” Lomonosov knocked Nartov down - and intrigue and chaos ensued...

But why do we need this mess now? Nartov continued to invent - that’s the main thing. Andrei Konstantinovich left the work: “Theatrum Mahinarum, that is, a clear spectacle of machines,” with drawings of three dozen of his machines.

The second Gauri jumped out of the grave, and the first twin immediately moved straight towards him, as if he were another part of the machine, another spindle of some, say, lathe, moving along the same inevitable bed towards its nest...

W. Faulkner. "Defiler of Ashes"

The essence of the invention

Before Nartov’s invention, when working on a machine, the cutter was either adapted somehow, or even simply held in the hand. Nartov whipped up a reliable “pedestal” (as he himself called it) for the lathe, also known as a support (Latin supporto - I support), the principle of operation of which has not changed to this day. The “iron hand” holding the cutter was moved with the help of a screw pair, that is, a screw screwed into a nut.

Competitors

The invention of the caliper was attributed to the Englishman Henry Maudsley - his lathe from 1797 has been preserved (in the London Science Museum). But there is nothing to argue about here - Nartov was 80 years ahead of the Englishman.

Nicholas Benardos (1842-1905):
ELECTRIC WELDING

The genius engineer who mastered the voltaic arc dreamed of a steamship on rollers

This steamer on the rollers gave Benardos no rest. Well, imagine: he skips shallows and avoids obstacles on the rails. By that time, the dreamer had already married, rebuilt an estate near the Kostroma village of Lukh, and was even elected to the provincial zemstvo assembly. But he became a victim of gossip - about his alleged affair with Princess Bersenyeva. Benardos had a short conversation - he took and flogged the gossiper. For insult, the court sentenced him to Siberia, which was replaced by a three-month guardhouse and deprivation of the right to work in the civil service. That's when he took up the all-terrain steamer.

He built it, named it “Nikolai” in honor of his eldest son, tested it by sailing 300 km along Lukh and Klyazma to Gorokhovets. I took my miracle to St. Petersburg. Demonstrated successfully. Not a single official, not a single industrialist raised an eyebrow. The steamer under which the estate was mortgaged was used for firewood...

But everyone in the Benardos family was stubborn. The portrait of the grandfather general, Pantelei Yegorovich, is in the gallery of heroes of the Patriotic War of 1812 in the Hermitage. Father, colonel, passed the Crimean one. Well, his son, having lost the ship, became interested in... electrical engineering.

In 1882, at the International Electrical Exhibition in Paris, Benardos first demonstrated a new method of electric welding: he called his method of “connecting and separating metals by the action of electric current” “electrohephaestus”. Onlookers at the exhibition watched as Benardos cut thick rails - and his invention was awarded a gold medal.

But there was no money to obtain a patent. The inventor's estate was auctioned off for debts. It was then that the wealthy merchant Olshevsky offered help to Benardos - on the condition that he would become a co-owner of the patents. Benardos agreed, received patents in France, Great Britain, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, USA, Switzerland and Austria-Hungary. In all patents, except the Russian one, Olshevsky is listed as a co-owner...

In 1898, he moved to Fastov, near Kyiv - there was absolutely nothing to live on. He died on September 21, 1905 in the Fastov almshouse.

The model of the welder's suit (produced by the Shatura garment factory) was called "Benardos".

Slimy tunnel walls, twisted rails, black puddles, and electric welding sparks flew across the screen.
“This is not for me,” I said. - Let accountants and hairdressers do this...
“It means you don’t know what you want,” said the round-headed man. - This is a difficult case. I'm sorry, are you not Intel?

The Strugatsky brothers. "Predatory Things of the Century"

The essence of the invention

Electric carbon arc welding is called the Benardos method. In the “privilege” this method was described as follows: “The subject of the invention... is based on the formation of a voltaic arc between the metal processing place that constitutes one electrode and the handle containing the other electrode, which is brought to this place...”

Competitors

At the 4th Electric Exhibition in St. Petersburg, a dispute began between Benardos and Nikol Slavyanov, a Ural engineer, about primacy in the discovery of electric welding. In 1892, a commission of experts of the Russian Technical Society gave an opinion in favor of both inventors. Then the court established the complete independence of the methods of “electrohephaestus” by Benardos and “electric casting of metals” by Slavyanov.

Nikolai Pirogov (1810 -1881):
GYPSUM AND NARCOSIS

The founder of military field surgery operated on the wounded while kneeling

In June 1850, forty-year-old Doctor Pirogov and twenty-two-year-old Baroness Alexandra Bistrom were on their honeymoon. Getting ready for a wedding at the estate of the bride's parents, Pirogov asked Alexandra Antonovna to gather all the poor souls who needed surgery for his arrival: he wouldn't get bored doing nothing on his honeymoon...

Three years earlier, on February 14, 1847, Nikolai Ivanovich performed the first operation using ether anesthesia. While others were arguing about the innovation, Pirogov tested the properties of ether on dogs, calves, even on himself and his assistants. And, having decided to use ether anesthesia in the war, he immediately left for the Caucasus. And to the hottest point at that time. In the Samurt detachment, which besieged the fortified village of Salta, the infirmary consisted of several huts with benches made of stones and covered with straw. Pirogov performed 100 operations with ether anesthesia while kneeling. For the first time in the world - on the battlefield.

And in 1853, the Crimean War began - and Nikolai Ivanovich rushed to Sevastopol. The first thing I did was introduce triage of the wounded - also for the first time. Who should be operated on urgently, under bullets, who should be evacuated to the rear after first aid. Thanks to Pirogov, sisters of mercy appeared in the Russian army: he organized the “Exaltation of the Cross community of sisters caring for the wounded and sick” and wrote to his wife: “Until now, we have completely ignored the wonderful talents of our women.” And a year before that, he began using a molded alabaster bandage to heal fractures...

After the fall of Sevastopol, the founder of military field medicine, at a reception with Alexander II, with all the directness of a soldier, said that he was thinking about the leadership of the army by Prince Menshikov. How did the wise king-reformer respond? Pirogov was removed from the Medical-Surgical Academy, exiled first as a trustee of the Odessa and Kyiv educational districts, then even abroad, to Heidelberg, Germany, to supervise Russian candidates for professors...

Before his death, Pirogov carefully indicated the diagnosis of his illness in a note.

"Why anesthesia?" - I asked, not believing my ears. After all, I thought that the operation was over and that they would now start stitching up the wound.
“Something needs to be filled in here,” said Aleksandrov.
"Fill it with? Iodine?" - I asked.
"No".
I think I asked - with what? And it seems he didn't answer.
“I can handle it anyway,” I said.
"No, you can't stand it."
“No need for anesthesia,” I asked, “otherwise I’m a drinker and will be violent under anesthesia.”

Yu. Olesha. "Book of Farewell"

The essence of the invention

The hypnotic effect of ether (“sweet vitriol”) has been known for a long time. Pirogov also designed a special mask that allows you to inhale a precisely specified amount of ether.

Pirogov was inspired to use gypsum in medicine by the sculptor N.A. Stepanov: the doctor saw in the workshop how plaster bound the canvas. And for the next patient with a fractured leg he applied canvas strips soaked in a plaster solution. The oblique fracture, which had a strong bleeding, healed even without suppuration.

