Stone capacitors in Crimea

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

In 1900, the Feodosia forester Fyodor Ivanovich Siebold, while leveling the Tepe-Oba mountain slopes in order to establish water-collecting and irrigation canals, "should ensure the success of afforestation," discovered fragments of an ancient hydraulic system. The structure turned out to be quite large, with a volume of “up to 300 cubic meters. fathoms”and was a cone-shaped heap of rubble, piled on the slopes of mountains and on rocks located at a considerable height above sea level.

Fragments of the mysterious structure, as the discoverer established, were nothing more than natural condensers, in which the condensation of water vapor contained in the atmospheric air took place. The mechanism of its action, according to Fyodor Ivanovich, was as follows: saturated with vapors (near the sea!) The air entered innumerable cracks and holes in the rubble heaps, cooled, reached the dew point and gave up its moisture in the form of myriads of drops of fresh, in fact, distilled, Dripping down, drops filled a bowl at the base of each of the rubble piles. The water collected in this way was supplied to the city cisterns through pottery water pipes.

And this is what these findings and research led to …

Siebold capacitor, circuit

In addition to 22 capacitors F. I. Siebold also found the remains of a pottery aqueduct, which was once laid from the condensers he found to the city fountains of Feodosia (in 1831-1833 alone, during various excavation works, more than 8000 pieces of such pipes were extracted!). It was a truly huge-scale engineering system for supplying the city with fresh water.

To test his hypothesis (and, if confirmed, to revive the forgotten method of obtaining clean drinking water), Siebold decided to build a modern condenser of atmospheric moisture. With the support of local authorities in 1905-1913, he built two similar structures - a small condenser (near the meteorological station in the Feodosia forestry) and a large one (on the top of Tepe-Oba mountain). The stone bowl of the latter - it is called the Siebold bowl - has survived to this day.

It is made of limestone, round in plan, with a diameter of 12 meters. The edges of the bowl are raised, the bottom is funnel-shaped, the outlet chute is laid from the center to the side. The bowl was covered with a layer of concrete 15 cm thick and filled with large coastal pebbles, laid in the form of a huge truncated cone - its height was 6 meters, the diameter of the top was 8 meters, and the total volume of pebbles was a little more than 307 cubic meters. Dew droplets, settling on the pebbles, flowed down to the bottom of the condenser and were led out to the pipe along the chute.

The construction of the large condenser was completed in 1912. For several months, according to contemporaries, he gave up to 36 buckets (about 443 liters) of water per day. Unfortunately, the bottom of the condenser was not strong enough, and through the cracks that formed, water soon began to go into the soil.

In the opinion of F. I. on the slopes of Tepe-Oba he counted up to 10 "crushed stone heaps-condensers".

Little is known about the creator of this amazing structure. Fyodor Siebold was a Russian German, his real name is Friedrich Paul Heinrich. In 1873 Siebold graduated from St. Petersburg University with a degree in jurisprudence and worked as a teacher in Riga. In 1872 he accepted Russian citizenship. In 1889-1893.studied at the St. Petersburg Forestry Institute. After finishing it, he first worked as a forester in the Yekaterinoslav province, and from 1900 - in the Feodosia forestry. Fyodor Ivanovich actively joined the work on afforestation of mountain slopes in the Feodosia region, thanks to him, pine plantations appeared on Tepe-Oba.

Only one portrait of Siebold is known - a verbal one. In 1909, the future professor and connoisseur of Crimea, and then still a student, Ivan Puzanov did an internship at the Sevastopol biological station and was invited by the head of the station Zernov to an expedition across the Black Sea. The route of the expedition ran along the coast of the eastern Crimea, for several days the members of the expedition stopped in Feodosia.

Remembering this, Puzanov wrote:

We also got acquainted with the Feodosia forester F. I. Zibold, with his forest plantations … F. I. Zibold, a vigorous, dry old man, about 60 years old, with gray-blue eyes and a gray beard, his appearance somewhat resembled K. A. Timiryazev. Dressed in a long white shirt, belted with a strap, in a straw hat, leaning on a thin cane, he walked lightly in front of us, giving explanations. The slopes of the once bare hills surrounding Feodosia were covered with a young pine forest 3-4 m in height thanks to the initiative, art and energy of F. I. Zibold. At present, he was fascinated by the construction of stone condensers, with the help of which he thought to help solve the eternal problem of Feodosia - water supply … Out of the blue … a round concrete platform with a drain was laid, and on it was a cone of large pebbles. At the time described, the cone rose above the level of the concrete platform by no more than 1.5 m. Having opened the drain tap, F. I. Siebold treated us all with cool condensation water.

