"Russian Leonardo" - Vladimir Shukhov

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

Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov, a remarkable engineer of the late XIX - early XX century, refused to imitate foreign models and began to create in an original, purely Russian style, relying on the traditions of Lomonosov, Mendeleev, Kazakov, Kulibin. During his lifetime, he was called "the man-factory" and "Russian Leonardo": with only a few assistants, he was able to accomplish as much as a dozen research institutes could do. Shukhov has more than one hundred inventions, but he patented 15: there was no time. And this is also very Russian.

Vladimir Shukhov was born on August 16, 1853 in the small provincial town of Graivoron, Belgorod district, Kursk province. At the age of eleven, he entered the St. Petersburg gymnasium, where he showed aptitude for the exact sciences, especially mathematics, and immediately became famous for proving the Pythagorean theorem in a way that he invented himself. The surprised teacher praised him, but gave him a "two", saying: "That's right, but immodest!" However, Shukhov finished his studies with a brilliant certificate.

On the advice of his father, Vladimir entered the Moscow Imperial Technical School (now the Bauman Moscow State Technical University), where he was given the opportunity to receive fundamental physical and mathematical training, an engineering specialty, and at the same time master crafts. As a student, Shukhov registered a remarkable invention - "a device that sprays fuel oil in furnaces using the elasticity of water vapor" - a steam nozzle. It was so simple, effective and original that the great chemist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev put her drawing on the cover of his book "Fundamentals of Factory Industry". And Ludwig Nobel, the head of a huge oil concern and brother of the founder of the prestigious prize, immediately acquired a patent for its production from Vladimir. In 1876 V. Shukhov graduated from college with a gold medal. Academician Pafnuti Lvovich Chebyshev, who noticed the outstanding abilities of the young mechanical engineer, made him a flattering offer: to conduct joint scientific and pedagogical work at the university. However, Vladimir was more attracted not by theoretical research, but by practical engineering and inventive activity.

A trip to Philadelphia to attend the World's Fair in 1876 was fateful for the young engineer. There he met A. V. Bari, a native of Russia, who had lived in America for several years, participated in the construction of buildings for the World Exhibition, being responsible for all the "metal work", for which he received the Grand Prix and a gold medal.

In the summer of the same year, A. V. Bari returned to Russia with his family, where he began organizing a bulk system for the transportation and storage of oil. He invited Shukhov to head the firm's office in Baku, the new center of the rapidly developing Russian oil industry. And in 1880, Bari founded a construction office and a boiler plant in Moscow, offering V. G. Shukhov the position of chief designer and chief engineer. Bari was not mistaken in his young colleague. Many ingenious inventions were born in this extraordinary business and creative tandem. “They say that Bari exploited me,” Shukhov wrote later. - It's right. But I also exploited him, forcing him to carry out even the most daring proposals."

Six months later V. G. Shukhov was the first in the world to carry out industrial flare combustion of liquid fuel using a nozzle invented by him, which made it possible to efficiently burn fuel oil, which was considered an oil refining waste; its huge lakes in the vicinity of oil refineries poisoned the soil. For the storage of oil and oil products, Shukhov created the design of a cylindrical tank with a thin bottom on a sand cushion and with walls of stepped thickness. This design had the least weight with the same strength of its surface: the pressure of the liquid in the tank on the wall increases with depth, and the thickness and strength of the wall increase accordingly. And the sand cushion under the bottom takes the weight of the liquid, making the bottom of the tank thin. For the distillation of oil with decomposition into fractions under the influence of high temperatures and pressures, he developed an industrial installation. And that was just the beginning of his fast-paced engineering career.

GO, RED

Women have always liked Vladimir Grigorievich. He was talented and handsome. It is not surprising that in the early 1890s the famous actress O. L. Knipper, who later became the wife of A. P. Chekhov, fell in love with him. But Shukhov did not accept the courtship of Olga Leonardovna.

Soon Vladimir met his future wife, the daughter of a railway doctor, Anya Medintseva, who came from the old Akhmatov family. He had to seek the location of the 18-year-old green-eyed beauty for a long time. In 1894, the wedding took place. Anna Nikolaevna bore him five children - Xenia, Sergei, Flavius, Vladimir and Vera.

