FROM THE HISTORY OF PHYSICS

RUSSIAN ELECTRICIANS OF THE 19TH CENTURY

N. A. Kaptsov

The first Russian electrician was the founder of Russian physics, the great Russian scientist Mikhail Vasil'evich Lomonosov (1711–1765). His principal work in the field of electrical phenomena was the study he undertook of atmospheric electricity and the electrical effects of lightning. For this purpose Lomonosov, and likewise his contemporary and friend, Academician Georg Wilhelm Richmann (1711–1753), each built at home a “thunder machine.” Such a machine consisted of an electrical capacitor connected with a wire, the other end of which was led out of the building into the courtyard and raised to a certain height by means of a vertical pole. During thunderstorm phenomena the capacitor became charged, and sparks could be drawn from it by hand. For the quantitative determination of the degree of charge of the capacitor, Richmann constructed an electrical measuring instrument in the form of a special electroscope, which allowed quantitative readings and which he called an “electrical gnomon.” This instrument consisted of a vertical metal ruler, to the upper end of which a linen thread was attached, and to the lower end a wooden quadrant with divisions, by which the greater or lesser deflection of the thread from the ruler was read when the instrument was charged. On July 26, 1753, when Richmann, with the “gnomon” in his hands, approached his thunder machine during a storm, he was killed by lightning that struck it. The experiments of Lomonosov and Richmann, carried out almost simultaneously with Franklin’s experiments, confirmed the latter’s idea of the electrical nature of lightning and, moreover, established that electrical charges are present in the earth’s atmosphere and can be extracted from the air even in the absence of a thunderstorm. In a letter to Count Shuvalov dated May 31, 1753, Lomonosov writes: “I observed at my thunder machine on the 25th of this April that, without thunder or lightning (so far as could be heard or seen), the thread moved away from the iron rod and followed my hand; and on the 28th day of the same month, while a rain cloud was passing without any perceptible thunder or lightning, strong blows came from the thunder machine, such as... had not yet been observed anywhere.”

RUSSIAN ELECTRICIANS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

A practical conclusion from Lomonosov’s works was the proposal he made for the installation of lightning rods to protect not only individual buildings, but also a more or less extensive territory. In the speech he delivered on November 26, 1753, “On Aerial Phenomena Proceeding from Electrical Force,” Lomonosov says: “To place such arrows in places remote from human intercourse I consider a useless matter, so that the striking lightning may expend its force more upon them than upon human heads and temples.” In the same speech M. V. Lomonosov sets forth the first theory of the origin of atmospheric electricity and, in particular, of the charges of a thundercloud. In doing so he proceeds from the assumption that electric charges are formed by friction between ascending and descending currents of air. Let us note that modern theories of thunderstorm phenomena also take this phenomenon into account as one of the possible causes of the electrification of thunderclouds. In his dissertation “A Theory of Electricity, Developed by Mathematical Means,” Lomonosov—an opponent of imponderable fluids—speaks of the role of the ether in electrical phenomena. Anticipating by a whole century the ideas of Faraday and Maxwell, Lomonosov divines the close connection between electrical and light phenomena, ascribing both the one and the other to the motion of the ether, and raises the question of the interaction of light and electricity.

Lomonosov’s contemporary Franz Ulrich Theodor Aepinus (1724–1802) belongs to the number of scholars invited from abroad to work at the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Aepinus moved to Petersburg in 1757. In 1759 he published a work of major importance for that time (in Latin): “An Attempt at a Theory of Electricity and Magnetism.” In this book Aepinus rejects the notion, widespread at the time, of the “efflux” of an electrical fluid from a charged body as the cause of electrical phenomena, and, in the field of the doctrine of electricity, adopts the standpoint of action at a distance. Aepinus still does not know of the existence of positive and negative electric charges, and in his theory operates with an “excess” and a “deficiency” of electricity in bodies.

The first ionic theory of electrolytic phenomena was proposed in 1805 by Grotthuss, a native of Russia. Baron Grotthuss (1785–1822) received his higher education abroad in the period 1803–1803, and then lived without leaving his homeland, in the Vilna province. Several works in chemistry and physical chemistry belong to him. Grotthuss’s conception of the mechanism by which electric current passes through electrolytic solutions differs from our modern conceptions: in Grotthuss’s view, ions do not move freely within the solvent, but merely jump, under the action of the field, from one neighboring molecule to another. The neutral molecules that decompose and form again make up a continuous chain from one electrode to the other. The substances liberated at both ends

of this chain, positive and negative ions jump directly to the positive and negative electrode. In 1806, when Grotthuss published his theory, atomistics was only just winning the right to existence; the laws of electrolysis were not yet known. Therefore Grotthuss’s theory was very bold and advanced for its time. It remained in science for more than seventy years, until it was replaced by ideas about ions, which better reflected actual reality.

After Lomonosov and up to the thirties of the nineteenth century, the most outstanding figure not only among Russian electricians, but also in general among Russian physicists, was Vasilii Vladimirovich Petrov (19 June 1761 — 22 July 1834). V. V. Petrov was the son of a parish priest in the town of Oboyan, Kursk province. In his life he traveled a long road, beginning as a teacher of mathematics and physics at the Mining School in the town of Barnaul (1788), then becoming an ordinary academician of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1815), and finally an honorary academician of the Military Medical-Surgical Academy (1833). V. V. Petrov owed his advancement to these high scientific and teaching posts and the remarkable successes of his scientific investigations exclusively to his outstanding abilities and to his own efforts in independently mastering physics and chemistry.

V. V. Petrov was the author of numerous works in the field of chemistry. He was a supporter of Lavoisier and a convinced opponent of the phlogiston theory. He brilliantly confirmed his views experimentally.

V. V. Petrov’s works on electrophysics proceeded in two directions: he studied the conditions of the electrification of bodies and the phenomena accompanying electric current. On the first question he firmly established that the fundamental distinction between metals and other bodies with respect to electrification by friction, proclaimed in its time by Gilbert, does not exist in the very nature of these bodies. It is only necessary to insulate the metallic body from the earth with the utmost care and to carry out the friction itself in the proper manner. Doubts about the correctness of Gilbert’s proposed division of all natural bodies into “electric” (electrified by friction) and “non-electric” had been expressed even before Petrov, but the results of experiments by various investigators who tried to electrify metals by friction were contradictory, and the causes of these contradictions were unclear. Petrov’s careful experiments cleared up all the misunderstandings.

For the study of electric current, V. V. Petrov, immediately after receiving news of the discovery of “galvanic” phenomena and the construction of the “Voltaic pile,” built, as he expressed it in the second of the three books he published*), “an enormous battery of the most powerful kind”

) 1) A Collection of New Physico-Chemical Experiments and Observations by Vasilii Petrov, Professor of Physics at the Academies of Saint Petersburg*

of 4,200 zinc and the same number of copper discs. Having begun with experiments on the decomposition of water by electric current, Petrov then discovered a number of “luminous phenomena” between carbon electrodes connected to the poles of his battery and immersed in various oils. This prompted him to investigate what would occur between similar electrodes placed in air if they were brought close to one another, and led him to the discovery of the “voltaic arc” several years before this phenomenon was observed by the English physicist Davy. “If,” says Petrov, “on a glass plate or on a bench with glass legs there are placed two or three pieces of charcoal capable of producing luminous phenomena by means of the galvanic-voltaic fluid,* and if then metallic insulated conductors (‘directores’), connected with both poles of an enormous battery, are brought near one another to a distance of from one to three lines, then there appears between them a very bright light or flame of white color, from which these pieces of charcoal ignite more quickly or more slowly, and by which the dark interior can be fairly clearly illuminated.” Petrov’s last words are the earliest indication in time, the first expressed idea, of the possibility of using electric current for illumination. Adhering to the main direction of his scientific work—the investigation of combustion processes—V. V. Petrov, having discovered the phenomenon of the electric arc, immediately proceeds to study how various bodies behave and burn in this arc (tin, silver, gold, zinc, mercury, combustible gaseous mixtures, gunpowder, alcohol, ethers, oils, etc.). “Finally,” says Petrov, “by means of the fire accompanying the flow

Medico-Surgical and Free Arts. Part One.” In St. Petersburg, at the printing house of the State Medical College, 1801.

2) “Report on the galvanic-voltaic experiments conducted by Professor of Physics Vasilii Petrov by means of an enormous pile of batteries, consisting sometimes of 4,200 copper and zinc discs, and kept at the St. Petersburg Medico-Surgical Academy.” In St. Petersburg, at the printing house of the State Medical College, 1803.

3) “New Electrical Experiments of Professor of Physics Vasilii Petrov, by which he proves that insulated metals and persons, and preferably only heated bodies, can be made electric by friction; that the same glass and wool also emit strong sparks when red-hot, and when rubbed by resinous substances and certain other bodies; and also special experiments, carried out in various ways, for discovering the cause of electrical phenomena.” In St. Petersburg, at the Medical Printing House, 1804.

*) V. V. Petrov conceived electric current as the motion of a special “galvanic-voltaic” fluid flowing through a metallic conductor. Pouring out into the space between the ends of two conductors, this fluid, in his opinion, could participate in chemical reactions. This is evident, for example, from the title of Chapter III of his book cited above: “On the dissolution of water, alcohol, and expressed oils by means of metals, certain other bodies, and the galvanic-voltaic fluid.” The latter is placed here in one row with metals and certain other bodies, as though the subject were an ordinary chemical body and an ordinary chemical interaction.

of the galvanic-voltaic fluid, using a huge battery, I tried to convert red lead and mercury oxides, as well as grayish tin oxide, into metallic form; the results of those experiments were such that the oxides mentioned, mixed with powdered charcoal, lard, and expressed oils, when these combustible bodies were burned, sometimes with flame, took on a true metallic appearance.” Thus, Professor of Physics Petrov was the first to show the possibility of applying electric current—in particular, the electric arc—in metallurgy. His experiments constitute the conceptual beginning of electrometallurgy. The very name “Voltaic arc” should long ago have been replaced by the name “Petrov’s arc,” all the more so since Volta had no direct connection with the discovery of the electric arc. The extraordinarily great interest that V. V. Petrov showed in the phenomena of combustion did not, however, obscure in his mind other essential questions then confronting advanced physicists. At the end of his second book Petrov raises the question of whether the “galvanic currents” obtained by him with the aid of his battery and the “electric currents” observed in experiments with electrostatic machines represent one and the same physical phenomenon. Comparing a number of experimental data, Petrov comes to the conclusion that these data “still show a greater or lesser difference between the actions of the galvanic-voltaic and the electric fluid.” These differences arose from the high voltages and small quantities of flowing electricity in the “electrical” experiments and, conversely, the comparatively low voltages and large quantities of electric charges involved in galvanic experiments. Petrov, of course, could not yet know this in 1803. But it is noteworthy that he raises the very question and the doubt about the difference in the physical essence of “electrical” and “galvanic” phenomena, which is implicit in the word “still” in the quotation given above.

