TOP-12 discoveries of domestic scientists

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

World science knows a huge number of discoveries and inventions that have determined, among other things, the direction of development of all mankind. And it is important to know that many of them belong to Russian and Soviet scientists. LED, synthetic rubber, chemical elements and even vaccines against previously fatal diseases - all these discoveries are the merits of Russian science.

1. Aluminothermy (1859)

Nikolai Nikolayevich Beketov may not be as widely known as Mendeleev, but he left his mark on world science. While working at Kharkov University, the scientist was engaged in pioneering experiments on the reduction of metallic oxides with other metals at high temperatures. In the process, he lined them up in a so-called "displacement series" and for the first time obtained pure preparations of several alkali metals.

Powdered aluminum was recognized as one of the most effective reducing metals - reactions with it are accompanied by the release of a large amount of heat. Therefore, the process is called alumothermy - a method of obtaining metals, non-metals and alloys by reducing their oxides with metallic aluminum. The discovery of a chemist of the 19th century is still used today in the welding of pipes and rails, as well as in metallurgy to obtain manganese, chromium, etc.

2. Quantum Dots (1981)

Quantum dots are semiconductor nanocrystals, the properties of which depend on their size and shape. This, in turn, makes it possible to clearly control the parameters of their radiation. Quantum dots, first obtained by the Soviet physicist Alexei Ivanovich Yekimov in 1981, are a promising direction in biology, medicine, optics, optoelectronics, microelectronics, printing and energy.

3. Artificial light for plants (1866)

For a long time, no one even knew that plants are capable of photosynthesis under artificial light. Only the Russian botanist Andrei Sergeevich Famintsyn succeeded in proving this, who conducted a series of experiments with illuminating plants with a kerosene lamp.

As a result, it became clear that algae continue to photosynthesize without hindrance. But Flamycin did not stop there - he continued to study the influence of short-wave (red-yellow) and long-wave (blue-violet) radiation, thereby laying the foundation for the development of artificial lighting for the needs of crop production.

4. Solar battery (1888)

A common man in the street, unlike the academic world, knows little about the Honored Professor of the Imperial Moscow University, Alexander Grigorievich Stoletov. And in vain: after all, it was the results of his experiments that became the basis for the theoretical work of none other than Einstein, who eventually received the Nobel Prize for them. We are talking about Stoletov's studies of the external photoeffect - the so-called "knocking out" electrons from the substance by the radiation flux.

It was Stoletov who formulated the basic laws of this process, and also assembled and tested a photocell that uses light to generate electricity. In fairness, it should be clarified that this experience cannot be called the creation of the first solar battery in a familiar form, but today it is precisely these photocells that are used in green energy, operating on the basis of the photoeffect discovered and described by Alexander Stoletov.

5. Stem cells (1909)

Serious scientific discussions have been going on about these cells for more than a century, but it was the Russian scientist - the histologist Alexander Alexandrovich Maksimov - who laid the foundation for them. It was he who was the first to trace the main stages of hematopoiesis, that is, the process of blood formation.

Describing such a complex mechanism, he also found that different types of blood cells are formed from the same "ancestor", which resemble lymphocytes. He called these cells stem cells (Stammzellen). Technically, Maksimov did not attach an official substantiation, and, moreover, a modern meaning to this term, but it was the Russian scientist who introduced it into the scientific discourse.

6. Vaccines against cholera (1892) and plague (1897)

Technically, this discovery did not take place on the territory of the Russian Empire, but it was made by a Jew who was born in Odessa and for a long time tried to find his place in the scientific world in the domestic open spaces. However, unfortunately, this did not happen to Vladimir Aronovich Khavkin, and therefore he moved to Switzerland and came to his homeland only periodically. It was there, in the city of Lausanne, that he developed the first cholera vaccine from a preparation of weakened bacteria. Moreover, he proved its effectiveness by testing it on himself.

After that, the talented scientist began to cooperate with the British government, and they helped him open a laboratory for the production and testing of vaccines in Mumbai, India - today it is a large bacteriological center. In the same place, in the vastness of India, Khavkin began to study another dangerous disease, the plague, and after a few months, he managed to get a drug from this scourge, which has been terrorizing humanity for hundreds of years.