Competitors

In foreign literature, the idea of ​​a plaster cast is sometimes attributed to the Belgian doctor Mathiesen, but it is documented that he was the first to propose and apply it

N. I. Pirogov. The idea of ​​intravenous anesthesia also belonged entirely to Nikolai Ivanovich, and not to Flourens, Or or Burckhardt. The same goes for intratracheal anesthesia. Pirogov used it five years before the Englishman John Snow.

Sergei Bryukhonenko (1890 -1960):
ARTIFICIAL CIRCULATORY DEVICE

The successful experiments of the desperate physiologist exceeded the imagination of the best writers

On the table is the dog's head, separate from the body - tubes and hoses connect it to an intricate system of pumps and vessels that replace the lungs and heart. The head squints from the bright light, the ears tremble, hearing the blows of the hammer, the tongue licks the nose, smelling the pungent smell of lemon...

This is not some kind of “horror” film, but footage from the educational film “Experiments in Revitalizing the Organism” (1940), which told about the research of physiologist Sergei Bryukhonenko. In that film, he also brought to life experimental dogs - Chernoushka, Bunny and Naida, wagging their tails, confirmed that the dizzying experiments were successful.

And all thanks to Bryukhonenko’s autojector.

Sergei Sergeevich, a hereditary engineer, originally from the town of Kozlov (Michurinsk), went to the front in 1914, immediately after graduating from the medical faculty of Moscow University. He returned before the revolution, worked for many years in the department of clinical pathology and therapy of the military hospital in Lefortovo - as an assistant to a professor (like Bulgakov’s Dr. Bormental). Together with the doctor Sergei Chechulin, he was involved in the development of something previously impossible - a device capable of supplying the body with oxygenated blood, completely replacing the heart and lungs. The first trial experiment with an “autojector” (that’s what they called the device) was carried out already in 1924...

The pile of pumps, tubes, hoses and tanks looked ominous - but the miracle happened. The autojector was demonstrated at the II All-Russian Congress of Pathologists (1925), at the II All-Union Congress of Physiologists in Leningrad (1926). It was patented in the USSR, Germany, England, France...

In 1936, Bryukhonenko developed a bubble oxygenator (“artificial lungs”), received a patent for it in 1937, and the artificial blood circulation machine began to be used in combination with an “autojector + oxygenator.” The devices are being improved to this day, both here and abroad. But Bryukhonenko was the first...

“I’m not a laundress, but an artist,” said Briquet’s head proudly. - I want to have a beautiful body. And a mole on the shoulder... Men like it so much.
“Let it be your way,” Kern answered. - Mademoiselle Laurent, move Mademoiselle Briquet's head to the operating table. Do this carefully; artificial circulation of the head must continue until the last moment.

A. Belyaev. "Professor Dowell's Head"

The essence of the invention

The design of the autojector is similar to the blood circulation circuit of a warm-blooded animal. The mechanical heart consisted of two diaphragm pumps (instead of the left and right halves of the heart), powered by electric motors. One pump sent blood through the arteries, the other pumped out from the veins. Blood pressure in the vessels and temperature were maintained by automatic regulators. Bayer 205 anticoagulant was used to keep the blood fluid.

Competitors

Bryukhonenko's followers were distinguished by their radicalism and publicity. Vladimir Demikhov, who studied the possibilities of organ transplantation, demonstrated a two-headed dog in 1954. In those same years, the American Robert Cornish achieved artificial maintenance of blood circulation in experiments with dogs using injections of anticoagulants and adrenaline in combination with rocking the body on a stand (to “churn up” the blood).

Pyotr Prokopovich (1775-1850):
FRAME HIVE

The creator of the bee factory “gave all his life, all his thinking, all his vigilance”

A year before the 18th century ended, Hussar Lieutenant Prokopovich lay down among the blooming cornflowers on the outskirts of the village of Mitchenki. Pyotr Ivanovich husked the seeds and thought about the meaning of life. Here's the neighbor's girl Anyuta Borovikova - how much does it mean that she is pretty? A bee rang above my ear and knocked me out of my thoughts. (This is all the younger brother - he started himself a hive with bees).

Prokopovich is only 24 years old, an eternity lies ahead. He arrived home in the Chernigov region (decommissioned from service, apparently due to illness), and his father, a rural priest, excommunicated his son from home forever. Prokopovich's biography is full of fog: for what? But what we have is what we have...

Throughout the summer of 1799, cornflowers bloomed, Anyuta with her blonde braid was a muse, and curious bees hovered. Pyotr Ivanovich could not bear it, one day he looked into his brother’s hive. Then he admitted directly: as he looked at the hive at the skid, at themselves, sitting in it and making noise, the passion to start them suddenly flared up.

He bought a tithe of land “for his settled life” and kept bees. He was inexperienced; out of 32 bee families, only nine survived. And things weren’t going well on the family front either. Anyuta bore him two illegitimate daughters and a son, after which the landowner took his illegitimate wife Borovikova to marry him in a distant village. And in 1801, someone burned all of Prokopovich’s property. And he was left with one 10-ruble note, two pounds of honey in a tub and bees. He began to live in a dugout and build hives.

That's where things started to go wrong for him.

By 1808, the apiary already numbered 300 families. In January 1814, Prokopovich came up with the world's first hive with removable frames. I tried different ones - logs and nest boxes, made of straw, attached and built-on, built a hive in the form of a barrel. But this one was the best, square, with collapsible frames. A simple design - but it’s as if he has found a common language with the bees...

In 1828, Prokopovich opened a beekeeping school, and over half a century he trained 640 serfs sent by neighboring landowners. It’s a pity that I couldn’t publish 12 volumes of my “Methodological Essay on Bees and Beekeeping.”

Prokopovich saw Russia as a land of honey, bees and wax. It was as if he measured people like bees. He divided bees into three categories: 1) kind, quiet and smart, 2) evil, biting and thieving, 3) bad and stupid. He knew what he was saying: “I penetrated into the secrets of the bee family further than all my predecessors...”

Eat, baby, eat! - she said. - You are here without your mother, and there is no one to feed you. Eat.
Yegorushka began to eat, although after the candies and poppy seeds that he ate every day at home, he did not find anything good in honey, half mixed with wax and bee wings. He ate, and Moisey Moiseich and the Jewish woman looked and sighed.

A. Chekhov. "Steppe"

The essence of the invention

Prokopovich's hive had an upper and lower bottom. The interior of the hive was divided by two partitions into three compartments. The upper compartment (store part) was separated from the middle by a board with cuts through which bees could freely pass, and the queen could not enter the store. Wooden frames measuring 245x175 mm were slid into this compartment, placed on the grid, and freely removed.

Competitors

Both the Pole Jan Gerzhon (but his collapsible hive appeared in 1838) and the German August von Berlepsch (1852) claimed primacy in the invention of the frame hive. American Lorenz Langstroth patented his hive in the United States in 1851. It is an indisputable fact that Prokopovich was the first.