After Siebold's death (December 1920), the construction of condensers at Tepe-Oba died out. And now, almost a sensation: it turns out that the invention of the Feodosia forester is well known in scientific circles of the world. According to the French hydrologist, Doctor of Sciences Alain Geode, Siebold is the first and only scientist of our time who managed to advance this issue in practice. Thanks to Russian emigrants, information about the unique hydraulic engineering structure got abroad - to France and aroused great interest in European scientific circles. In 1929 L. Chaptal built a similar moisture condenser near Montpellier (southern France).

True, in six months only 2 liters of water were obtained with the help of this condenser. In 1931, again in the south of France, in the town of Trans-en-Provence, engineer Knappen built a similar installation, called the Ziebold machine. This "machine" did not give water at all, but all the same it immediately became a local attraction.

Unfortunately, the air well, as condensers are sometimes called, built in the south of France, did not justify itself. It was one of many attempts to extract water from the air - a problem that humanity has not yet solved. We have learned to extract water from fog, but from the air, alas.

Fyodor Ivanovich Siebold was not so much an eccentric inventor, but the chief forester of the Feodosia forestry. The result of his labor: a strip of forest plantations that looms in relief on the Tepe-Oba ridge is the result of the selfless labor of people who managed to plant a forest in extremely unfavorable soil and hydrogeological conditions. The beginning of work on afforestation of the mountains in Feodosia dates back to 1876, when the first attempts at afforestation began. Now the area of artificial plantations around the city reaches an area of more than 1000 hectares.

Siebold's experiment was repeated in 2004 in the Old Crimea. A condenser with an area of 10 square meters was installed on the mountain. m. At high relative humidity (more than 90%) for 5, 5 hours it was possible to obtain about 6 liters of clean drinking water. But such high humidity is very rare, and in any case 6 liters is very little. So the Siebold bowl is still the most efficiently designed example of a condenser of atmospheric moisture, and the experiment of the Feodosia forester is the world's first successful experiment in obtaining condensation water.

The results obtained by Siebold are all the more surprising, because his hypothesis turned out to be erroneous. As it turned out, the piles of rubble discovered by Siebold on the Tepe Oba slopes and inspiring him to build his bowl actually had nothing to do with hydraulic engineering. In 1934, the archaeological expedition of the State Academy of the History of Material Culture "could not establish any signs of special hydraulic structures." showed that F. I. Sibold took the mounds of the necropolis of ancient Feodosia for ancient condensers, that is, ancient condensers, turned out to be ancient burial mounds.

However, the problem of providing Feodosia with fresh water remained. At the beginning of the XX century. the search for fresh water led to the discovery of the Feodosia medicinal mineral waters. In 1904, the water "Pasha-Tepe" ("Feodosia") was discovered, and in 1913-1915. - "Kafa" ("Crimean Narzan").

Thus, at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 20th century. water supply was one of the most important aspects of life in Feodosia. For a long time, the only source of fresh water was the medieval hydrotechnical system, which was based on the use of water resources in the immediate vicinity of the city. But gradually the old water supply system fell into decay. Attempts to revive it, or to create new systems on the basis of existing hydraulic structures did not improve the water supply of Feodosia. In the 70s - the first half of the 80s. the situation became disastrous.

Construction in 1887-1888 The Feodosia-Subash water pipeline guaranteed the city, every day, up to 50,000 buckets of drinking water of excellent quality. But the rapid development of Feodosia in the late XIX - early XX century. again aggravated the water problem, despite the additional inflow of water from the Koshka-Chokrak springs into the city. At the beginning of the XX century. projects for the expansion of the Feodosia-Subash water pipeline were developed. At the same time, the search for new sources of fresh water continued, including by unconventional methods.