Among V. V. Petrov’s later works, his investigations of the luminescence of bodies under various conditions deserve great attention. He succeeded experimentally in establishing the boundary between the luminescence of bodies in the presence of a chemical reaction (the oxidation of phosphorus, the rotting of organic residues, etc.) and the phenomena of phosphorescence. Petrov studied in detail the luminescence of various specimens of Iceland spar, which he described as “phosphors from the kingdom of fossils,” contrasting crystals capable of phosphorescence with luminous glowworms.

Most of V. V. Petrov’s works, undoubtedly, could and should have played a major role in the development of science and technology on a world scale. But beyond the borders of Russia these works remained unknown, and in Russia, for a number of reasons, Petrov’s works were soon forgotten. Their discovery at a later time proved to be a true revelation.

The first electrical engineer-inventor who laid the foundation for the practical application of electric current in Russia was the young-

RUSSIAN ELECTRICIANS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

A contemporary of V. V. Petrov, Pavel Lvovich Schilling von Kannstadt (1786–1837). P. L. Schilling was born in the city of Revel, came from an old noble family, and took part in the Patriotic War of 1812 as an officer. He is credited with the invention and implementation of the first practically usable electromagnetic telegraph several years earlier than this was done by Gauss and Weber. In 1832 Schilling’s telegraph operated in St. Petersburg between the Winter Palace and the building of the Ministry of Communications. The transmission of signals in Schilling’s telegraph was carried out with the aid of sixteen keys controlling currents in six wires. Schilling laid these wires underground, wrapping each wire with paper yarn and placing all six together in glass tubes with rubber couplings. Thus he should also be regarded as the inventor of the underground cable. In 1836 he carried out successful experiments in telegraphing through a cable insulated with rubber and lowered into water. He also conducted experiments on exploding mines by means of an electric current (1822).

When V. V. Petrov, in 1833, because of a serious eye disease, had to leave his work at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, the Academy’s physics cabinet, which Petrov had in his time raised to a considerable height, passed into the charge of a physicist who was then still young but already held the rank of extraordinary academician, Emil Khristianovich Lenz (19 February, old style, 1804–29 January 1865).

Lenz was born in the city of Yuryev (now Tartu), graduated from Yuryev University, and began his scientific activity in the field of physical geography, taking part in a circumnavigation as a physicist. Around 1830 Lenz was invited as an adjunct to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, settled in St. Petersburg, and turned from questions of physical geography to work on electromagnetism. In 1834 he was elected ordinary academician; from 1836, in addition, he received the chair of physics and physical geography at St. Petersburg University and headed this chair for 29 years, until his death. His works in the field of physics were widely known in Europe. Their great significance and high scientific merits led to Academician Lenz occupying a prominent place in the history of the development of science.

In order to appreciate properly everything done by Lenz in the field of electromagnetism, it is necessary to imagine the state of this question at the time when, in 1832, Lenz began his work. The phenomenon of induction had only just been discovered by Faraday. Oersted’s discovery of the action of a current on a magnetic needle and Ampère’s discovery of the ponderomotive interaction of currents were only twelve years old. Concepts of electrical resistance and of the electrical conductivity of bodies were still very vague. Ohm’s law, established by the latter in 1826–1827, by many physicists

had not yet been recognized as the fundamental law of electric current, common to all cases. To doubts about the unity of the essence of “galvanic” and “electric” phenomena were added questions about the unity of the nature of both induction and galvanic currents, and of currents generated by various galvanic cells. Experiments that were incorrectly set up or incorrectly interpreted seemed to indicate that the specific actions of different currents were different.

Thus, for example, short-lived intermittent induction currents could not impart to a magnetic needle the same constant deflection as currents from galvanic cells; by means of them it was not possible to produce, in pure form, the phenomena of electrolysis, and so on. In optics, the predominance of the luminous, thermal, or chemical action of radiation from different sources of light was erroneously, but confidently, attributed not to the composition of the radiation, but to the nature of the light source itself. This conception was transferred to sources of electric current, and the cause of the allegedly different properties of currents of different origin was sought in the different nature of the sources of current. To make broad generalizations in this field and to establish general laws of electromagnetic phenomena independently of the nature both of the sources and of the conductors of the current was a bold and difficult undertaking. The great merit of E. Kh. Lenz before world science consists in the fact that, despite all the doubts then widespread among physicists and the erroneous views, despite all the contradictory experimental data cited in the literature, he arrived, by means of a profound analysis of each individual case, at a correct assessment of the available experimental material and was wholly imbued with the idea of the unified nature of electric current. In his first work on electromagnetism, presented to the Petersburg Academy in 1832, Lenz showed, by experiments arranged and carried out excellently not only by the standards of that time, that the strength of an induction current is quantitatively determined exactly by the same quantities, the same conditions, and the same universal Ohm’s law as the strength of any other current. The editor of the Annalen der Physik und Chemie, Poggendorff, delayed printing Lenz’s article in his journal for a full two years—so unexpected did the results obtained by Lenz seem to him. Lenz’s second step was the establishment of the well-known “Lenz’s rule,” by which he substantially supplemented Faraday’s laws of electromagnetic induction.

In deriving this law, Lenz proceeded from a comparison of the phenomena of the occurrence of current when a conductor moves in a magnetic field—magneto-electric phenomena—with the ponderomotive forces acting on a conductor at rest in a magnetic field when a current is present in it. It is interesting that the physicist Ritchie proceeded from the same comparison. But the latter, on the basis allegedly of the law of equality of action and reaction, came to a diametrically opposite conclusion. Ritchie’s article was printed in the same volume of the Annalen as was

Lenz’s article. In an editorial note Poggendorff gives preference to Lenz’s conclusion. Lenz himself shows the validity of his rule by listing a long series of experiments, both those of others and his own. Of interest is the very clear and brief second formulation of Lenz’s rule, which he gives in one of his later articles: “Every electromagnetic experiment may be transformed in such a way that it will lead to the corresponding magneto-electric experiment. For this it is only necessary to communicate, by some other means, to the conductor of the galvanic current the motion which it performs in the case of the electromagnetic experiment, and then in it there arises a current in a direction opposite to the direction of the current in the electromagnetic experiment.” In order to draw the correct conclusion from a comparison of magneto-electric and electromagnetic phenomena, E. Kh. Lenz, as the late V. K. Lebedinsky points out in the article devoted to him, must have had, perhaps not clearly expressed, but essentially correct, ideas about the transformations of energy and its conservation. Lenz continued the struggle for the unified nature of the electric current in his subsequent works as well.

E. Kh. Lenz established, in parallel with Joule, but with much greater accuracy and persuasiveness, the law expressing the quantity of heat liberated when an electric current passes through any conductor—the Joule–Lenz law.

Prompted by the demands of practical electrical engineering, Lenz, together with B. S. Jacobi, developed the theory of electromagnets. Lenz significantly advanced the theory of magneto-electric machines. He introduced the concept of the self-induction of the armature and thereby laid the foundation for what in technology is the important doctrine of the so-called “armature reaction” of an electric machine. A practical consequence of Lenz’s work in this direction was the indication of the need to change the previously accepted arrangement of the machine’s commutator brushes. The joint work of Lenz and Jacobi on investigating the most advantageous design of electromagnets marked the beginning of the study of the phenomena of magnetization of iron.

On the significance of Lenz’s works in the field of electromagnetism, V. K. Lebedinsky, in an article devoted to the fortieth anniversary of Lenz’s death, says: “Lenz’s works are not accidental, disconnected experiments. They reveal, one after another, a chain of concepts, beginning with the simplest. The author seems to know to what result this chain will lead, although he does not say so. An involuntary comparison with the immortal Faraday suggests itself. The experiments of these two physicists revealed the phenomenon of induction, and while the theories of Ampère and Weber are being replaced by new ones, the true significance of the experiments of Faraday and Lenz will remain forever…”. It is difficult not to agree with this assessment.

In close contact with the work of E. Kh. Lenz proceeded also the work of his contemporary Boris Semyonovich Jacobi (September 9

1801—March 27, 1874). Jacobi, the brother of the well-known mathematician Jacobi, was a native of the city of Potsdam. His specialty was initially architecture, but he quickly switched to work in the field of physics and electrical engineering and set himself the task of building an electric motor. In 1835 he was invited to the University of Dorpat to occupy the chair of architecture and accepted Russian citizenship. From then until his death, for thirty-nine years, he worked continuously in Russia and devoted all his strength and knowledge to the service of Russian science and Russian industry. In B. S. Jacobi we have a rare combination of an eminent scientist and a talented inventor. Having arrived in Dorpat, he continued to work on the electric motor.

In 1837 a special commission was organized in Petersburg to resolve the question of using electric current to set in motion vessels of the naval fleet. Lenz was invited to this commission, as was Jacobi, who by that time had already achieved definite successes. Jacobi moved to Petersburg. Working in contact with Lenz, in 1839 he built an electric motor which set in motion on the Neva, against the current of the river, a large boat carrying 14 people, and which was supplied by batteries of galvanic cells. In contrast to the types of electric motors that had been proposed up to that time, whose inventors sought to imitate the reciprocating motion of the piston of a steam engine, Jacobi was the first to apply the principle of the rotational motion of the armature of an electric motor. Jacobi also gave the first theory of electromagnetic motors. He showed that the general law for mechanical motors applies to these motors: what can be gained in the speed of a motor, through one or another change in the construction of the machine, will be lost in force, and vice versa. By this he eliminated a number of incorrect notions and vain hopes which, at a time when the law of conservation of energy had not yet been clearly formulated, many placed in “electrical machines.”