Grigory Petrov (1886-1957):
WASHING POWDER

The talent of the Russian chemist amazed Gorky and was supported by Lenin

Grigory Semenovich refused to leave Russia after the 1917 revolution. And if so, they invited me to the Main Directorate of the Supreme Council of National Economy. While they were shooting around, Petrov was working on the problem of oxidizing liquid petroleum hydrocarbons in order to produce carboxylic and hydroxycarboxylic acids...

For just such words one could get caught from a lumpenproletarian. But fortunately for him, the chemist knew Gorky. And he, in 1921, told Lenin himself about Petrov: they say that they are not allowed to interfere with wheels abroad for scientific reasons. Ilyich, without hesitation, wrote to the deputy chairman of the Cheka-GPU Unshlikht: “I ask the NKidel and the Cheka to issue an order for immediate passage abroad...”

Lenin! - the old man sat down here. Under the powerful armor of Lenin, Petrov went through his remarkable scientific path, which began before the revolution.

Coming from a proletarian family (born into the family of a sawmill worker), Petrov in 1904, already with a diploma from the Kostroma industrial school, entered the service at the St. Petersburg Fat Plant. And he immediately distinguished himself. The warehouses are filled with nondescript soap: they couldn’t sell everything. Petrov, here is the head, digested all this soap and added, without stirring, a bright dye. The soap came out with a beautiful layered pattern. They called it “marble” - everything immediately fell apart.

But that was only the beginning...

During the sulfuric acid purification of petroleum products, sulfonic acids are formed, which they did not know how to get rid of. Petrov came up with the main thing: you can’t win, which means you have to use it correctly. This is where a miracle was revealed.

Petroleum sulfonic acids, acting as fat breakers, have proven to be indispensable in industry.

In addition, Petrov noted, when shaken, solutions of petroleum sulfonic acids foamed like soap. They turned out to have excellent cleaning properties and soften water...

Why, this is a washing powder for every housewife!

And for men it is useful to know that the discoverer of washing powders, the inventor of plastics also created the “BF” glue, which is irreplaceable in the house.

There’s nowhere to do laundry here, and I didn’t want to carry powder and stain remover with me. I took four dresses: gray-blue, gray-brown, mint and the color of summer twilight. I also took four scarves with them... I tried to eat light-colored foods and drink white wine. It didn’t help: stains of unknown origin made their way onto the fronts of all my outfits, so on my last day here I had to go and buy myself a black dress.

T. Tolstaya. "Russian School", blog entry, August 2015

The essence of the invention

Synthetic detergents, obtained by chemist Petrov by the action of sulfuric acid on petroleum products, contain surfactants (enzymes that decompose protein or fatty contaminants), which make washing easier and are not afraid of hard water. In addition to ordinary washing, the opening is widely used in industry - in the production of lubricants, polymers, in the separation of valuable ore from waste rock, cold spinning of flax, leather processing...

Competitors

Before World War I, the Belgian chemist A. Reichler drew attention to the cleaning effects of certain synthetic surfactants. The German Fritz Ponter spoke about their industrial use. However, only the work of Grigory Petrov opened up wide possibilities for the use of synthetic detergents.

Alexey Bakhmutsky* (1893-1939):
COAL COMBINE

The Donbass nugget did not spare his life for the sake of his car

He was born in Petrovo-Marevka, a Donbass village smoked from hard mining work. Of course, as a thirteen-year-old teenager he came to the mine as a rock selector. By the age of eighteen he had grown to become a mechanic at the Tatyana mine. And then he went to war

He returned only in 1919 - everything was in ruins. Typhoid mowed down his father and two sisters. But the Soviet Republic undertook to revive Donbass. German mining machines came to Pervomaisk, the first “cutters” from the Eyckhoff company. But without adjusters. In the end, Alexei Bakhmutsky, a mechanic at the Pervomaisky Mining Administration, could not stand it: he opened the boxes with large German letters, climbed the machines down to the screw, studied them, adjusted them, and taught others. The Germans arrived - and ours themselves had mustaches.

But Bakhmutsky understood that this was yesterday. The miner needs revolutionary new equipment. All these machines, pumps, conveyors are always acting up. What if all the cars were combined in one?

I shared with my assistant Fedor Chekmarev, a master of golden (albeit black) hands. Without drawings, the two assembled a miracle machine in the workshops. And in 1932, she received second prize (no one was given the first) at the All-Union competition for the best combine harvester!

On August 17, 1932, tests were carried out in the Albert mine. Under Bakhmutsky’s hand, as they wrote then, the mighty heart of the machine came to life, and it easily floated across the lava. The B-1 coal miner traveled 12 linear meters, loading 25 trolleys.

Know ours!

The newspaper “Kadievsky Rabochiy” immediately notified the workers: “The mining machine operates in a 100-meter long face, simultaneously cutting, beating and heaping coal, replacing 12 pile breakers, 6 breakers and 2 drillers in one cycle... With the launch of the mining machine, there is no manual labor at the face ".

But Bakhmutsky saw the shortcomings of his brainchild. Improved it, tested it again. By 1939, the Gorlovka plant named after. Kirov produced five of his cars. Work was underway on the powerful B-6 model. But during the next tests an accident occurred. The miner's injury turned out to be fatal...

A year later, his B-6-39 combine produced 23.6 tons of coal per hour - productivity twice as high as that of the first model.

We met our neighbors, or rather, neighbors (because they were students of Moscow universities), and they said that they were going to Ensk to work.
- Which one?
- It is not known yet. To the mines."

(V. Kaverin. “Two Captains”)

The essence of the invention

In the B-1 combine, Bakhmutsky used a rod cutter, which was widely used in the Donbass. The combine cut the coal seam near the soil with the plucking teeth of the lower rod, and the vertical chain bars cut the rock from top to bottom. The upper rod used impact-cutting elements to beat off the coal, which fell onto the scraper conveyor.

Competitors

The idea of ​​creating coal combines was first expressed by the Russian designer A. Kaleri back in 1897. In the 1930s, the O Tula combine appeared in America - but it could only work in soft coals that collapsed after cutting. The McKinley combine appeared - it was cumbersome, it was serviced by 9 people, and the productivity was low. The Soviet version of such a combine was Chekhachev's machine. However, they were all inferior to the first mining combine designed by A.I. Bakhmutsky.

Matvey Kapelyushnikov (1886-1959):
TURBODRILL

Americans they asked the Russian oilman to sell his license, but he held on like a flint

The son of Tiflis retired clerk Alkun Kapelyushnikov, who served half his life in a regiment of military cavalrymen. A graduate of the Tomsk Technological Institute does not major in petroleum at all. But in 1915, Matvey Kapelyushnikov ended up in Baku. And it got drilled!

By 1920, he was already a “top manager” at the Azneft trust. Nearby are smart engineers S.M. Volokh and N.A. Kornev. All three are drilling experts and know the main problem of the oil industry: wells are drilled ineffectively. The rotor turns a long column of pipes going deep, while you need to turn one bit-tip, gnawing the rock. And by 1922, the inseparable trinity developed a fundamentally new turbodrill. A year later it was tested from the pier of the oil company. Then at the drilling rig of the Surakhani field we covered 600 meters. And off we go!