7 synthetic rubber (1910)

Today, synthetic rubber is widely used in many areas of production, and its relevance does not subside even a hundred years after its discovery. But the latter we owe to the Russian scientist Sergei Vasilyevich Lebedev. It was he who, in 1910, carried out the first chemical synthesis of polybutadiene, and later, already in 1928, also described the technology for producing butadiene itself from common alcohol. Thanks to the work of a domestic scientist, by 1940 the USSR became the largest producer of artificial rubber on the planet: according to Novate.ru, more than 50 thousand tons of this material were produced per year.

8. Childhood autism (1925)

Domestic science did not lag behind in matters of psychology and psychiatry. So. if autism was named after the one who first described it, then it would be called so - "Sukhareva's syndrome." Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva has been organizing neuropsychiatric medical institutions for Moscow children and adolescents since the early 1920s.

There she repeatedly encountered cases of the so-called "schizoid psychopathy". In the course of her study, she described her as "autistic", thereby focusing on the pathological tendency to avoid communication by those who had this type of psychopathy.

Limited facial expressions, the absence of any social interaction, a tendency to automatism - these stereotypical signs Sukhareva listed long before the publications of another scientist working in the same direction, Hans Asperger. According to popular belief, in 1926, Sukhareva's works were published in German, and this is how the German psychiatrist got acquainted with the conclusions of her research.

Interesting fact:many researchers in the history of psychiatry have suggested why there is no reference to Sukhareva's research in Asperger's works. The thing is that the latter lived and worked in the Third Reich, and therefore, according to the "racial theory", quoting a Soviet scientist would be at least doubtful.

9. Tonometer (1905)

For more than a century, no more accurate method of measuring blood pressure has been found than by the sound of the pulse, which differs when pressure is applied to the artery within the established limits. But very few people know that it was described by the Russian scientist Nikolai Sergeevich Korotkov in Izvestia of the Imperial Military Medical Academy back in 1905. Amazingly, the scientist's mechanism has come down to the present day practically unchanged.

10. LED (1927)

It's hard to believe, but the first semiconductor LED was created by a simple Soviet citizen, who, moreover, did not even have a formal higher education. However, this did not prevent the talented radio engineer Oleg Vladimirovich Losev from successfully cooperating with the laboratories of Nizhny Novgorod and Leningrad, and even publishing several dozen scientific articles in the most authoritative domestic and foreign publications.

Back in the mid-twenties of the last century, Losev noticed that during the passage of a current through a carborundum detector, light appears. This is stated in one of his publications in the journal Telegraphy and Telephony without Wires. In 1927 he received a patent (No. 14672) for the so-called "light relay", which, in essence, was the first semiconductor light-emitting diode. At the end of 1941, Losev had already written an article in which, according to some sources, he described a semiconductor transistor. But, unfortunately, the text has not survived, and Losev himself died less than a year later in besieged Leningrad.

11. Stealth technology (1962)

The Soviet physicist and mathematician Pyotr Yakovlevich Ufimtsev became known all over the world in the middle of the last century, due to his research in the field of calculating the diffraction of electromagnetic waves by conducting bodies, on the surface of which there are kinks. In fact, he formulated equations for calculating the scattering area of radio beams for aircraft of various shapes.

In the early sixties Ufimtsev developed the edge wave method. Surprisingly, if in the Soviet scientific world this discovery was treated very critically, then the American corporation Lockheed saw a real prospect in this. The algorithms derived by Ufimtsev were applied during the design of the famous F-117 Nighthawk, the first aircraft created using stealth technology. The nevmdimka liner took off in 1981.

12. Chemosynthesis (1887-1888)

The planet has known about the exceptional importance of photosynthesis in the functioning of biological systems for a long time, but this process is not available in all corners of the Earth. Therefore, another mechanism often works there - chemosynthesis. This is what the Russian scientist-botanist Sergei Nikolaevich Vinogradsky called him.

Chemosynthesis is the ability of some microbes to obtain energy through the oxidation of simple inorganic substances: hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, iron (II) oxide, and sulfites. Bacteria and archaea capable of this process can be found in places inaccessible to other organisms, lacking oxygen - deep soil layers, and even the so-called "black smokers" at the bottom of the world's oceans.