Jacobi himself points to the coincidence of the expression he derived for the theoretical maximum of work that can be obtained from an electromagnetic machine with the expression for the amount of heat developed according to the Joule–Lenz law in a conductor when a current of the same strength passes through it and with the same voltage between the ends of this conductor, but he in no way explains the meaning of this coincidence. Jacobi became convinced that obtaining mechanical work by means of galvanic cells and an electric motor was 12 times more expensive than using a steam engine. Therefore, in subsequent years he ceased to be interested in electric motors.

While studying the Daniell cell as one of the sources for supplying electric motors with current, B. S. Jacobi arrived at the invention—or, as his contemporaries enthusiastically expressed it, the “discovery”—of electrotyping. Thanks to great perseverance

and energy, demonstrated by Jacobi, electrotyping soon found serious and broad application in the production of precise and fully identical printing plates for printing money in the Expedition for the Preparation of State Papers, and then in the copying and production of artistic metal articles in the large electrotyping workshop of Duke Leuchtenberg, created under Jacobi’s direction. At the same time, the foundations of galvanostegy (copper-plating, silver-plating, gilding, etc., of metal sheets) were laid in the same workshop. Jacobi’s invention was acquired, with 25,000 rubles issued to him instead of a patent, by the Russian government “for general publication for the benefit of the entire empire, and, if desired, for the benefit of the whole world.” In connection with this, B. S. Jacobi in 1840 published the book Electrotyping, or a Method of Producing Copper Articles from Copper Solutions by Means of Galvanism According to Given Models. But Jacobi’s greatest triumph as the inventor of electrotyping came in 1867 at the Paris Exhibition. Electrotyped articles, both Russian and foreign, were represented there in extraordinary abundance, and Jacobi was awarded a gold medal for the invention of electrotyping; thus his priority was recognized on an international scale. Jacobi improved the method of igniting mines by electric current and directed the application of the method he proposed in the defense of the Kronstadt fortress during the war of 1854–1855. He also proved to be Schilling’s successor in the field of telegraphy. He not only created an apparatus that was a prototype of Morse’s writing apparatus, but also went so far as to realize a letter-printing telegraph apparatus. In the field of scientific research, B. S. Jacobi is known for his work on methods of precise measurement of electrical quantities. In 1839 he experimentally, very carefully and over a wide range, confirmed the strict proportionality of the electromagnetic and electrolytic action of an electric current. To him belongs the improvement of voltameters. The method now used of depositing silver in a voltameter from a solution of silver nitrate was proposed by Jacobi.

He also invented special devices, “voltagometers,” for introducing a strictly definite resistance into an electric circuit. Finally, he created his own standard of electrical resistance and sent copies of it to many physicists so that the electrical measurements they made could be compared with one another. In 1852 Weber determined the value of Jacobi’s resistance standard in absolute units. B. S. Jacobi was Russia’s representative on the International Commission for the Establishment of Uniformity of Weights and Measures and was elected chairman of this commission. In 1838 B. S. Jacobi was elected a corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, in 1840 was confirmed as adjunct, and in 1842 as an extraordinary academician. In 1865 ...

Yakobi received the title of ordinary academician and took the seat in the Academy that had become vacant after the death, in that year, of Lenz.

A full seventy years after Professor of Physics V. V. Petrov expressed the idea that, with the aid of the electric arc he had discovered, “a dark chamber can be quite clearly illuminated,” electric lighting by means of Petrov’s arc still remained merely an expensive, impressive toy and was used only on ceremonial occasions, on a par with fireworks, or in theaters to create “electric suns” and other stage effects. Only occasionally did the use of Petrov’s arc for illumination find more serious application where the high costs and the need for constant supervision of the “electric burners” and of the regulators of the distance between the carbons of the arc were repaid by the practical results of work carried out under bright illumination of large work areas at night. The other method of electric lighting—by the incandescence of solid bodies with current—had not emerged from the stage of purely laboratory and unsuccessful experiments.

To this early period belongs the work of the Russian electrical engineer, teacher of physics at the Pavlovsk Cadet Corps, Aleksandr Ilyich Shpakovsky. Shpakovsky directed the illumination in 1856. This illumination made a very strong impression on the then still quite young boy, and later prominent electrical engineer, V. N. Chikolev, and awakened in him enthusiasm for electric lighting. Shpakovsky also invented his own type of electric-arc regulator, which found application during the ceremonial illumination of the Kremlin in 1866 and was described in one of the foreign journals. In order to make the use of the arc for lighting cheaper, dynamo machines began to be produced for the generation of electric current. These machines were even called “light machines.” But the practical application of electric lighting on any fairly broad scale was still hindered by the imperfection of arc regulators, which required the constant intervention of a human hand; moreover, from each “light machine” only one arc could be supplied. When the “burners” were connected in parallel, only one was always ignited—the one in which the discharge gap had the lowest ignition potential. When connected in series, the operation of each regulator interfered with the operation of the others; as a result, some pairs of carbons closed until they touched, while others moved apart and caused the rupture of the arc and the interruption of current in the circuit. The use of a separate small “light machine” for each burner was inconvenient and expensive.

The electricians of that time faced three unresolved problems: 1) to find a reliable method for maintaining a constant distance between the carbons of the arc, 2) to achieve the division or “splitting up” of the electric light produced by the current from one large “light ...”

machines”; 3) to devise such an arrangement that, when used for lighting by the simple incandescence of solid bodies, these bodies would not burn up or be destroyed over a sufficiently long period of time.

Only in the seventies of the last century did three Russian men, Russian electrical inventors—Yablochkov, Lodygin, and Chikolev—almost simultaneously, though each in his own way, solve all three of these problems. They made electric lighting available for practical use, and among them Yablochkov brought his “candle” and his lighting system into wide use on a European scale.

Alexander Nikolaevich Lodygin (1847–1923) was the first to take incandescent lamps out of the seclusion of the scientific laboratory and into the street, and the first to accomplish the “subdivision” of light by means of these lamps.

A. N. Lodygin graduated from the Moscow Junker School. Having received his first officer’s rank, he retired and enrolled as a student in the physics and mathematics faculty of St. Petersburg University. Observing on one occasion the projection of an electric arc onto a screen, Lodygin became convinced that the emitted light came chiefly from the incandescent ends of the carbons, while the radiation of the air in the arc itself was considerably weaker. Moreover, at that time it was generally believed that an electromotive force arose in the electric arc in a direction opposite to that of the current. It seemed to Lodygin that an additional amount of energy was being spent to overcome this “polarization.” “Therefore,” Lodygin later wrote, “the thought occurred to me of replacing the voltaic arc with a carbon cylinder which, being heated by the current, would give light without producing polarization. Thus, from two carbon poles connected by an arc, I came to one thin piece of carbon that presented no interruption.” Money was needed for the development and testing of lamps, and later for their production. Lodygin found enterprising people, scraped together modest funds, and organized in Petersburg the “Lodygin and Co. Electric Lighting Association,” with a capital of only 10,000 rubles. In order to organize the “Association,” he had, in accordance with university rules, to leave the university. Lodygin demonstrated to the general public his first, still far from perfect lamps, created by the “Association,” by brightly illuminating, on one dark autumn evening in 1873, one of the streets in Peski in Petersburg. The demonstration was a great success. Its results promised bright prospects for the new source of light, and this date is considered the birth date of the incandescent lamp. However, Lodygin did not succeed in introducing into practice lighting with the lamps he had then created. The first lamps were very short-lived, and the “Association” lacked the funds to carry the technical development of Lodygin’s idea through to completion.

A. N. Lodygin initially proposed to eliminate the burning-through of coal heated in air by placing a small stick of coal, clamped between two metal conductors, in a hermetically sealed glass bulb. He assumed that after all the oxygen enclosed in the bulb had been consumed, the destruction of the small coal stick would cease. But for a long time it proved impossible to achieve a hermetic seal of the bulb. In 1875 a new, more advanced type of lamp was constructed. In these lamps, by pumping with a pump, an “airless space” was created. In case of burning-through, there were several spare carbon rods that switched on automatically. By means of three such lamps, patented under the name “Kohn lamps” (after the person who at that time stood at the head of the “Company” and vigorously supported his work), during January and February 1875 a successful trial of prolonged illumination was carried out in one of the fashionable shops of Petersburg.

Of another type of Lodygin’s lamps we read in M. A. Shatelen: “In this Lodygin lamp, for the first time, the incandescent rods used were not of retort carbon, but pins with heads made of various kinds of wood, charred by heating in carbon powder with little access of air. This idea of obtaining organic substances (wood, plant fibers, etc.) in crucibles with little access of air was subsequently applied by almost all inventors of incandescent lamps, including Edison.” The question of the relationship between the inventions of Lodygin and Edison is very interesting. It is known that one of the persons close to the “Lodygin and Co. Company,” Lieutenant of the Navy Khotinsky, who was sent to America in the seventies, took with him several Lodygin lamps and showed them to Edison. There is an opinion that Lodygin’s successes prompted Edison to continue his work on incandescent lamps more intensively, in particular on lamps with a carbon filament in a vacuum. “Of course, it is difficult to establish,” says M. A. Shatelen, “to what extent this circumstance influenced Edison’s invention, but that Lodygin’s invention was known in America is clear from the fact that when the lawsuit between Edison and Swan arose in the American court, the court annulled the privileges of both named inventors, basing its decision on the existence of Lodygin’s lamps.”

In 1875 the financial affairs of the “Company” became so poor that A. N. Lodygin was forced to take a position as a fitter-toolmaker at the Petersburg Arsenal. From 1876 to 1878 he worked as an engineer at a metallurgical plant, and from 1878 to 1884 in the workshop of the “Yablochkov and Co. Company,” which was engaged in introducing electric lighting in Russia by Yablochkov’s method. In 1884 Lodygin was invited as an engineer to the lamp factory of the Edison company in Paris. While working at the factory, he at the same time successfully continued his own work on improving

incandescent lamps. In 1890 he patented in America the use, in incandescent lamps, of filaments made of refractory metals, including molybdenum and tungsten, placed in a vacuum. In 1888 A. N. Lodygin moved from France to America in order, at the invitation of the Westinghouse firm, to take part in the construction of a lamp factory. He worked at this factory until 1894. In 1898–1899 he worked at automobile factories in Paris. The years from 1900 to 1905 he again spent in America, working there in various fields of technology: the manufacture of cars from pressed steel, the manufacture of storage batteries, the construction of the New York subway, and the manufacture of electric cable.