However, something strange happened with the “comrades”. In the fall of 1924, the three of them submitted an application to the Committee for Inventions of the USSR. But already in February 1925, their joint statement arose: “In view of the agreement that took place between us... we ask the Committee: in the patent for the invention... include only the single name of Matvey Alkunovich Kapelyushnikov.” The further path of Semyon Volokh and Nikolai Kornev melts in this fog of uncertainty. But we remember them with gratitude. In the twentieth century, the times when single artisans stood behind miracle inventions have finally passed.

And the Americans were already waiting for Kapelyushnikov with bread and salt. In 1929, he and his wife Varvara Andreevna, a team of workers and two turbo-drills went overseas on a business trip for two years. The stunned Yankees asked to sell them a patent or a license, but our pipes were like flint...

In 1959, Kapelyushnikov was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow.

What about cosmic dust?..
Tyler began brushing dust off the surface.
- Do we have a drill? - he managed. - Well, for collecting samples?
“I’ll get it now,” Orson said, taking the drill out of his backpack and handing it to Tyler. He installed it and pressed the button. Clearly visible in the beam of light, the drill began to rotate. Tyler pressed harder.
“It’s strong, it’s an infection,” he muttered.
Things were going badly.

K. Simak. "Construction site"

The essence of the invention

The first experimental design of a geared turbodrill, created by Kapelyushnikov, Volokh and Kornev, weighed about a ton. An engine was placed in a cylindrical casing - a single-stage turbine was driven by a washing clay solution pumped through the cavities of the drill pipes. Not everything was perfect. However, this first turbo drill at an exhibition in the USA worked 60% faster than conventional rotary installations and consumed three times less energy.

Competitors

Already in 1932-40, the creative group of GINI (State Petroleum Research Institute, later Scientific Research Institute of Drilling Equipment), under the leadership of the talented engineer and organizer Pyotr Pavlovich Shumilov, abandoned the use of a gearbox in a turbodrill and built a low-speed multi-stage turbine.

Dmitry Grigorovich (1883-1938):
SEAPLANE

Until the inventor crosses himself with a weight, a flying cruiser will not thunder over the sea

Not everyone can cross themselves with a two-pound weight. The trick, which delighted the circus audience, was easily performed by Dmitry Pavlovich. He was a strong man. A weight is a weight, and the son of a military quartermaster, Grigorovich, has been making seaplanes (and just airplanes) all his life - he managed to design more than 60 different types, 38 of them were mass-produced. After the Kyiv Polytechnic and studying in the Belgian Liege, he moved to St. Petersburg and in 1912 became the technical director of the First Russian Aeronautics Partnership S.S. Shchetinin and Co.

And a year later he built that very new type of naval aircraft that would become a classic.

Before Grigorovich, the problem was solved primitively - they put ordinary land planes on huge floats. The young engineer created a flying boat. She could take off and land in half-meter waves. The bottom did not “stick” and easily came off the water surface. The two-seater M-5 seaplane easily accelerated to a decent speed of 105 km/h.

Of course, it was immediately adopted. And already in April 1915, the M-5 performed its first combat flight, which confirmed its high performance characteristics, and the following year it bombed the Turkish ports of Zunguldak and Istanbul. No matter how much officials groaned, they had to gradually abandon the purchase of foreign aircraft.

Before 1917, Grigorovich managed to design the world's first naval fighter M-11, a flying naval torpedo bomber (with a 1000-kilogram torpedo on board), and a flying naval cruiser...

Of course, Grigorovich tried to serve the new government. However, the M-22 and M-23 reconnaissance aircraft he created did not go into production: there were no suitable engines. Grigorovich, it happened, started drinking out of despair. Of all his projects, only a four-seat civil aircraft reached serial production. Grigorovich and a group of designers were sent for correction to the “sharashka”, where he, together with Polikarpov, created the famous I-5 fighter, then the I-7. And what do they mean by “sharashka” - people are obsessed!

In 1938 he organized a new OKB-153. That same year, on July 26, he died of leukemia. They buried him with honors at Novodevichy.

Three tiny, graceful seaplanes emerged from behind the cape and were flying low over the sea... The roar of the engines deafened the bay, and then died down, and the seaplanes left in the direction of Saint-Maxim...
“They didn’t even look at me,” Katherine said. - What business guys.
- What were you waiting for? Aerial photography? - asked David.

E. Hemingway. "Garden of Eden"

The essence of the invention

In general, a seaplane is similar to a land plane. One “but”: a seaplane needs buoyancy, unsinkability, and stability on the water - just like for a sea vessel.

The engines are above the wing so that they don’t flood with water. Instead of a conventional power unit (engine at the front combined with a tractor propeller), Grigorovich began to use a pusher propeller on the wing behind the pilot. This reduced the risk of the engine flooding with water and improved the pilot's visibility.

Competitors

In 1918, the US military department, having received several seaplanes from the “white army”, organized the serial production of similar ones - without reference to the original source. Franz also began to be given credit for Henri Farman's invention of the design for attaching the wing box to the fuselage, developed in 1917 by Grigorovich for the flying sea cruiser MK-1.

Pavel Molchanov (1893-1941):
RADIOSONDE

The father of Russian aerology was eager to take to the sky, but died in the hold of a prison barge

It's kind of stuffy. Veselchak Pavel Alexandrovich loved fresh air. But now I was worried, maybe.

The airship slowed down to four meters per second. They opened a special hatch, there the emptiness hissed and the White Sea crumpled like a sheet. It's time. Five cubic meters of hydrogen from the Graf Zeppelin tanks are already in the balloon. A radio device of his design, Molchanov’s, is suspended from the ball. And a weight with a guillotine. The radio probe will fall until the airship has time to move to a safe distance. At a signal from the clockwork, the knife will cut the string, the balloon will pull the probe into the height of the stratosphere...

This polar flight in 1931 was organized by the international society "Aeroarctic". German scientists invited their Russian colleagues on an expedition on the Graf Zeppelin: from Germany through Leningrad to the Arctic and back. Of course, how could we not call Molchanov: it was he who launched the world’s first radiosonde (marked “271120”) a year before, on January 30, 1930. From the Main Geophysical Observatory in Pavlovsk, the radiosonde went to a height of 7.8 kilometers, 32 minutes after launch they received a signal: temperature -40.7 C. The first aerological news for the Leningrad Weather Bureau and the Moscow Central Institute of Weather Forecasts. A new round in the development of meteorology: from now on it is possible to obtain accurate information about the free atmosphere at altitudes up to 30 km.

Molchanov, they remember, was a terrible good-natured man. A short, plump, round face, a trimmed mustache, faded eyebrows, a gray suit always ironed, a starched white collar. Originally from Volosov, Tver province. After graduating from Physics and Mathematics at St. Petersburg University in 1914, he immediately joined the army. In 1919, he began restoring the aerological observatory in Pavlovsk near Petrograd...

In February 1941, he was appointed head of the department of aircraft instruments at the Leningrad Aviation Institute. And in April, two months before the war, the merry fellow Molchanov, the greatest meteorological scientist, the father of Russian aerology, was arrested. It is unclear who and what denounced him. Maybe they remembered the flight with their German colleagues. In October of the same 41st, prisoners were loaded into the hold of a barge for evacuation along Ladoga. There was nothing to breathe. They were suffocating.

The guards shot at everyone who climbed onto the steps to catch their breath. Molchanov - he was only 48 - could not live without fresh air.