All their life they were connected by a tender, touching relationship. The photographs taken by Shukhov have been preserved, in which members of his large family are lovingly captured - at tea on the veranda of the dacha, reading, playing the piano … the dynamics of the moment and the lively mood of the girl, which was almost an impossible task for the photographic technique of that time. His engineering and creative talent is clearly visible through the tiny print. In general, he was passionately fond of photography and even said: "I am an engineer by profession, but a photographer at heart."

The sedate Anna Nikolaevna is looking at us from the old photos. And Vladimir Grigorievich himself - fit, with a kind, intelligent, slightly tired face. Shukhov's contemporary NS Kudinova described him as follows: “Vladimir Grigorievich is a man of average height, thin, with surprisingly clear and spotless blue eyes. Despite his age (at the time of his acquaintance he was 76 years old - Ed.), He is constantly fit and impeccably neat … And what an abyss of attractiveness, humor, what depth in everything! " His son Sergei recalled: “He most of all appreciated the sense of his own dignity in people, as equals, in no way betraying his superiority, never gave orders to anyone and did not raise his voice to anyone. He was impeccably polite to both the servant and the janitor."

Shukhov was a cheerful, gambling person. He loved opera, theater, chess, was fond of cycling. Eyewitnesses said that once Bari ended up in the Alexander arena, where cycling races took place. The fans were on a rampage. "Give it, redhead, give it!" they shouted to the leader. The red-haired guy gave it up, triumphantly threw up his hands at the finish line, turned around, and Bari was dumbfounded when he recognized the winner as the chief engineer of his company.

However, the main "love object" of Shukhov was always work. “In 1891-1893, a new building of the Upper Trading Rows was built on Red Square in Moscow with Shukhov's coatings (see page 4 of the cover), so graceful and light that from below they looked like a cobweb with glass cut into it,” says great-granddaughter of V. G. Shukhov Elena Shukhova.“Such an effect was provided by the arched truss invented by Shukhov, in which the traditional rather massive braces and racks were replaced by thin beam puffs with a diameter of about a centimeter, working only in tension - the most advantageous type of effort for metal.”

In 1895 Shukhov applied for a patent for mesh coatings in the form of shells. It was the prototype of the hyperboloid tower he had constructed, which soon turned the whole world architecture upside down. “Faced with the question of the lightest coating, Vladimir Grigorievich invented a special system of arched trusses that work in tension and compression thanks to wire rods attached to them. The search for the location of the rods and the dimensions of the trusses is carried out by the researcher under the condition of the least weight of the structure. … This idea of finding the most advantageous designs lies at the basis of almost all the technical works of Vladimir Grigorievich. He conducts it in a harmonious and simple mathematical form, illustrating his thought with tables and graphs. This idea is based [and] the essay of Vladimir Grigorievich about the most advantageous form of reservoirs ", - noted Nikolai Yegorovich Zhukovsky. The very idea of such mesh structures and amazing hyperboloid towers came to the mind of a Russian engineer at the sight of a simple willow basket of twigs turned upside down. “What looks beautiful is durable,” he said, always believing that technical innovations are born with careful observation of life and nature.

HYPERBOLOID OF ENGINEER SHUKHOV

The first samples, which marked the creation of a completely new type of load-bearing structure, were presented by Shukhov to the public during the All-Russian Exhibition of 1896 in Nizhny Novgorod. These were eight exhibition pavilions: four with hanging roofs, four with cylindrical mesh vaults. One of them had a thin sheet metal hanging (membrane) in the center, which had never been used in construction before. A water tower was also erected, in which Shukhov transferred his grid to a vertical lattice structure of a hyperboloid shape.

“The weight of Shukhov's 'roofs without rafters', as their contemporaries called them, turned out to be two to three times lower, and the strength was much higher than that of traditional types of roofs, says Elena Shukhova. - They could be assembled from the simplest elements of the same type: strip iron 50-60 mm or thin corners; The installation of insulation and lighting was simple: in the right places, instead of roofing iron, wooden frames with glass were laid on the mesh, and in the case of an arched roof, the height differences of various parts of the building could very well be used for lighting. All designs provided for the possibility of easy and quick installation using the most elementary equipment such as small hand winches. Diamond mesh strip and angle steel mesh has become an excellent and lightweight material for long-span hanging roofs and mesh vaults.