In 1906 Lodygin won his second victory over Edison. The largest American firm for the manufacture of incandescent lamps, and later also of other electric-vacuum devices, General Electric Co., acquired his 1890 patent for lamps with metallic filaments and put this new invention of Lodygin’s into broad practical use. Thus, modern incandescent lamps, brought to a high degree of perfection by Langmuir and others, originate from Lodygin’s lamps. In that same year, 1906, A. N. Lodygin came to Russia, where he hoped to apply, for the benefit of his homeland, his still vigorous energies and his now enormous technical and life experience. But in Russia, this time as well, A. N. Lodygin was underestimated, and, as 32 years earlier, the necessary support was not given to his undertakings. Lodygin was offered only the post of head of the substations of the Petersburg tramway, which condemned him to purely administrative work. Lodygin then again left for America and spent the rest of his days there. Regarding this period of his activity there is information about his construction of a plant for producing ferrotungsten, ferrochrome, and ferrosilicon; it is also known that he worked on the development of electric furnaces of various types, including induction furnaces. He received patents for electric furnaces: for melting metals, for melting melinite, for smelting ores, for heating metal tires when fitting them onto wheels, for hardening and annealing gun rings, and for obtaining phosphorus and amorphous silicon.

On November 2, 1923, the Russian Technical Society held a ceremonial meeting in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of A. N. Lodygin’s invention of the incandescent lamp. It so happened that at this same meeting the recent death of A. N. Lodygin in America was announced.

Lodygin left behind only a very small number of printed articles and notes. Of great interest is the article he published in 1909 in the journal Electricity (No. 2), “Technical Education and the Ideals of American Engineers.” We shall allow ourselves to quote from this article the following passage, showing how Lodygin himself pictured the activity of the engineer of the future: “People who subjugate nature to themselves will soon become the decisive force in the united

make efforts to meet the pressing demands of the coming years, because to them will belong the honor of laying the foundation of a future civilization. To them will belong the honor of creating the material well-being of nations, serving as the basis for broader, higher, fuller forms of life.”

The fate of Pavel Nikolaevich Yablochkov took a somewhat different course. Like Lodygin, he did not manage, while working in his homeland, to bring to completion his major invention—a new and original system of electric lighting—but he was fortunate: having left for Paris, he quickly achieved extraordinary success, implemented electric lighting on a broad European scale, and returned to Russia as a true triumphant figure. Yet fortune smiled on him as a brilliant, but only short-lived, firework. The last years of his life were even more difficult than its beginning. He lived only 47 years.

Pavel Nikolaevich Yablochkov (September 26, old style, 1847—March 19, 1894) came from an impoverished noble family. His inclination toward inventions appeared in him from his early youth. In 1866 he graduated from the Nikolaev Military Engineering School and then, additionally, from the “Officers’ Galvanic Classes” in Petersburg. Like Lodygin, at the first opportunity he left military service and in 1870 took the position of head of the telegraph department of the Moscow–Kursk Railway. This gave him the opportunity to use the workshops of the railway telegraph for his experiments. In 1873 P. N. Yablochkov became acquainted with another outstanding Russian electrical engineer-inventor, V. N. Chikolev, at one of the public technical talks which Chikolev, as a convinced popularizer of electrotechnical knowledge, conducted at the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow. Chikolev was a passionate enthusiast of the cause of electric lighting. He infected Yablochkov as well with his enthusiasm. Especially strong was the impression made on Pavel Nikolaevich by Chikolev’s attempts to invent the design of a reliable regulator for the electric arc. The idea of the differential regulator proposed by Chikolev consisted in the fact that the distance between the carbons was determined by the action not of one, but of two simultaneously acting electromagnets. Through the winding of one of them, connected in series with the electric arc, passed the discharge current of the arc; this electromagnet responded to changes in the distance between the carbons. The second electromagnet was connected in parallel to the discharge gap of the arc. Therefore it responded to fluctuations of voltage in the network feeding the arc lamp, and constantly adapted the distance between the carbons to this voltage. Yablochkov made for Chikolev, who had no experimental facilities at hand, a specimen of the differential regulator corresponding to the then still imperfect stage of this invention, as it had been recorded by Chikolev in a drawing; and then he himself became not

not only to think hard about the possibility of the reliable application of the electric arc for lighting, but also began experiments on studying the behavior of the arc under various conditions. Carried away by these ideas, P. N. Yablochkov carried out, under several unusual conditions, an experiment in the application of an arc lamp in railway work. The experiment succeeded, but Yablochkov, who had had to keep watch in the frost for a night or two by an electric lantern placed on the front platform of a locomotive, while all the time correcting in the frost the action of Foucault’s regulator, was once more convinced of the impossibility of the broad application of the old method of electric lighting. In 1874 Yablochkov left government service in order to have more time and a better base for his research and inventive work, and with his own modest personal means opened a workshop for physical instruments in Moscow. Yablochkov’s calculations were not justified. He fell into debt and in 1875 decided to go abroad, with the aim of realizing the inventions he had and of seeking an application for his abilities in his chosen field.

While in Paris, Yablochkov visited the then world-famous workshop of clocks and precision measuring instruments of Breguet (Bréguet). The owner and technical director of this workshop in those years was Louis François Clément Breguet, an extraordinary member of the Paris Academy of Sciences, an enlightened man and very knowledgeable in many fields of technology. Talking with Yablochkov on technical and scientific subjects, Breguet understood what an outstanding person he was dealing with, and proposed that Pavel Nikolaevich enter his, Breguet’s, employ as an assistant and work on improving dynamo machines. At the same time he promised to give Yablochkov full opportunity to continue his personal work on the practical realization of electric lighting and other inventions, making use of all the facilities of the workshop. Yablochkov agreed.

The next several years were the years of the greatest flowering of P. N. Yablochkov’s inventive and research activity. Yablochkov continued the experiments he had begun in Moscow, placing various refractory bodies between the carbons of the arc, and in less than a year arrived at a solution—remarkable for its simplicity and reliability—of the question of maintaining a constant distance between the ends of the carbons of the electric arc. In Yablochkov’s “candle” the carbons are arranged parallel to one another and separated by an insulating refractory mass, which evaporates simultaneously with the burning of the carbons. For the use of Yablochkov’s candle on direct current, the positive carbon, which under equal conditions burns twice as fast as the negative, had to be made twice as thick as the latter. Yablochkov shifted to the use of alternating current, and the need for different diameters of the carbons disappeared. The result of Yablochkov’s experiments was not only the development of the “candle.” P. N. Yablochkov discovered that the resistance of kaolin, magnesite, and many other refractory bodies to the electric

current upon heating decreases, contrary to the then widespread notion of a positive temperature coefficient of resistance for all solid bodies. If a kaolin plate connected to a source of electric voltage is heated, the strength of the current flowing through the plate increases, and the plate ultimately begins to glow brightly. Having discovered this phenomenon, Yablochkov used it to make a peculiar incandescent lamp that did not require the creation of a vacuum. As a practical application of this invention he illuminated the cabins of three ships of the Russian navy with kaolin lamps. The idea of Yablochkov’s incandescent lamp is the same as the idea of the Nernst lamp, patented twenty years later and highly successful. But Yablochkov regarded all incandescent lamps as, in principle, economically unprofitable and did not attach due importance to this invention of his. He believed that the principal source of the energy radiated by an arc was chemical reactions and, comparing the energy possibilities of the electric arc with those of the incandescent lamp, he contrasted what seemed to him the energetically more advantageous “incandescence with combustion” with “incandescence without combustion.”

Yablochkov solved the problem of dividing electric light in several different ways. First, in contrast to regulators, Yablochkov candles could be connected in one and the same electric circuit in series, several at a time. Second, Yablochkov proposed connecting in series, in the main circuit of the “light machine,” the primary windings of several induction coils, and from the secondary windings of these coils feeding 4 or 5 candles connected in series. Thus, he was the first to apply in practice the principle of the transformer. In the further implementation of this idea he was assisted by Ivan Filippovich Usagin, a laboratory assistant in the physics cabinet of Moscow University, who made, especially for P. N. Yablochkov, in place of induction coils, the first models of real transformers. The third method of dividing the light proposed by Yablochkov consisted in the use of capacitors. One plate of the capacitor was connected to the wire of the main circuit; the other plate was connected to earth through one or several “candles.” The second pole of the machine was likewise grounded. In order to use all these methods with direct-current machines, Yablochkov, in his patent applications, proposed connecting interrupters into the main circuit. But he always insisted on the use of alternating current and considered it more natural or more natural on the grounds that such a current always arises of itself in the winding of a machine, without the use of such complicated devices as the Pacinotti–Gramme ring. Before Yablochkov, “light machines” were built only for direct current. After the success won by Yablochkov’s candle, the same Gramme firm began to manufacture alternating-current machines. The indication of the convenience and advantages

application of alternating current in electrical engineering was one of the major merits of P. N. Yablochkov. The subsequent development of electrical engineering fully justified his point of view. In 1885 he himself shared, in the circle of his friends, thoughts about the possibility of transmitting electrical energy over great distances by wires when using transformers.

Immediately after the laboratory testing of the candle he had invented, Yablochkov gave the whole “burner” a technical form. Yablochkov’s candle had great success at the London exhibition of physical instruments in 1876, to which Yablochkov went as a representative of the Bréguet firm. Soon in Paris Yablochkov succeeded in founding a fairly powerful joint-stock company under the name “Society for the Study of Electric Lighting by Yablochkov’s Methods.” Very successful tests were carried out in lighting one of the main streets of Paris, Avenue de l’Opéra, and several first-class Parisian shops. A wide spread of Yablochkov candles began not only in Paris, but also in other large European cities: Petersburg, London, Madrid, Naples, Berlin. It was truly the triumphal march of Yablochkov’s candle across Europe. In the East it found distribution as far as the palaces of the Persian shah and the king of Cambodia. The public was struck by the brilliance and power of the new lighting and everywhere was delighted with the “Northern light,” the “Russian light.” The latter name was introduced by Yablochkov himself and engraved on the metal rim of the frosted glass globes, inside which Yablochkov candles burned.