The tower pierced the clouds with its top, and nothing on the ground was visible from it... Neither the top of the tower nor the rooster weather vane, which was supposed to show the townspeople the weather and the direction of the wind, were visible from the ground either. Levach went down in confusion and fear, and the people who had gathered under the tower dispersed, saying that it was still unknown what Levach had built there in the clouds.

M. Pavic. "Horses of St. Mark"

The essence of the invention

Molchanov's comb radiosonde was simple, convenient and cheap to manufacture. A gondola with a single-tube radio transmitter, temperature, pressure and air humidity sensors, as well as switches, is suspended from a small balloon. The transmitting antenna is a wire fixed along the line of the ball, and the counterweight is a freely hanging wire.

Based on the nature of the received signals, the aerological laboratory determines the indicators of the atmospheric layers through which the probe passes. Temperature is determined in the range from +40 to -60, pressure from 30 to 700 mm Hg and humidity up to 100%.

Competitors

Molchanov's radiosondes were beyond competition. They turned out to be so perfect that they were used virtually unchanged until 1958.

P.S

Alexander II, who lost the Crimean War, listens to Pirogov, who, in the words of my colleague, “told” the tsar such a truth about his would-be appointees that such a freethinker was out of sight.” He returned when he was called to organize our hospitals in the conditions of the Turkish War. He set a condition - complete freedom of action. Dali. He went and worked in Bulgaria. When he returned, he became an honorary citizen of Moscow...

I would not say that this fate was broken by the autocracy. It is dictated by the unpredictable Russian history. A hero can do it.

Alexander II appointed another craftsman “Photographer of His Imperial Majesty” - he took very good photographs. But he came up with submarines even better. And torpedoes. For this reason, he sold his photo studio and entered the naval service. And what? Fired. I received no money, no recognition. Ivan Alexandrovsky died in a hospital for the poor in 1894 (13 years after Alexander II was killed by revolutionaries). What about torpedoes? The British started making them.

The third option for the highest participation in the fate of an inventive hero is the story of Nartov. Almost an idyll: a 16-year-old student at a navigator school is noticed by Peter I and appointed as his “personal turner.” And until his death he keeps it with him: he takes care of him. After the death of the guardian, there is a rollback: the “turner” is expelled from the palace. Then they return it. Then they expel me again. Nartov's lost grave was found two hundred years later. In 1950 he was buried in the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. Next to Lomonosov...

How to react to such “mess”?

Reflecting on this, I come to the conclusion that the confrontation between lonely heroes and their opponents in tsarist times was not a clash of fronts. This is exactly "mess". As they grow up and find their way, smart girls develop a heroic loyalty to their destiny. Even in unpredictable situations.

While revolutionaries are hunting for the emperor in St. Petersburg, two friends in Odessa are building a balloon from calico bookbinding.

And in another cruel era, the inventor Grigorovich, together with the inventor Polikarpov, develops fighter aircraft. For the front, for the glory of Soviet power. But either the authorities did not have enough materials or money - the work was interrupted. Grigorovich starts drinking out of despair... but stops because he is given the opportunity to think about new planes. And the nugget does this favorite thing until his last days.

A small clarification: he does what he loves most in the “sharashka”. Everyone who has read Solzhenitsyn knows what sharashka is. But he was buried with honors.

This, alas, is common among our outstanding wise men: little human warmth, and sometimes even fame, was allotted to them during their lifetime. Let us pay tribute to their memory at least after death. I dare to add one more figure to our proud list.

A boy who survived the Great Patriotic War as a child graduates from a mechanical institute in Tula. He goes to work at the federal enterprise "Splav", where he invests his intelligence and talent in improving the combat systems "Grad", "Hurricane", and "Smerch". Becomes a Hero of Labor...

His works are known throughout the technical world. Only the last name is unknown, because the nugget works in a closed defense system (not to be confused with the sharashka).

The great gunsmith designer died in February of this year, and his name became well known. The reflection of our ineradicable cheerful teasing plays on it: Denezhkin.

Lev Anninsky

* in the previous version of the article there was an error and the photograph of Alexey Bakhmutsky was mistakenly signed with the name of Andrey Vlasenko. We apologize to the readers.

Preface.

Our dad Pyotr Fedorovich Kharlanov.
Born August 18, 1926. WWII veteran and group 2 disabled person.
Historian. Worked at school. Was a primary school teacher
and a history teacher. Graduated from Tomsk State. University, Faculty of History
I only recently found out. what he wrote in his youth.
He gave me the remaining manuscripts, and we published the book for his 90th birthday (August 18).
And I decided to exhibit his stories here. Maybe they are naive.
But this was the time of his youth.

Through the half-open door of the forge of the second field brigade of the Rodina collective farm, the sound of hammers could be heard. The hammer sounded loudly in the heroic hands of the hammerman Fedos Germanovich Bludov. The hammer of the blacksmith Vasily Viktorovich Sokoltsov echoed the beat. The blacksmith held a strip of hot iron with his pliers and, turning it from one side to the other, exposed it to a heavy blow from the hammer. The iron flattened, bent and turned from fiery red to purple and finally black.
Vasily put the hammer on the anvil, which means stop hammering. And silence reigned in the forge. Only my ears continued to ring.

We asked what work was being done.
“We are making paws for cleaning the wheels of the seeder,” said Vasily.
With the transfer of technology to collective farms, the role of the blacksmith increased even more and became one of the main links in collective farm production. RTS employees have strengthened control over the repair of agricultural machinery.
All this has a positive effect on the collective farm economy. The owner's eye and thrifty attitude greatly extend the life of agricultural machines.

Having forged another part, the blacksmith immediately said without preamble:
- All. It's time for lunch.
We left the forge. The April sun was warm like summer. The smell of thawed earth was in the air. The blue sky was covered with white, lace-like clouds. On both sides of the wide street grew tall poplars with swollen buds. Flocks of pigeons circled above them.
Vasily walked with a swaying, bearish gait, wearing a sweatshirt and a hat with earflaps. He held his head high.
The Sokoltsovs' house stood behind a fence. Neat, under a slate roof. The trim and cornice are painted, the doors fit tightly. Handles, latches...

“I did everything with my own hands,” Vasily said, not without pride.
We were greeted by a woman of average height with delicate features. Two sons played, the daughter studied homework.
Vasily washed his face. The face was dark, with a strong blush, and was beautiful. Large open brown eyes. High straight forehead.

The conversation didn't go well. He spoke in abrupt phrases. But from them we nevertheless compiled the life of a wonderful rural craftsman.
In Grozny in 1942, teenager Vasily Sokoltsov crossed the threshold of the forge for the first time and stood with a heavy hammer at the anvil. It was a bit difficult. Thanks to his innate curiosity and ingenuity, he quickly learns blacksmithing.
Occasionally people came from the front, crippled by the war. But the boy was never replaced. There weren't enough hands. I had to work one for two.

Vasily perfectly mastered his second specialty - carpentry, which he adopted from his father.
Since 1946, he combined two jobs - a blacksmith and a carpenter.
He himself makes carpentry and metalworking tools, invents an original and at the same time simple device for notching saw teeth. Now even experienced craftsmen consult him.
In a person’s life, sometimes it turns out that he walks and walks and unnoticeably turns off the path, but looks around and heads the right way.