Mesh floors: the exhibition pavilion designed by V. G. Shukhov (1896) and the oval hall of the British Museum by N. Foster.

The buildings are widely known. All the newspapers wrote about them. High technical perfection, external simplicity and spaciousness of the interior under the soaring network of suspended ceilings - all this created a real sensation. The shell in the form of a hyperboloid of revolution has become a completely new, never before used building form. It made it possible to create a spatially curved mesh surface from inclined straight rods. The result is a lightweight, graceful and rigid structure that is easy to calculate and build. The Nizhegorodskaya water tower carried at a height of 25.6 m a tank with a capacity of 114,000 liters to supply water for the entire exhibition. This first hyperboloid tower remained one of the most beautiful building structures in Shukhov. After the completion of the exhibition, the wealthy landowner Nechaev-Maltsev bought it and installed it on his estate at Polibino near Lipetsk. The tower still stands there today.

Water tower in Yaroslavl. 1911 year.

"The works of V. G. Shukhov can be considered the pinnacle in this area of architecture," says Elena Shukhova. “Their outward appearance, unlike anything before, organically follows from the properties of the material and exhausts its possibilities in constructing a form to the end, and this“pure”engineering idea is not masked or decorated with“unnecessary”elements."

Orders poured into Bari's firm. The first was an order for a metallurgical plant in Vyksa near Nizhny Novgorod, where it was required to build a workshop using hyperboloid structures. Shukhov performed it brilliantly: spatially curved mesh shells significantly improved the usual design. The building has survived in this small provincial town to this day.

Light, graceful water towers were in great demand at that time. Over the course of several years, Shukhov designed and built hundreds of them, which led to a partial typification of the structure itself and its individual elements - stairs and tanks. At the same time, Shukhov did not have twin towers. Demonstrating an amazing variety of forms, he proved to the whole world that the engineer, as the ancient Greeks believed, is a real creator.

Construction of a double-curved ceiling-shell for a metallurgical plant workshop in the town of Vyksa, Nizhny Novgorod region. 1897

The equipment of the water towers included a steam piston pump. Especially for him, Shukhov developed an original transportable design of a samovar-type boiler. Vladimir Grigorievich said that it is no coincidence that the boiler looks like a samovar: “My wife complained at the dacha that the samovar did not boil for a long time. I had to make her a samovar with boiling pipes. It was he who became the prototype of the vertical cauldron. It is now called a steam tube.

The development of the railway network also required the construction of many water towers. In 1892 Shukhov built his first railway bridges. Later, he designed several types of bridges with spans from 25 to 100 m. Based on these standard solutions, under his leadership, 417 bridges were built across the Oka, Volga, Yenisei and other rivers. Almost all of them are still standing.

Openwork masts designed by Shukhov for the placement of rangefinder posts made warships less noticeable. Russian battleship "Emperor Paul I" (1912).

NOT THERE AND NOT HERE

We also owe Shukhov a modern water supply system. Especially for her, he designed a new water-tube boiler, which began to be mass-produced in 1896. Using his own experience in the construction of oil tanks and pipelines and applying new modifications to his pumps, he laid a water pipeline in Tambov. On the basis of extensive geological research, Shukhov and his employees drew up a new project for the water supply of Moscow in three years.

For the Moscow General Post Office, built in 1912, Shukhov designed the glass covering of the operating room. Especially for him, he invented a flat horizontal truss, which became the prototype of spatial structures from seamless pipes, which were widely used in construction several decades later.

Construction of the Bryansk (now Kiev) railway station. Architect I. I. Rerberg, engineer V. G. Shukhov.

The last significant work performed by Shukhov before the revolution was the landing stage of the Kiev (then Bryansk) railway station in Moscow (1912-1917, span - 48 m, height - 30 m, length - 230 m). Shukhov used an extremely rational installation technique, which was proposed to be the basis of all station coatings. The project, alas, was not destined to come true: the war began.

Shukhov hated war. “I consider it necessary to make a substantial reservation about love for the motherland,” he wrote.- Christian morality, according to which the peoples of Europe are brought up, does not allow the extermination of other peoples for the sake of love for the motherland. After all, war is a manifestation of the brutal nature of people who have not achieved the ability to resolve the issue peacefully. No matter how victorious the war is, the fatherland always loses from it."