Having created the “candle,” Yablochkov immediately took steps for the broad realization of his invention in Russia, but he succeeded in this only when it had received recognition abroad and Yablochkov himself had become a European celebrity. The establishment of the Petersburg company “Yablochkov the Inventor and Company” cost him personally very dearly. After the failure of the first attempt, he transferred the rights to his Russian privilege (patent) to the Paris joint-stock company at its founding. In order to have the right to open a workshop for “candles” in Petersburg, Yablochkov had to buy back his Russian “privilege.” The heads of the Paris company demanded for it the shares of the company belonging to Yablochkov, amounting to one million francs. Passionately wishing to organize the realization of his invention in his homeland, in Russia, Yablochkov gave up his shares and thereby deprived himself of participation in the revenues of the Paris company. The year 1879 was the year of Yablochkov’s greatest successes, but harsh disappointments awaited him ahead. In that same year Edison filed one of his principal patents for the incandescent lamp, and the Siemens company in Berlin released for sale an electric burner with the differential regulator of Hefner-Alteneck, using Chikolev’s idea. Yablochkov’s candle acquired serious competitors, and demand for it fell.

The Edison incandescent lamp was less economical and had poorer chromaticity, but on the other hand it permitted a finer subdivision of light, was easier to handle, was long-lived, and did not require such constant maintenance as the daily replacement of carbons in Yablochkov’s lanterns. In Russia Yablochkov immediately fell into uncultivated soil and was deprived of the support of influential and wealthy circles. Abroad he was an outsider. Having lost his shares, he could no longer influence the affairs of the Paris company. As a result, the managing director of this company, Fontaine, ordered the magnificent lighting of the “Avenue of the Opera” to be discontinued—according to his own words, allegedly on the grounds that this lighting was unprofitable for the company. In one of his books he himself later admitted that this unprofitability could have been eliminated by using the application, proposed by Yablochkov, of transformers and automatic candle replacement, of which he supposedly had not known.

Hard times came for Pavel Nikolaevich. Finding himself once again in straitened material circumstances, he nevertheless continued to work energetically. He no longer occupied himself with improving electric burners, but turned to sources of current: to the invention of galvanic cells of new types and to the improvement of dynamo machines. Along this path he achieved considerable successes, but he no longer had at his disposal the material resources needed to put his new ideas and inventions into practice. In 1889 he was the manager of the Russian section of the electrical-engineering division of the World Exhibition in Paris. His candle was exhibited there in a number of up to one hundred specimens, in combination with transformers and with a demonstration of all its possibilities and improvements. But its former glory had faded. After the exhibition Pavel Nikolaevich returned to Russia extremely exhausted and ill. Many years of selfless work and all the hardships and anxieties he had endured had undermined his strength. He had to undergo serious treatment and take a long rest in his homeland, in Serdobsk district. Then, having moved to Saratov, he again tried to work, but his heart could not withstand it, and he died still comparatively young, in the prime of his talent and intellectual powers. His life was cut short prematurely, as swiftly as each of his candles burned down.

P. N. Yablochkov was not only a major inventor, but also a thoughtful physicist-researcher, who deeply analyzed all the phenomena with which he had to deal. He did not merely invent; he studied the phenomena he observed and gave them his own, sometimes original, interpretation. During his experiments with the “subdivision of electric light” by means of capacitors, Yablochkov considered the question of the passage of electric current through a capacitor. With the aid of a capacitor of very large capacitance and a very weak source of current, he succeeded in showing that a definite finite time is required for the charging of a capacitor. To this entire question,

the essence of which Yablochkov defined as the transition of dynamic electricity into static electricity and back, he attached great problematic importance. In our time the question of static and dynamic electricity does not arise, but in those days it still stirred the minds of scientist-innovators, and a reflection of this may be found in the works even of such a major physicist as A. G. Stoletov.

The figure of Vladimir Nikolaevich Chikolev (July 23, 1845—February 22, 1898), his entire fate and activity, differ greatly from the figure and fate of P. N. Yablochkov and A. N. Lodygin, with whose names his own is constantly interwoven in the history of technology. Like them, he was a passionate enthusiast of electric lighting. Like them, he successfully, originally, and independently solved this great problem. His inventions are likewise numerous and varied; the significance of these inventions is no less, but the scale on which he himself succeeded in realizing his ideas was far from the same. On the other hand, Chikolev was a very solid theoretician for his time in questions of electrical engineering and electric current, and a remarkable and inspired popularizer of electrotechnical and physical knowledge. After him there remained a whole series of useful books and, in particular, many interesting and valuable journal articles for that time. He was one of the organizers of the first All-Russian Polytechnic Exhibition of 1872 and the founder of the electrotechnical department of the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow.

V. N. Chikolev was a native of Smolensk province and came from the raznochintsy. He lost his parents early and was sent for upbringing and education to the Orphan Cadet Corps. But, like Yablochkov and Lodygin, he did not wish to devote himself to military service. Supporting himself with occasional earnings, he completed, as a non-matriculated student, the course of the physico-mathematical faculty of Moscow University and began preparing to take the master’s examination. But soon, carried away by electrical engineering and engaging in invention in this still young field, V. N. Chikolev renounced an academic career and left the post of assistant at the department of physics in the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy.

Chikolev began working on differential regulators for the electric arc in 1869, and the last, most perfect type of differential lamp was built by him in 1879. But it was not Chikolev’s lot to achieve success in the broad practical introduction of electric lighting by the method he proposed. He did not have at hand a sufficient experimental base for this. His academic cast of mind allowed V. N. Chikolev to limit himself to setting forth his inventions and proposals on paper and in drawings, and to reconcile himself to the impossibility of quickly realizing them, whereas P. N. Yablochkov, by the very cast of his character, was constantly burning with a passionate desire to embody his ideas in living reality as quickly and as fully as possible. Moreover, V. N. Chikolev,

sometimes polemicizing very sharply and caustically with his competitors, at the same time did not take sufficiently rapid and decisive steps to secure his own interests, and incautiously gave others the opportunity to seize his ideas. Here is what Chikolev himself wrote to the editor of the journal La Lumière Electrique concerning the German patent for a differential lamp: “In your highly respected journal of May 1, 1880, my differential lamp was described, and on that same May 19, i.e., a few days after receiving this issue, ... he filed a request for the granting to him of a privilege in Germany for a lamp invented by him, which is a slight modification of mine. That this is indeed true is confirmed solely by the response I received from the German Patent Office, by which it refuses to issue me a privilege because my lamp is identical with Schuckert’s, while the latter’s petition was received earlier than mine. Of course, it would be very easy for me to annul Schuckert’s patent, but I should have to spend time and money on this; meanwhile I do not consider myself entitled to keep silent about such a case before electricians and not to warn them against such unscrupulous tricks*)”... As a result, electricians were warned, but the patent remained with Schuckert. Lamps with a differential regulator became widely used for street lighting under the names of the Hefner-Alteneck, Fontaine, and other lamps. Chikolev’s lamps, despite their great merits, were used only in a small number of examples in the Russian artillery department.

In 1876 Chikolev took the post of clerk of the electrotechnical section of the Artillery Committee in Petersburg and worked in the Artillery Department until the end of his days. But his work there was not the work of an official. He was the soul and the actual leader of the application of electrical engineering in artillery affairs in Russia. Chikolev succeeded in creating an electrotechnical laboratory at the Gun Factory. Here, with his closest participation, the application of electric current to a number of special tasks was developed. In 1892 Chikolev developed and carried out an ingenious method for testing parabolic mirrors for searchlights by photographing the image, reflected in the mirror, of strictly parallel alternating black and white stripes. He also applied the photographic method to determining the velocity of projectiles. He constructed a safe electric lantern for powder magazines and gunpowder factories. He is also credited with a whole series of other electrotechnical inventions connected both with artillery affairs and with electric lighting and other questions. For the reasons already indicated above, many of his ingenious proposals remained on paper and were not realized even on a laboratory scale.

) Journal Electricity*, 1881, p. 310.

The many-sided, fruitful life of V. N. Chikolev was suddenly cut short as the result of an unfortunate accident. In 1896, when a rail trolley on which Chikolev was traveling to an artillery range overturned, he received a severe blow to the side. The result was an acute disease of the liver, which led to his death after a prolonged illness.

For a number of years Chikolev served as inspector of foreign equipment for Russian artillery and distinguished himself in this post by incorruptible honesty.

A tremendous merit of V. N. Chikolev was his extensive and many-sided activity as a popularizer. In 1880 V. N. Chikolev and the group of Russian electrical engineers that had rallied around him, on behalf of the Russian Technical Society, brought out the first electrical-engineering journal in Russia, Electricity, which continues its glorious existence to this day. The soul of this undertaking and its first editor was V. N. Chikolev. The articles, notes, and letters that he placed in Electricity during the first years of the journal’s existence are striking in their number. The journal provided full coverage of all the successes of the science of electricity and of all technical achievements in this field both in Russia and abroad. Alongside Electricity, Chikolev also wrote articles for the Artillery and Engineering journals.

Chikolev also wrote a number of brochures and books on questions of electrical engineering, including several very useful reference books for that time. Of special interest are the very vividly written popular booklets: Wonders of Technology and Electricity, St. Petersburg, 1886, and Not a Fable, Yet Not an Invention. An Electrical Tale, St. Petersburg, 1896 (2nd ed.). In the first of these, he tells of Ch. (Chikolev’s) visit to a certain estate electrified with the aid of wind-driven motors and storage batteries, and, in a fantastic form for that time, describes every possible application of electric current in domestic life and agriculture. The second book goes still further into the realm of sound creative fantasy. In it Chikolev tells of his imaginary visit to the supposedly just opened “Institute of Experimental Electricity”*). Here Chikolev describes, in a clear and engaging form, the possible applications of electricity, including a detailed description of the construction and operation of “electric vehicles.” In the chapter containing the story of an investigation into the causes of a fire that had occurred, he graphically refutes the common opinion regarding the special danger of electric lighting in relation to fire. In this book Chikolev develops the idea of the great benefit that an institute like the one he describes could bring for the practice of applying electricity.