This is what happened with Sokoltsov. After the army, he works with Khabar MTS as a blacksmith. But if a river runs from the place where it is born, then a person strives to where he was born. The Sokoltsovs decide to move to the collective farm, but the administration refuses to dismiss them. Then the former chairman of the Rodina collective farm, Ivan Fedorovich Denisenko, suggests that Sokoltsov, without receiving payment from MTS, move to the village of Vesely Kut. Soon he was elected a member of the board, which he remains to this day.
In 1957, major construction was planned on the collective farm. For this purpose, about a thousand cubic meters of roundwood were harvested. The farm had a sawmill, but no sawmill.

The board members gathered in the chairman's small office. They solve regular business matters. Everything was discussed in a businesslike manner. The question of the sawmill remains open. The chairman of the collective farm peers through a thick veil of tobacco smoke into the faces of the governors. Here is the best milkmaid Elizaveta Kirillovna Sinyakina. Here is the foreman Stepan Germanovich Bludov.
Then the chairman's gaze fell on Sokoltsov. Their eyes met. Suddenly Vasily stood up.
“I’ll try,” he said simply, without a hint of arrogance.

...The dawn will just break, and the lark will soar into the blue heights with a cheerful song, as Sokoltsov travels to Novo-Fedorovka, where the sawmill is installed. He will check the installation of the saws, lubricate the sliding parts of the frame and wait for the workers to arrive. Soon the sawmill will begin to chug, and the roar of the engine will not cease until late in the evening. Result: every day one and a half to two norms.
Many collective farm facilities were built. Members of the agricultural artel also built. They moved from squat huts to light houses that smelled of straw.
On the collective farm there are days hotter than construction - suffering.
At this time, collective farmers direct all efforts to quickly remove grain from the fields, and, having sold the surplus to the state, fill up the seeds and give them to collective farmers for workdays.

Every person, every machine is working at full capacity these days.
But on one combine, its commander failed. The car stood lonely in the collective farm yard, blown by the winds. Unharvested fields were washed by rains.
The assistant foreman of the tractor brigade, Mikhail Tsarev, invited Vasily to take the helm of the combine.
Not every tree is planed without grouting. So it is with Sokoltsov at the combine. It will become a car. He waits for the foreman or assistant to arrive, otherwise he runs after them to the village.

But this did not last long. After some time, Vasily caught up with his workmates. When the machine operators looked at their earnings in the office in the fall, they gasped. Vasily Sokoltsov's combine harvester produced the most output.
“Here you go,” they said.
But Vasily did not rest on this. In the winter of 1959, he completed a combine operator course.
But this is not all of Sokoltsov’s professions. He is also a tailor and a beekeeper...

Municipal budgetary educational institution
Mukshinskaya secondary school
School scientific and training complex “Step into the future”

Let's talk about mills in the past
we are the word
Author: Vakhrushev Zakhar
Sergeevich, 4th grade student
MBOU Mukshinskaya secondary school
Head: Abrosimova
Valentina Viktorovna,
primary school teacher
MBOU Mukshinskaya secondary school
YakshurBodya 2018
Content
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………. 2
Chapter 1
1.1. Mill – what is it?................................................ .............................. 4

1.2. Water mill…………………………………………………………….. 4
1.3. Windmill…………………………………………………………………… 5
1.4. When did mills appear?........................................................ .......... 5
Chapter 2
2.1.Mills of our region…………………………………………….. 7
2.2. The device of a hand mill…………………………………….. 8
2.3. From the history of one mill……………………………………………………… 9
Conclusion…………………………………………………………….12
Sources of information……………………………………………………13
Applications…………………………………………………………………………………15
Introduction
A tree has roots, people have a past. If you cut off the roots, the tree will dry out.
The same thing happens to people if they don’t want the lives of their fathers and grandfathers
know. A person comes and goes on earth, but his deed is good or evil -
remains, and depending on what work is left, the living joy or burden and
grief. In order not to increase hardships and multiply grief, those living should know
where does it come from?
The wonderful words of Isai Kalashnikov can serve as a motto for
every person who is interested in the history of his ancestors, life,
the way of life of their distant ancestors. Gradually leaving our everyday life
many household items. Today, not only city children, but also
1

many villagers no longer see objects such as a rocker in action,
grip, poker, cast iron, and spinning wheels, on which “three girls under the window
we were spinning late in the evening.” And the tub in which he offered to splash
Moidodyr?
It's good that many schools have museum rooms or museums.
Unique items, documents collected over a long period of time
children and teachers throughout the village, as well as in nearby villages,
found their corner in these repositories of antiquity.
When you visit a museum, you involuntarily ask questions. Who are they for?
belonged? What is the history of these things? What are they for?
were needed? How few people remain today who, with their own eyes,
saw these items in action. How difficult it is today to find out who they are
belonged, and who made them.
In the museum of our school there is a unique thing that, as I was told
grandmother, belonged to our family, or rather to my great-grandmother on my father’s side
line Serebryannikova Lyubov Alekseevna. (Annex 1). This is manual
mill. Looking at this exhibit, I could not understand how, with the help of two
Can you grind kiln into flour or get cereal? I wanted to study
the history of this item, its structure, who used it, and how
Thus the mill ended up in our museum, i.e. study the biography of this
exhibit, also learn about other types of mills. (Appendix 2)
So, the object of study is various types of mills.
The subject of the study is a hand mill.
Purpose: to study local history material related to the history of various
types of mills used in our region, including manual
mills - grain grinders.
Tasks:
study local history literature on the history of origin
mills;
collect information about hand mills and grain crushers operating in
personal farms of peasants;
2

meet people who can tell you about the research
subjects.
Based on the foregoing, we put forward a hypothesis: when meeting with
people of the older generation, working with scientific local history literature,
it is possible to establish the history of the origin of things and describe them.
The work used materials from the Mukshinskaya Museum,
materials published in the supplement of the regional newspaper "Oshmes" Yakshur
Bodiinsky district, also used reference and
local history literature, internet resources.
Practical significance: my work can be used in
local history lessons, classroom hours, during excursions.
Chapter 1.
1.1. Mill - what is it?
We understand perfectly well that the time of mills is long gone. This
an ancient symbol that contains the elements of water, wind and air, and
also represents the harvest and fertility, and still holds
all its secrets and mysteries, and never ceases to fascinate the hearts and souls of people
the older generation, and we, the younger generation, perceive the mill as
fairy tale item. For example, from the fairy tale “Puss in Boots” by Charles Perrault.
Mill is a mechanism designed for grinding various
materials. Mills differ from crushers by finer grinding
material. The mill can be water, wind or manual.
Why were mills created?
The mills generated the energy needed to pump water, while
paper making, grain grinding, timber sawing and
3

many other industrial tasks, but still the main job
The water wheel was left to grind the grain. What types of mills are there?
1.2. Water Mill
During the construction of the water mill, one was mainly used and
the same standard design, the operating principle of which is very similar to the operation
windmill, only the wheel is powered by water. Rarely before
no river there was a mill. In the countryside she was something
special. The following types of work were carried out here: grinding grain into flour
and cereals, crushing oatmeal, obtaining linseed oil. Savvy
the miller could arrange in the mill barn both to sift flour and
fulling mill. Carts with grain were reaching to the mill from the immediate surroundings, and
back the same carts with fresh flour - the drivers and horses were slightly white with
flour dust.

