These things were created in the Russian Empire, and are still used today

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Russian inventions that appeared before the twentieth century help us every day. Who doesn't eat cakes and honey, doesn't warm at home …? All this would be more difficult if it were not for …

There are many Russian inventions, the authorship of which is widely known - Sikorsky's airplanes and helicopters, Zvorykin's TV, Kotelnikov's backpack parachute, Kalashnikov assault rifle, color photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky … And even if these are not always the first inventions of this kind in history, they have changed entire industrial sectors.

There are also techniques that are much less significant for history, such as a Russian stove or a seven-string guitar, a tetris or a faceted glass. And many others. Some make our life better every day, but the story of their appearance is forgotten. Let's talk about five.

Powdered milk: in bread, cakes, yoghurts

Powdered milk is a product of extremely wide application all over the world. It is convenient to store it, it is easy to get a large amount of milk of certain properties, it retains most of the nutrients. The water is evaporated (and then the condensed milk is dried), and everything else remains.

This is a natural product. Bakers use milk powder to make dough, and dairy producers use a wide variety of recipes. For example, powdered milk in ice cream is common.

The idea to evaporate water from milk first came to Osip Gavrilovich Krichevsky in 1802 - a doctor at the Nerchinsk factories was looking for a way to preserve one of the few nutritious foods that were in abundance in a distant Trans-Baikal town. He succeeded, but during the life of Krichevsky, neither he himself nor other doctors appreciated the importance of the invention.

Only three decades later, firms appeared that produced milk powder for sale. From the late 1840s, milk powder began to spread throughout Europe.

Powdered milk. Source: interfoodcompanu.ru

Frame hives: more honey than ever

Pyotr Ivanovich Prokopovich invented the frame beehive in 1814. After serving in the army, he returned home to the village of Mitchenki and saw bees at his brother; a year later he began to breed them himself and caught fire with beekeeping. At first, Prokopovich started only a few bee colonies, then he learned honey business for a long time, and fifteen years later he figured out how to modernize their homes.

Before, beekeepers had to break hives to get honey, and the swarm of bees died. With frame hives, everything is much simpler - they can be used many times: take out the frames, collect honey, and then return the frame to its place so that the bees fill it with honeycombs again. That's all.

With the new hives, Prokopovich's apiary had grown to ten thousand bee colonies by 1830 and became the largest honey production in the world! After that, Prokopovich taught many more specialists in his school of beekeepers. His invention is still irreplaceable in any apiary.

Frame beehive. Source: gaiserbeeco.com

Heating radiators: warmth in our homes

The familiar tubular batteries that heat almost every Russian home, as well as millions of homes around the world, are the creation of the Russian German Franz Karlovich San Galli. He produced various metal products in St. Petersburg, such as fireplaces and safes, and somehow got an order for a heating system.

San Galli figured out how to simplify existing steam devices - to make them water and tubular in order to increase heat transfer. This happened in 1855. In the second half of the century, an enterprising German built a factory and made a fortune on radiators. Very quickly, his products appeared abroad.

By the way, it was San Galli who came up with the idea of calling his invention "battery".

San Galli factory advertisement. Source: peretzprint.ru

Ski cars

Physicist Sergei Sergeevich Nezhdanovsky designed airplanes and in 1903 wanted to test the engine and propeller of a new design. To do this, he attached them to a kind of sleigh. So - almost by accident - the snowmobile, more precisely, "a sled with a propeller for movement in the snow", turned out. They do not get stuck in the snow like wheeled vehicles, are light and can move at high speeds.

The invention very quickly attracted the interest of industrialists, and the production of "ski cars" began. The Dux plant was the first to make "ski cars". The 1912 model was already able to accelerate to 85 km per hour. The invention was ordered by the Ministry of War. And in 1916, Nezhdanovsky designed the first motor sleds, in fact, the first snowmobile - an irreplaceable transport in the North of Russia and Siberia.

The first motor sleigh of Nezhdanovsky. Source: titcat.ru

The first icebreaker

The long Russian winter was very disturbing for the merchant Mikhail Osipovich Britnev. The owner of a shipyard, banks and a steamship company transported goods from Kronstadt to Oranienbaum. In early spring and autumn, when the ice was already interfering with the ships, but could not yet withstand the generously laden sleigh, the business stopped - which means there was no income.

Britnev came up with a simple idea - to design the bow of the ship in such a way that it "crawled" onto the ice. The ice breaks under the weight of the ship, and you can swim further.

The first icebreaker was the small steam ship "Pilot" - in 1864 it made a successful voyage. Thanks to the icebreaker, it was possible to transport cargo for two months a year longer than before. Britnev's second icebreaker, Boy, also performed well.

A Soviet stamp in memory of the Pilot icebreaker. Source: Wikimedia Commons

A few years later, the merchant patented his design. Soon, another icebreaker was made according to his patent by the Germans, then the Danes, Dutch, Swedes and Americans. Since then, icebreakers have begun to ply many seas, which has made it cheaper to ship a huge number of goods.

Konstantin Kotelnikov