The same enthusiastic attitude toward electricity and its applications, especially toward electric lighting, runs like a red thread through—

*) Set forth by us according to a bibliographical note in Electricity, 1896, p. 149.

calls this, too, an inseparable trait of all the other articles and books of V. N. Chikolev. Even before Yablochkov achieved his brilliant successes, Chikolev repeatedly predicted the imminent victory of electric lighting. Thus, at one of his public lectures at the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow in 1875, he said: “Of course, it will not be our children, but we ourselves, who will have to witness the wide dissemination of electric lighting.” Not even three years passed before these words were brilliantly justified by the successes of P. N. Yablochkov. But in 1875, on the eve of these successes, such words seemed a distant fantasy. “As I now recall,” wrote V. N. Chikolev twenty years later, “what objections, what attacks my phrase provoked for publicly communicating my personal enthusiasms.” Chikolev concludes the article “The History of Electric Lighting,” published in the journal Electricity in 1880, as follows: “Several years ago I earned the reproach of enthusiasm when, in one public lecture in Moscow, I expressed confidence that in the very near future the splendid electric light would cease to be a brilliant toy and would win for itself a serious position in our life. Now I shall allow myself to predict the by no means distant realization of the canalization of electricity; we ourselves, and not our children, must be witnesses of this event, which will have incalculable, boundless consequences. I do not doubt—although this achievement, of course, will already fall to the lot of our children—that people will cease burning coal for the movement of railway trains, and will ask the sun to take upon itself this honorable labor, which may already become beyond our own powers and means... The expected progress will be accelerated all the more insofar as technology closes its eyes less to the imperfections of the methods being practiced, and will be guided in its labors by the infallible principles of science, and not by the accidental whims of fantasy...”

In his articles V. N. Chikolev is always ardent and polemical. He expresses and defends his opinion directly and sharply, and does not hesitate at times to strike his opponent with a caustic word. But he is honest and just, and when life convinces him that he was wrong, he invariably renders his opponent his due. Such is Chikolev—an inventor and scientist-theorist, a dreamer with a broad flight of imagination and a sober practical worker of the Artillery Department, a man of high honesty and integrity in all respects.

The pioneers of Russian electrical engineering A. N. Lodygin, P. N. Yablochkov, and V. N. Chikolev began their work in the early seventies, alone, meeting—at least at the beginning of their activity—no support from the milieu around them. Their great technical achievements and glorious inventions, and the very great work carried out by V. N. Chikolev in the propaganda and popularization of electrotechnical knowledge, led to the fact that in the following two last decades of the nineteenth century in Russia (chiefly

...in St. Petersburg) there was already a large group of electricians who maintained lively contact with one another. Among them were engineers, inventors, and physicist-scholars. Their mutual communication was greatly facilitated by the journal Elektrichestvo and its editorial board, the newly established Electrotechnical Section of the Russian Technical Society, and the Physical Section of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society at St. Petersburg University.

One of the persons who worked in contact with Chikolev was Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Lachinov (May 10, 1842—October 15, 1902), professor of physics and meteorology at the Forestry Institute in St. Petersburg. Lachinov worked extensively on theoretical questions in the field of electricity and electrical engineering. He authored a large number of scientific, technical, and popular articles in Elektrichestvo, in the newspaper Elektrik, and also in the general press. In a major article published in 1880 in the journal Elektrichestvo under the title “Electromechanical Work,” Lachinov examined in detail the question of transmitting mechanical work over a distance by means of electric current. Here he arrived at substantial conclusions. Lachinov’s work remained unknown abroad, and subsequently foreign electrical engineers came to the same conclusions. Among Lachinov’s major inventions are the method he proposed for manufacturing storage-battery plates from spongy lead and the electrolytic method for the industrial production of hydrogen. Both found practical application abroad. Lachinov built an optical pyrometer and developed the design of a dynamo machine without iron. D. A. Lachinov possessed the ability to defend his author’s rights to an even lesser degree than V. N. Chikolev. As a result, many of Lachinov’s ideas were put into practice by people unconnected with him and remained unassociated with his name. D. A. Lachinov wrote the book Fundamentals of Meteorology and Climatology (1895), which was a valuable contribution to Russian literature in this field.

In close collaboration with V. N. Chikolev, Lachinov carried out, in the physics laboratory of the Forestry Institute, an investigation of the electric arc. He measured the intensity of light, the current, the resistance of the arc, the length of the arc, and, as he expressed it, the “electromotive force of the voltaic arc.” By the latter he meant that very electromotive force of polarization which was attributed to the arc and which Lodygin had had in mind in his time when he rejected the use of the electric arc for lighting. Concerning this e.m.f., Lachinov, as a result of his investigation, came to the conclusion: “I consider these experiments completed only in a qualitative respect; they seem to me to prove the existence in the voltaic arc of an e.m.f. directed opposite to the exciting force of the battery and equal to approximately 12 exciting forces of a Bunsen cell”... *)

) Journal of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society 9*, 263 (1877).

it was also determined what influence the alkali metals introduced into the arc have on its resistance (or, as we would now say, on its volt-ampere characteristic). In the minutes of the debates at the Russian Physico-Chemical Society on Lachinov’s report*) we read: “The considerable difference in the resistance of the voltaic arc when potassium and sodium are introduced into it may be explained, in the opinion of D. I. Mendeleev, by the fact that potassium combines with carbon at high temperature, whereas sodium does not combine; in general, chemism must play an essential role in the phenomenon of the voltaic arc.” Great importance to “chemism” in the electric arc was attributed both by its discoverer V. V. Petrov and by P. N. Yablochkov. In the first years of the twentieth century one of the outstanding Russian electrical engineers, a member of the same group that had rallied around the journal Electricity and the physics laboratory of St. Petersburg University, now Academician V. F. Mitkevich (born in 1872), convincingly showed experimentally that the source of the electrons feeding Petrov’s arc is thermoelectronic emission from the incandescent cathode (the Edison effect, as this phenomenon was then called). Thus, the electric arc was not only discovered in Russia by V. V. Petrov, but was also thoroughly investigated and explained by P. N. Yablochkov, V. N. Chikolev, D. A. Lachinov, and V. F. Mitkevich. It also found wide practical application in the hands of the Russian electrical engineers Yablochkov, Slavyanov, and Benardos (see below).

Among that same group of permanent contributors to the journal Electricity, the figure of Vasilii Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov deserves great attention. He was a very talented man, fascinated by the broad prospects for applying electricity in industry. The articles he wrote and those original inventions that he managed to bring to completion show that, under normal living conditions, he would undoubtedly have become a major electrical inventor and a cultural figure of considerable scope. But only a few days before graduating from the St. Petersburg Forestry Institute, V. A. Tikhomirov was exiled by the tsarist government to the far north. In the early 1880s, upon returning from exile, he settled in Moscow, and there began his useful activity as a practical electrical engineer. However, after several years he was again subjected to repression and was exiled to a remote province, where he could apply his knowledge and energies to nothing except agriculture and meteorology. During the short period of his free activity, V. A. Tikhomirov gave an ingenious reconstruction of Yablochkov’s candle for use with direct current. He proposed making the positive carbon of the candle in the form of a body of screw-like shape with an axis coinciding with the axis of the negative carbon rod. With this form of the carbons, the difference in the rate of their burning affected the operation of the candle only very slightly

*) Ibid., p. 215.

V. A. Tikhomirov built galvanic cells with sulfur-cyanide salts. He also devised a new method of nickel-plating, a galvanometer of simplified type, the spraying of metals by means of electric current, as well as several electrochemical works. He worked on the question of applying wind and electric motors to the irrigation of fields. Tikhomirov’s instruments and inventions enjoyed great success at the All-Russian and Vienna exhibitions.

Another original solution to the question of maintaining a constant distance between the electrodes of Petrov’s arc was given in those same years by the Russian electrical engineer Repiev. In Repiev’s lamp two pairs of carbons are placed opposite one another. In each pair, which constitutes one of the electrodes of the arc, both carbons are arranged in a vertical plane at a certain angle to one another. Their ends touch one another. As the carbons burn away, they move until they come into new contact with one another, by means of constantly acting springs. Thus the closing ends of each pair of carbons are constantly at one and the same height and at one and the same distance from the ends of the opposite pair of carbons, which constitutes the second electrode. Repiev’s lamp was exhibited in 1882 at the Electrical Exhibition in Petersburg and described in Fontaine’s book.

In the field of work on dynamos begun by Yablochkov, the dynamos of A. I. Poleshko deserve attention. In constructing these machines Poleshko proceeded from the idea that the path of all the armature elements should pass, as far as possible, through the active region of the machine’s magnetic field. Poleshko’s machine was provided with a collector of a new type, which made it possible to obtain, at will, either direct or alternating current. It was also possible to feed several circuits from a single rotating collector: some with direct current, others with alternating current. A. I. Poleshko also constructed a type of transformer which is considered the first transformer built in Russia, if one does not count the small transformers made by I. F. Usagin for Yablochkov’s experiments.

Among other Russian electrical engineers of the same period we shall briefly mention N. Golubitsky, inventor of a number of improvements in telephone practice, and E. Tveritinov, who worked in the field of military electrical engineering and in 1882 arranged the illumination of the Ivan the Great bell tower. Tveritinov was the author of books that were very useful in their day: Electric Accumulators and Electric Lighting. These books received high praise from V. N. Chikolev as “an original work by a serious Russian electrical engineer.” We shall mention N. Dobrokhotov-Maisky, inventor of one of the non-differential types of electric-arc regulators, which was advantageously distinguished by its simplicity. About Lieutenant of the naval fleet N. Khotinsky,

proposed a new method for manufacturing plates for accumulators by stamping. Of A. A. Linëv, the author of a new scheme for a magneto-electric railway with a third-rail system; an experimental line was built in 1890 in London, and later this invention of Linëv’s was applied on the factory tracks of one of Edison’s factories in America.