The road often went through a mill dam. From the pool under the dam
it was always possible to catch fish, ducks and geese swam in the pond,
The grass was lushly green in the floodplain meadows. A pond and a dam enlivened the rural
scenery. (Appendix 3)
Mostly people used a water mill, but in those places
where their installation was not possible, windmills were already appearing.
1.3. Windmill.
Russian carpenters created many diverse and witty
windmill options. Already in our time, more than
twenty varieties of their design solutions. Of these you can
distinguish two main types of mills: “post” and “tent” mills.
The first were common in the North, the second - in the middle zone and
Volga region. Both names also reflect the principle of their design. On
windmills and tents were built on the territory of Udmurtia.
4

At the pillar mills, the mill barn rotated on a dug into the ground
pillar The support was either additional pillars or a pyramidal
log house
The principle of the tent mills was different; their lower part was
motionless, and the smaller upper part rotated with the wind. AND
This type had many variations in different areas. (Appendix 4)
1.4. When did mills appear?
Water Mill. In a poem dated 98 - 90. BC.,
Antipart welcomes the appearance of the first mills: “Give rest to your
hands, O working women, and sleep peacefully! The rooster will crow in vain
tell you about the morning! Deo entrusted the work of the girls to the nymphs, and they easily
now they jump on the wheels, so that the shaken axles rotate along with
with their spokes and make the heavy millstone rotate.” During the era of Charles
Great, in 340, a water mill appeared as a borrowing from Rome
in Germany, on the Moselle River. At the same time, the first water creatures arose
mills in Galia (France).
In Rus', water mills appeared no later than the 12th century. On the plains
rivers, the water pressure necessary for the operation of the mill was provided
dams. The blades of the water wheel are lowered into the water and driven
movement by the river current. The water mill was used not only for
grinding grain into flour, but in the production of paper for grinding
raw materials in the production of gunpowder. This is how they worked on rivers in the middle of the 16th century
paper mills, a blacksmith's hammer was adapted to the water wheel -
it turned out to be “samok”. In 1655, on the Yauza River, by order of Tsar Alexei
Mikhailovich, two gunpowder mills were built. Creation of water
The mill is considered an important step in the history of technological development. It was
the first step towards machine production.
Windmills appeared at the end of the 10th and beginning of the 11th centuries. in France and
England and then in Holland. Now the landscape of this country is impossible
5

imagine without windmills. Many improvements to wind turbines
The mills were made precisely in Holland. Yes, they appear here
original braking devices, with the help of which it was possible to very
quickly stop the rotating millstones.
In Rus', mills appeared at the end of the 15th to the middle of the 17th century. Izza
invasion of the Tatar-Mongols into Russia, the development of the country and the beginning of technical
The revolution was delayed compared to Western countries.
Chapter 2.
2.1. Mills of our region
Today, models of mills, most often windmills, can be seen at
design of garden plots, parks and even in the Izhevsk Zoo.
(Appendix 5)
But there is a unique object for our republic - a water mill,
which is located in the Uvinsky district, in the village of Turyngurt. Even in Russia
Few such historical monuments have survived.
As usual, there is a picturesque large building located on the edge
villages by the pond. High log walls, a couple of small windows and
dam. And all this against the backdrop of an overgrown pond. Looks impressive and
even fabulous.
The mill is almost 100 years old, but it can still work. Can
grind flour or connect to a drying or sorting machine
units. If you connect it to a generator, then the water mill will
give electricity. (Appendix 6)
In addition, it was only recently that one could see it in action. TO
Unfortunately, the last miller, Boris Obukhov, passed away in 2013
Ivanovich.
6

The working windmill can be seen in Ludorvae - a museum under
open sky. The mill was built back in 1912, but on
the museum territory came only in 1994, where it was transported from
ChemoshurKuyuk village, Alnash district. The mill height is 12
meters and has 3 floors. Hip-type mills, which include
This exhibition was distributed in the territory of southern Udmurtia.
For a long time the mill was closed, but since 2009 people have been allowed here.
visitors. This mill is the only one preserved
windmill on the territory of Udmurtia. (Appendix 7)
According to local residents on the territory of the Mukshinskoye municipal district in the middle
In the 20th century there were 4 water mills. In the village of Kikva on a pond near the farm, on
Pukhovka pond between the villages of Mukshi and Dmitrievka, in the village of Kutonshur, in the village.
Mukshi on the upper pond. In addition to water mills in the village of Druzhny there was
windmill, because the village was far from the river.
In addition to wind and water mills, villages often used
hand mills, especially if the settlement was located at a distance from
mills In the next paragraph we will look at how a hand mill works.
2.2. Hand mill device
The hand mill is made of solid logs and consists of two
separate parts. To the inside of the top and bottom of the mill
About 2 thousand small cast iron plates are driven in, thanks to which the grain
as the top of the mill rotated, it was crushed and turned into flour.
A tray is attached to the side at the bottom of the mill, through which the ground material is ground.
the grain was slowly poured into the prepared container. At the top there are three
holes: one served for filling grain, the other for a handle, using
which the mill rotated. The handles were inserted differently, depending on
the amount of grain and the number of working people. If you worked alone
person, then the handle was inserted short, if there were several, then a long one. For
7

strength and greater pressure, a pole was inserted into the third hole and
attached it to the ceiling. In order for the flour to fall in the right direction
direction, the edges of the lower part of the mill were often trimmed in a circle
iron. The height of the mill was made different, it depended on the master or on
customer and the dimensions reached 1 meter in height and half a meter in width.
(Appendix 8)
But how did the grain turn into flour on this unit?
The grain fell through the hole in the upper part onto the contacting
surface of the logs, was broken, and entered the box through slotted grooves,
then it was swept into the bag through the exit hole. After the first pass of grains
they turn into cereals, with repeated grinding it was possible
receive flour. Subsequently, sifting took place through a sieve. This product
used for making porridges and stews. In the received
The crushed grain often contained sawdust from wooden millstones. If
take into account that such units were used in difficult lean years,
then it is quite reasonable that sawdust remained in the product as
filler, to which nettle and quinoa were also added.
In the post-war years, peasants used on their farms
a slightly improved model of a hand mill.
On
contacting surfaces of the millstones radially, from the center to the periphery,
“cast iron” was clogged with fragments from broken cast iron and pots,
sanded flush with each other. The rye grain was crushed twice, and
then sifted through a sieve and sieve. One bucket of grain yielded
up to ¾ bucket of “coarse” flour. Wooden millstones were installed so that
there was a certain gap. In this embodiment, the crushed product does not
sawdust fell from the tree. Similar grain crushers were also used in
favorable times for making sprinkles for pets.
Peasants received grain for workdays for working on the collective farm.
8