But he still had to participate in the war. Shukhov could not stand aside either as an engineer or as a patriot. “One of the main tasks at the beginning of the First World War was the design and construction of botoports - large ships designed to serve as gates to docks where damaged ships were repaired,” says Elena Shukhova. - The design was successful. The next order was the design of floating mines. And this task was quickly solved. He developed lightweight mobile platforms where marks and long-range guns were installed. There were no unimaginable points in space for them."

The war ended, but 1917 broke out. Bari emigrated to America. Shukhov, however, resolutely rejected numerous invitations to leave for the United States or Europe. In 1919 he wrote in his diary: “We must work independently of politics. Towers, boilers, rafters are needed, and we will be needed."

Meanwhile, the firm and the plant were nationalized, the family was evicted from the mansion on Smolensky Boulevard. I had to move to a cramped office in Krivokolenny Lane. Shukhov, who was already over sixty, found himself in a completely new situation. The construction office of Bari was transformed into the organization "Stalmost" (now it is the research and design institute of the Central Research Institute of Proektstalkonstruktsiya). The Bari steam boiler plant was renamed into Parostroy (now its territory and the surviving structures of Shukhov are part of the Dynamo plant). Shukhov was appointed their director.

Shukhov's son Sergei recalled: “My father lived hard times under Soviet rule. He was an opponent of monarchy and did not put up with it in the Stalinist era, which he had foreseen long before it began. He was not closely acquainted with Lenin, but he had no love for him. He told me more than once: “Understand that everything that we do is of no use to anyone and for anything. Our actions are ruled by ignorant people with red books, pursuing incomprehensible goals. " Several times my father was in the balance of destruction."

SHOOT CONDITIONALLY

The Council of Workers 'and Peasants' Defense decided: "to establish in an extremely urgent manner in Moscow a radio station equipped with devices and machines with a capacity sufficient to ensure reliable and constant communication between the center of the republic and foreign states and the outskirts of the republic." Poor radio communications could cost the young Soviet republic a defeat in the war, and Lenin understood this well. Initially, it was planned to build five radio towers: three - 350 m high and two - 275 m each. But there was no money for them, five towers turned into one, a place for it was allocated on Shabolovskaya street and "cut" to 160 m.

An accident occurred during the construction of the radio tower. Shukhov wrote in his diary: “June 29, 1921. When lifting the fourth section, the third one broke. The fourth fell and damaged the second and the first. " It was only by a happy coincidence that people did not suffer. Summons to the GPU, long interrogations followed immediately, and Shukhov was sentenced to "conditional execution". Only the fact that there is no other engineer capable of continuing such a large-scale construction in the country saved from a real bullet. And the tower had to be built at all costs.

As the commission later established, Shukhov was not at all to blame for the accident: from an engineering point of view, the design was impeccable. The tower almost collapsed on the heads of the builders only because of the constant savings on materials. Shukhov warned about such a danger more than once, but no one listened to him. Entries in his diaries: “August 30. There is no iron, and the design of the tower cannot yet be drawn up. " “September 26th. Sent projects of towers 175, 200, 225, 250, 275, 300, 325 and 350 m to the board of directors of GORZ. When writing: two drawings in pencil, five drawings on tracing paper, four calculations of networks, four calculations of towers "…" October 1. There is no iron "…

“To build such a unique in scale and bold construction in a country with an undermined economy and a ruined economy, with a population demoralized by hunger and devastation, and only recently ended by the Civil War, was a real organizational feat,” says Elena Shukhova.

I had to start all over again. And the tower was still built. It became a further modification of mesh hyperboloid structures and consisted of six blocks of the corresponding shape. This type of construction made it possible to carry out the construction of the tower with an original, surprisingly simple "telescopic" installation method. Elements of subsequent blocks were mounted on the ground inside the lower support section of the tower. With the help of five simple wooden cranes, which stood on the next upper section of the tower during construction, the blocks were lifted one after another, successively increasing the height. In mid-March 1922, the tower, which was later dubbed "a model of brilliant construction and the top of the art of building", was put into operation. Alexei Tolstoy, inspired by this construction, created the novel "The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin" (1926).