We shall separately mention Cheslav Kupriyanovich Skarzhinsky (1849–1912), a regular contributor to the journal Electricity. Through his articles Skarzhinsky did much to clarify concepts connected with electric current among practicing electrical engineers and to train them in electrotechnical calculations. Skarzhinsky was an assistant of P. N. Yablochkov in Paris.

Vladislav Aleksandrovich Tyurin (1862–1908), who collaborated in the early 1880s with V. N. Chikolev, deserves great attention. Later Tyurin’s interests were concentrated chiefly on questions of thermodynamics and physical chemistry. He is responsible for a theory of galvanic cells and work on the influence of ions on osmotic pressure. Tyurin’s principal work in the field of electrical engineering was his research, jointly with Chikolev and Klasson, on electric-light searchlights and their action (1888). The apparatuses invented by Tyurin, which replace sight for the blind by touch and allow them to read printed text, deserve considerable attention. The idea of these apparatuses is based on the photoconductivity of selenium and on dividing the “read” printed page into separate small cells, as is done in our modern methods of television.

Of very great importance are the works of the mining engineer Nikolai Gavrilovich Slavyanov and Nikolai Nikolaevich Benardos on the application of Petrov’s arc in the metalworking industry. In Benardos’s method, which he called “electrohephaestus,” the electric arc between a carbon electrode and the edges of two metal sheets or plates placed closely side by side heats their adjoining edges and welds them. This same method was used by Benardos for cutting metal sheets or plates, for making holes in them, and also for converting one modification of cast iron into another by heating. Slavyanov uses a metal rod instead of a carbon electrode. The rod melts under the action of the electric arc, and the metal flows in the form of a liquid mass onto the object being worked, which is the second electrode, or else into a specially placed mold. Thus Slavyanov’s method is a method of electric soldering and electric casting. In its time this method found wide application in the manufacture of small metal articles and in the repair of broken metal parts of machines. Slavyanov also proposed a method of heating by an electric arc a mold in which casting is being carried out—

… and then cooling of metal objects, in order to avoid premature solidification of the upper layers of the metal and the formation, under the crust of the metal, of harmful voids in the thickness of the object being cast. With Slavyanov’s method, according to data of that time, it was possible to obtain good-quality castings weighing up to 700 poods. The methods of electric welding of Benardos and electric soldering of Slavyanov quickly became widely used both in Russian and in foreign factories and remain very important techniques in the manufacture of metal products even at the present time.

N. G. Slavyanov graduated from the Mining Institute in Petersburg in 1877. He studied electrical engineering independently from books and journals and mastered it so deeply and fully that he himself designed and built the dynamos most suitable for applying his method. He also invented his own regulator for arc lamps, distinguished by simplicity of construction and good operation, and illuminated with arc lamps built by him the cannon factory in Motovilikha, near Perm. M. A. Shatelen, in the obituary he wrote, says of Slavyanov: “N. G. died while still a comparatively young man, only 43 years old, having worked only 20 years in the field of engineering. But even in that time he managed to do so much for electrical engineering that his name will never be forgotten and, alongside the names of Petrov and Yablochkov, will constitute the pride of Russian electrical engineering.”

The difficult conditions that existed in Russia for progressive people under the reactionary regime established by the tsarist government led to the fact that another major Russian electrical engineer, Mikhail Osipovich Dolivo-Dobrovolsky (1862–1919), was forced to live and work outside the borders of our homeland. M. O. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky came from the city of Odessa and was the son of an official. For active participation in the student movement he was expelled in 1881 from among the students of the Riga Polytechnic Institute, without the right to enter any higher educational institution in Russia. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky went abroad and entered the Polytechnic Institute in the city of Darmstadt. While still a student at this Institute he gained recognition through his work, and after graduating from the Institute he was invited as an engineer to the German General Electricity Company. Here he quickly advanced and took up the question of the best method of generating alternating current. Having given the rotating magnetic field, first implemented by the Italian physicist Ferraris, a practically more convenient form, and having established in the coils of the machine connected to the external circuit a phase difference of currents of 120°, M. O. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky arrived at the scheme of three-phase current and was the first in the world to implement it. At the Electrical Exhibition of 1891 in Frankfurt am Main, the transmission of electrical energy by means of three-phase current from Lauffen to Frankfurt over a distance of 178 km was demonstrated.

After this exhibition, both in Europe and in America, numerous stations and lines for the transmission of three-phase current began to be built.

M. O. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky took part in the first electrical congress in Petersburg at the turn of 1899–1900 and delivered an extensive report, “On the Contemporary Development of the Technology of Three-Phase Current.” Having analyzed and described in the report all the parts of the three-phase installation he had developed, and having discussed its merits, Dolivo-Dobrovolsky comes to the conclusion that “such a system, worked out down to the smallest details, must more and more conquer for itself a field of application and gradually embrace all branches of industry.” The 48 years that have passed since then have shown that Dolivo-Dobrovolsky was entirely right. His inventions brought about a revolution in the technology of heavy currents. His scheme constitutes the foundation of electrical engineering today. Everything necessary for the realization of this scheme—generators of a new type, electric motors with a closed armature without brushes, three-phase transformers—all this was invented and developed directly by M. O. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky or under his immediate direction. Of his priority in the invention of three-phase current Dolivo-Dobrovolsky says the following in his report: “The Electrical Exhibition of 1891 in Frankfurt am Main was important in the history of electrical engineering chiefly because there, for the first time, a new system, the so-called three-phase current, appeared publicly. Despite the fact that the rotating magnetic field had been discovered by Prof. Ferraris 5–6 years before this and in its turn had had predecessors (see the works of Deprez, Bailey, and others), despite the fact that the experiments of N. Tesla, as well as my own, had already existed for some two years before this exhibition, nevertheless the year of this exhibition (1891) must be regarded, so to speak, as the year of birth of three-phase current. Technology does not concern itself much with laboratory experiments, takes little interest in theoretical reflections and ‘possibilities’; it welcomes discoveries only when it is shown that something can be ‘made’ from them—shown, if not in a completed form, then at least in some practical form.”

With such a practical approach to questions of technology, M. O. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky was by no means a stranger to theory. In the same year, 1891, at the International Congress he demonstrated the advantages of the method of representing any alternating current as consisting of two components: a “working,” or “active,” component, coinciding in phase with the voltage, and a “wattless,” or “idle,” component, with a phase shifted by 90° relative to the phase of the voltage. In investigating the operation of the Lauffen–Frankfurt power-transmission line, Dolivo-Dobrovolsky encountered unexpected phenomena. One of them consisted in the fact that the voltage at the terminals of the primary winding of the transformer, when the line load was small, was higher than the voltage at the terminals of the current-generating machine; under heavy load this difference was smoothed out. The charging current of the line capacitance proved unexpectedly

large. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky succeeded in explaining the lower voltage at the machine terminals by the reaction of the generator armature to the capacitive load when the open 178-kilometer line was switched on*). As a result of his work, Dolivo-Dobrovolsky developed a number of basic principles which are still followed in the construction of electrical generators and motors: to use distributed windings wherever possible; to avoid the scattering of lines of force; to strive for a uniform distribution of the rotating field. M. O. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky produced several designs and inventions in electrical measuring technology. Under his direction a method was developed for obtaining aluminum by electrolysis at high temperature. In the last years of his life Dolivo-Dobrovolsky worked on the problem of transmitting energy over a distance by means of high-voltage direct current. This problem has acquired great urgency in our time, when the need has arisen to transmit electric power over extremely long distances.

According to his contemporaries, M. O. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky possessed an exceptional talent as a lecturer. He penetrated to the essence of the phenomena he studied or expounded not only with the aid of the means furnished him by mathematical analysis, but also through remarkable physical intuition. When the Polytechnic Institute was being established in Petersburg, an attempt was made by leading figures of Russian engineering to invite M. O. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky to the post of professor, head of one of the departments of that Institute. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky, who at that time had temporarily left his work at A.E.G. and was living in Switzerland, did not refuse, but “objective reasons prevented it”**).

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the second center which united Petersburg electricians, along with the editorial office of the journal Electricity, was the physics laboratory of the university). At that time, professors I. I. Borgman, O. D. Khvolson, N. A. Gezekhus, N. G. Egorov were keenly interested in questions of electricity there; and among those who maintained close ties with them were their pupils or followers Aleksandr Stepanovich Popov, A. I. Sadovsky, N. A. Smirnov, V. K. Lebedinsky, A. G. Gershun, M. A. Shatelen, V. F. Mitkevich. On the close connection of this group of physicists with the editorial office of the journal Electricity, we read in M. A. Shatelen: “Beginning in the nineties of the nineteenth century it (the editorial office of the journal Electricity*—N. K.) was a center around which the young generation of electricians gathered... The editorial office of the journal was also frequented by the then pillars of electrical engineering—

) Elektr.-Techn. Zeits. 12 (1891).
) V. Khashchinsky, “In Memory of Mikhail Osipovich Dolivo-Dobrovolsky,” journal Electricity No. 5, p. 238, 1930.
) Journal Electricity No. 8, p. 66, 1947.

... Chikolev, Skarzhinsky, Florensov, Poleshko, and others, as well as the younger brethren, chiefly university physicists. From among them A. I. Smirnov (the editor of the journal—N. K.) chose his secretaries. Who among the young electrical engineers of that time did not serve as secretary of the editorial board of Elektrichestvo! The secretaries included V. K. Lebedinsky, A. G. Gershun, V. P. Weinberg, and many others. Among them was also V. F. Mitkevich.” Organizationally, the Petersburg physicists and electrical engineers were united by the Physical Section of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society.