Not every peasant household had such a mill, only
wealthy peasants, for whom it was made by craftsmen.
Making a grain mill required certain skills and
time.
2.3. From the history of one mill
A hand grinder has recently appeared in the museum of our school and
took pride of place here. A village resident donated the mill to the museum
Mukshi Vakhrusheva Liya Borisovna, my grandmother, native of Debeski
UR region. (Appendix 10)
The history of the appearance of this exhibit in our museum is interesting because
he came to us not from our neighboring villages, but from the Debes region.
The hand mill was brought by the mother of Liya Borisovna Serebrennikova Lyubov
Alekseevna, when moving to a permanent place of residence with her daughter. Born
she in 1936 in the village of Starye Siri, Kez district of the Ural Republic. Lyubov Alekseevna
I was left an orphan very early and my brother and I went around the villages and helped
people around the house, thereby earning a living. At 18 she came out
married in the village of Berezovka, Debessky district to Boris Timofeevich
Serebrennikova.
The family lived in prosperity, and there she first saw this tame
the mill, where she later had to work herself. Water Mill
It was far away, and it was inconvenient to travel every time. Then to the rescue
Kruporushka came. More often it was used for grinding flour for
animals and cereal preparation. They ground rye, barley, wheat, and peas.
Although this work is not easy, children were often forced to grind,
queues turned the mill. As mentioned above, such mills were
not in every family, so people often asked to use the mill
9

fellow villagers. And father-in-law Timofey Stepanovich and mother-in-law Matryona Vasilievna
were kind people, ready to help their fellow villagers, and always
shared their property, which is why they enjoyed a large amount of money in the village
respect. But at the same time, they treated her with care. According to their stories
this mill was made for the family of Timofey Stepanovich's parents at the end
19th century wandering craftsman (unfortunately, no one knows the name of the master anymore).
This craftsman walked around the villages and made
kruporushki, while working he lived with the family and became a member of it.
Lyubov Alekseevna’s thing was dear, she inherited it
from her husband's parents, so when moving to her daughter, she decided to take
mill with you to pass on the living memory of your ancestors to your grandchildren and
great-grandchildren through the memory of things.
This is the legend of this exhibit, and Liya Borisovna decided after her death
mother to give the grinding mill to the school museum, because in a private
in the household, no one except family members sees it and loses its value, but in
museum it again acquires this value. The museum receives a unique item
which will give the opportunity to tell children about life, the life of our ancestors
past centuries, plunge into the world of our ancestors. (Appendix 9)
10

Conclusion
From childhood to the end of our lives, everything that is dear and dear to our hearts
surrounds us on our land. The names of lakes and
ponds, rivulets and streams, villages and villages, alleys and outskirts. These
historical information, legends and stories that tell about the lives of our
ancestors, are unique monuments of our antiquity, cultural
centers of past eras, partly embodied in such a concept as
mill. But the mills themselves have always been so cultural
centers for all people, at any time and in any country where in
while waiting for grinding, peasants from different villages met and exchanges took place
news, and economic discussions flared up.
An unusual household item for modern people, which
belonged to my ancestors and gave impetus to the search for new knowledge. As a result
search work, I confirmed the hypothesis that meetings with older people
generation, work with scientific local history literature, allow
establish the history of things and describe them.
Today the museum has about 300 exhibits, many of them have no history
legends of their appearance in the museum and it is unlikely that they can still be restored
belonging to some things. But still, it is possible to install
where and how certain antiquities were used, for example, how much
can tell us an exhibit called the “flail”, with the help of which
the peasants were knocking grains out of the ears. Our goal, while we have the opportunity,
Everything needs to be recorded and left for future generations. Mills
have always been surrounded by mystery, covered in poetic legends,
legends and superstitions. For example, “There are devils in every pool” and
The merman, as expected in fairy tales, also lives in the pool.
Information sources

This fabulous tower delights and causes complete delight. For more than 50 years, the self-taught master created and embellished his creation. And he built the House for the joy of all good people. And now his wife Lydia Kharitonovna is offered a lot of money for this miracle of construction, but she, of course, refuses to sell the architectural splendor of her husband.

In 1999, the creation of the Ural Master was recognized as the most beautiful house in Russia in a competition of amateur wooden architecture. There is so much in this fabulous mansion that your mind is simply overwhelmed by what you see. Horses, birds, flowers, pioneers, bride and groom, horsemen, heroes, children with banners “May there always be sunshine”….

And the master finished his creation exactly in time for the anniversary of the October Revolution, as evidenced by the inscription. This is obviously why there are so many Soviet symbols here. Even the coat of arms of the Soviet Union, Ilyich’s profile, red stars and at the very top – a rocket soaring into space.

Well, and the number 50 on the skate at home. And many different phrases: song lines, for example: “Fly, doves, fly, there is no barrier for you anywhere” and Soviet slogans, for example: “Our greetings to the peoples of the world.” All decorations are made of metal and wood.

Everyone who knew the Master remembers that his soul was exactly like this house built by his hands. He was a man with the kindest soul, which he revealed in his creativity. Sergei Ivanovich's wife Lidiya Kharitonovna never locks the house. Instead of a lock, the doors and gates have a special iron button: press it and it will open.

They say about Sergei Ivanovich that he never had free time, and on holidays and weekends he did his favorite thing. The house certainly requires constant care and restoration. All these numerous decorations need to be tinted. It's good that there are people who do this. In 2014, the ECB released a colorful album “House in Kunar”.

There is an amazing feeling in the House, there is a special energy of joy here, say those who have been here. You forget the bustle of the city, you just have to sit on a bench next to the house.

In the photo is the master Sergei Ivanovich Kirillov himself.

Blacksmith Sergei Ivanovich Kirillov died several years ago. But people who personally knew the master are sure that his soul was as positive and joyful as this house. After the master’s death, his widow Lidia Kharitonovna, who is already over 82 years old, continues to live in the house. To the best of his ability, he takes care of the miracle house and willingly shows it to visiting tourists, the number of which is growing from year to year. She does not lock the entrance to the estate. Instead of a lock, the gate and door have a special iron button: when you press it, the door opens and anyone can enter the yard. Despite this, no one has yet raised their hand to rob such a house.

-Where did he learn blacksmithing?

- I didn’t study anywhere. He only has 3 years of education. And in his family there was no one so skilled. In 1941, my father went to war and never returned; my mother died. Seryozha is survived by his younger sister and brother. I had to somehow live and survive - I had to go to a hammerman as an apprentice.

Sergei Kirillov was the only blacksmith in the village until his death. He worked on a collective farm, and at home he made his own workshop. I came home from work and immediately went to work. He worked until 12 at night and got up at 4 in the morning. If one of the neighbors asked to do something, he did not refuse anything. And on weekends, at the weddings of his fellow villagers, he played the accordion.

A fire raged twice around the Kirillovs' house. Neighboring buildings burned to the ground. But the miracle house remained safe and sound.

The house can be said to have become the hallmark of the Nevyansky district. And people come here not only from the Urals and other regions of Russia, but also from abroad.

The creator of this miracle, a simple Russian man, folk craftsman Sergei Ivanovich Kirillov, made not only his life beautiful, but also gave this miracle to the entire Urals and now to all of Russia.

P.S. After the death of the blacksmith Kirillov, only his widow remained in the house, who was unable to maintain the unique architectural structure in proper condition. As a result, the colors have faded and some of the carvings have been destroyed by wind, snow and rain. Local authorities helped put the house in order.