Nine years later, Shukhov surpassed his first tower structure by building three pairs of mesh multi-tiered hyperboloidal supports for the 1800 m long high-voltage power transmission lines across the Oka near Nizhny Novgorod with a height of 20, 69 and 128 m., their design turned out to be even lighter and more elegant. The authorities "forgiven" the disgraced engineer. Shukhov became a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, in 1929 he received the Lenin Prize, in 1932 - the Star of the Hero of Labor, became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, and then an honorary academician.

WHAT DOES THE HOMELAND BEGIN WITH?

But for Shukhov, this time was perhaps the most difficult. The youngest son Vladimir, who served with Kolchak, went to prison. To free his son, Vladimir Grigorievich transferred all his patents worth 50 million gold to the Soviet state. Vladimir was released, but he was so exhausted and exhausted that he never came to his senses and died in 1920. In the same year, her mother, Vera Kapitonovna, passed away, followed by his wife …

Saved work. Shukhov created so many different structures that it is not possible to list them. All major construction projects of the first five-year plans are associated with his name: Magnitka and Kuznetskstroy, Chelyabinsk Tractor and Dynamo Plant, restoration of objects destroyed in the Civil War and the first main pipelines … Museum of Fine Arts. Alexander Pushkin, Petrovsky passage, the glass dome of the Metropol … Thanks to his efforts, an architectural monument of the 15th century has been preserved - the minaret of the famous madrasah in Samarkand. The tower tilted heavily after the earthquake and could fall. In 1932, a competition for projects to save the tower was announced, and Shukhov became not only the winner of the competition, but also the head of the work on straightening the minaret using a kind of rocker arm. Vladimir Grigorievich himself said: “What looks beautiful is durable. The human eye is accustomed to the proportions of nature, but in nature what is solid and expedient survives."

The end of the life of the 85-year-old engineer was tragic. In the age of electricity, Vladimir Grigorievich died from the flame of a candle overturned on himself. The habit of using a strong "triple" cologne after shaving was destroyed, abundantly lubricating the face and hands with it … A third of the body was burnt. For five days he lived in terrible agony, and on the sixth, February 2, 1939, he died. Relatives recalled that until the end of his days he retained his characteristic sense of humor, during the dressings saying: "The academician was burnt …" Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.

In 1999, the famous English architect Norman Foster received the title of honorary peerage and lord for the mesh ceilings of the courtyard of the British Museum. At the same time, he always openly admitted that he was inspired in his work by Shukhov's ideas. In 2003, a gilded model of the Shukhov tower was installed at the exhibition "The best structures and structures in the architecture of the 20th century" in Munich.

Elena Shukhova writes: “For all the uniqueness of his talent, Shukhov was the son of his time - that short and irrevocably bygone era, about which the Russian thinker said: their play gave rise to beauty …? These words of N. A. Berdyaev, spoken by him in 1917, are habitually associated in our minds with the Silver Age, the flourishing of art, literature, philosophical thought, but they can rightfully be attributed to the technology of that time. Then the culture and the scientific and technical sphere of life did not become so tragically separated as today, the engineer was not a narrow specialist, blindly limited by the sphere and interests of his specialty. He represented in the full sense of the word a "Renaissance man" who opened a new world, possessed "symphonic", according to Shukhov's definition, thinking. Then technology was a life-building principle, it was a worldview finding: it seemed that it is not only a way to solve practical problems facing a person, but also a force that creates spiritual values. Then it still seemed that she would save the world”…

INCOMPLETE "ABC" OF SHUKHOV'S INVENTIONS

A - familiar aircraft hangars;

B - oil loading barges, botoports (huge hydraulic valves);

B - aerial cable cars, which are so popular in the ski resorts of Austria and Switzerland; the world's first hanging metal floors of workshops and stations; water towers; water pipes in Moscow, Tambov, Kiev, Kharkov, Voronezh;

G - gas tanks (gas storage);

D - blast furnaces, high-rise chimneys made of brick and metal;

F - railway bridges across the Yenisei, Oka, Volga and other rivers;

3 - excavators;

K - steam boilers, blacksmith shops, caissons;

M - open-hearth furnaces, power transmission masts, copper foundries, bridge cranes, mines;

H - oil pumps, which made it possible to extract oil from a depth of 2-3 km, oil refineries, the world's first oil pipeline with a length of 11 km;

P - warehouses, specially equipped ports;

R - the world's first hyperboloid radio towers;

T - tankers, pipelines;

Ш - sleeper rolling plants;

E - elevators, including "millionaires".