At meetings of this section, the famous reports of the inventor of radio, A. S. Popov, were also delivered. The name of Alexander Stepanovich Popov and all the stages of his glorious work are now widely known in the USSR. Therefore we shall permit ourselves only to dwell briefly on certain moments of his life and activity. A. S. Popov (March 16, 1859—January 13, old style, 1906) was the son of a priest in a workers’ settlement attached to the Bogoslovsk Plant in the Urals. The industrial environment of his native settlement from his earliest years instilled in Popov an inclination toward technology. Already in those years he built a peculiar electric alarm clock, in which the electric current from a galvanic cell flowed through a chain from which a weight was suspended, setting a wall clock in motion and making contact at the required time. Having left the theological seminary and prepared independently for the entrance examinations, Popov entered Petersburg University in 1877, and there devoted all his time free from compulsory studies to work in the physics laboratory. In search of earnings to support himself and his sister, Popov, while still a student, joined the “Electrotechnician” artel and personally took part in the first installations of electric lighting. This work gave him many craft skills that proved very useful to him later. After completing the course he was retained at the university “to prepare for the rank of professor.” In 1883 he accepted an invitation to the post of instructor in the Officers’ Mine Classes in Kronstadt and worked there until his transfer, as professor, to the Petersburg Electrotechnical Institute in 1900. The first apparatuses of wireless telegraphy, which marked the beginning of radio, Popov invented and built in the laboratory of the Mine Classes in Kronstadt. His closest assistant and helper in this work was Pyotr Nikolaevich Rybkin (May 1, 1864—January 10, 1948). A. S. Popov, beginning from his student days, responded keenly to new discoveries in the field of physics. Having learned of Hertz’s experiments, he immediately reproduced them in the laboratory of the Mine Classes. In contrast to Hertz, he at once conceived the idea of applying electromagnetic waves for signaling, and his constant contact with sailors and life at the principal base of the Baltic Fleet convinced him of the enormous significance of such wireless signaling for the navy. Popov became

he worked intensively on creating such a receiver of Hertzian waves, one that might find practical application. Having read, in the foreign literature—which he always followed closely—about Lodge’s experiments, Popov undertook a wide-ranging scientific investigation of the behavior of metallic powders with respect to electric current. After prolonged work and laborious, careful searches he succeeded in solving the problem he had set himself. A. S. Popov first demonstrated his famous scheme for receiving radio signals with the aid of a coherer and an electric bell’s hammer striking the latter on May 7 (Old Style), 1895, in a report at a meeting of the Physical Section of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society, under the modest title “On the Relation of Metallic Powders to Electrical Oscillations.” The report ended with the words: “In conclusion I may express the hope that my apparatus, with further improvement, may be applied to the transmission of signals over a distance by means of rapid electrical oscillations, as soon as a source of such oscillations possessing sufficient energy is found.”

The Marconi circuit, patented a whole year later and first described in the literature in 1897, consisted of exactly the same elements as Popov’s circuit. Marconi does not mention by a single word not only Popov’s report, published in print in January 1896, but also the work of Branly and Lodge. Whether Popov’s report was known to Marconi—which is almost beyond doubt—or not changes nothing in the question of Popov’s priority. That priority is indisputable. Branly and Lodge also acknowledged it in response to inquiries from the Russian Physico-Chemical Society. Popov and Rybkin continued their work. In the garden surrounding the building of the Mine Classes, the bells of their receiving apparatus were constantly heard, placed farther and farther away from the source of Hertzian waves. On March 24, 1896, A. S. Popov delivered a second report at a meeting of the same Physical Section. This time the wave receiver was connected to a Morse writing telegraph apparatus, and Popov demonstrated the transmission into the lecture hall, from another building at a distance of 200 m, of a short radiogram—the first in the world—consisting of the words “Heinrich Hertz.” To demonstrate the possibility of registering waves arriving from great distances, Popov made use of the electromagnetic disturbances that arise during distant thunderstorm discharges. Thus Popov’s “thunderstorm recorder” was born. Experiments in transmitting telegraph signals were transferred to the sea, to the ships of a squadron. The sensitivity of the receiving station and the transmission distance continually increased. During one of the tests Rybkin discovered that, with the aid of a telephone, the coherer made it possible to receive much weaker signals than with a telegraph apparatus, and Popov developed a system of aural reception, which greatly increased the transmission range. In the winter of 1899–1900, Popov’s radio telegraph, with direct—

...with the personal participation of Popov and Rybkin, was applied with very great success during the work of removing stones from the armored cruiser General-Admiral Apraksin, which had suffered an accident in the area of the island of Gogland, 43 km from the nearest populated point, Kotka, connected with Petersburg by a telegraph wire. Wireless communication functioned regularly during the rescue operations from January 28 to April 12, 1900. According to Popov himself, “the first official dispatch contained the order for the Yermak to go to the rescue of fishermen carried out to sea on an ice floe, and several lives were saved thanks to the Yermak and the wireless telegraph. Such an incident,” Popov writes modestly, “was a great reward for the labors, and the impressions of those days will probably never be forgotten.”

At the First Congress of Electrical Engineers in Petersburg in 1899–1900, A. S. Popov gave a detailed report on his invention, setting forth in detail the history of his searches and discoveries. After transferring as a professor to the Electrotechnical Institute and moving from Kronstadt to Petersburg, A. S. Popov continued work on introducing the wireless telegraph on ships of the Russian fleet and worked in the Naval Technical Committee. Having completed, by 1904, the equipment of a special laboratory at the Electrotechnical Institute, Popov set up there a number of scientific research works in the field of electrical oscillations and the propagation of electromagnetic waves, and thereby laid the foundation for the Russian scientific school of radio engineering, whose representatives, in the first years after his death, were V. K. Lebedinsky, D. A. Rozhansky, and others.

In 1905 the wave of revolution swept A. S. Popov too into its vortex. In September, during the rise of the revolution, the Council of the Electrotechnical Institute elected A. S. Popov rector of the Institute. With the reaction that soon began, the position of A. S. Popov—the elected rector—became very difficult. From above pressed the reactionary government; from below there was distrust on the part of the revolutionary-minded student mass toward the entire professorial body. In this situation A. S. Popov defended the interests of the Institute and of the student youth as far as his strength allowed. After another summons to the minister, who was threatening the Institute and the students with new repressions, and after a serious conversation with this tsarist satrap, A. S. Popov suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and he died on the very day when he was elected chairman of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society.

As A. S. Popov’s contemporaries emphasize in their recollections of him, constant contact with technology developed in him a sober and practical attitude toward scientific problems. He was as ardent an enthusiast of the cause of wireless communication by means of electromagnetic waves as, in his time, Yablochkov had been an enthusiast of the cause of electric lighting. Popov likewise selflessly devoted...

RUSSIAN ELECTRICIANS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

...to his beloved cause all his time, all his strength, and, without sparing his own modest personal means, when the sums—far from sufficient—which the Naval Department grudgingly allocated were not enough to carry out the experiments he had planned. Often, in the laboratory of the Mine Classes, possessing great manual skill, he made the necessary apparatus with his own hands. He developed into an exceptionally good experimenter. At the same time, he did not shy away from profound scientific questions. In short, A. S. Popov was a true representative of advanced science. Along with this, A. S. Popov was also a very good teacher. His lectures were not brilliant in outward form, but their exposition was always distinguished by extreme simplicity and clarity, and bore the stamp of his own deep working-through of any question. He attached very great importance to the organization of practical laboratory work for his students and willingly supervised these exercises.

A. S. Popov was a straightforward and honest man. He did not conceal his convictions and did not fawn before those in power. The following incident, described by M. V. Shuleikin in an article about Popov in the journal Elektrichestvo, is characteristic of him. When Popov achieved significant successes in radiotelegraphy, his “superiors” decided to show the novelty to the tsar. A. S. Popov was required to provide the instruments and to train specially appointed persons in handling them. Popov understood that he himself would not be admitted to the demonstration experiments in the presence of the tsar, as an “unreliable subject.” In appearance he submitted, but after doing what was required of him, as he was leaving, he took the tube of the coherer out of the receiver, put it in his pocket, and carried it away with him. In this way he thwarted the demonstration of experiments to the tsar that was repugnant to him.

A. S. Popov died at the age of only 46. He was one of those, in the group of Petersburg physicists mentioned above, who went to the grave earlier than the others. The activity of other members of the same group occupied a considerable part of the first half of the present century. Academician V. F. Mitkevich and Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR M. A. Shatelen continue to work fruitfully to this day. The origins of the activity of all these Russian electricians go back to the time of Chikolev and Popov, to the days of the meetings of the Physico-Chemical Society in the old laboratory of Petersburg University, in the so-called Jeu de Paume building, to the first decades of the journal Elektrichestvo. Therefore, in our essay on Russian electricians of the nineteenth century, we shall allow ourselves to devote a few lines to at least some of them.

Ivan Ivanovich Borgman (1849–1914) was a convinced adherent of the physical views of Faraday and Maxwell. He did much to acquaint Russian physicists and electricians with Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic field and theory of light. To him belongs the major work Foundations of the Doctrine of Electric and Magnetic...

phenomena” (vol. I, 1893; vol. II, 1895, St. Petersburg). His enthusiastic, one might say reverent, attitude toward Maxwell’s theory he expressed in the following words: “Maxwell’s theory is not a picture conveying, in all its details, some particular moment; it is, as it were, a profound musical work, clearly and vividly expressing the inner content of that moment, independently of the external forms that concern it.”

I. I. Borgman constantly followed both the scientific achievements in abstract questions of physics and their newest applications, and always with great enthusiasm acquainted his listeners with both the former and the latter, trying as quickly as possible to arrange for their experimental reproduction. At the Electrical Exhibition in Petersburg I. I. Borgman organized a demonstration of three-phase current almost simultaneously with the demonstration of this invention by Dolivo-Dobrovolsky in Frankfurt am Main. I. I. Borgman was the builder and organizer of the Physical Institute, completed in 1900 and replacing, at the turn of the new century, the old physical laboratory where A. S. Popov had demonstrated his lightning indicator and where I. I. Borgman himself had guided the first steps of V. K. Lebedinsky, M. A. Shatelen, V. F. Mitkevich, and many other Russian physicists and electrical engineers. Among his own experimental works it is necessary to note the studies “On the Conductivity of Galvanic Current by Liquid Plates” (1881), “On the Heating of the Glass of Capacitors During Their Intermittent Electrification” (1885), and especially “Experiments on the Propagation of Electric Current Through Air” (1886 and 1887). In this work the original experiments on the deflection of a small magnetic needle under the action of electric currents in air are very interesting. Observing the deflections of the needle in one direction or another at different positions of it in space, Borgman established the geometrical path of the passage of charges during a silent independent discharge. In connection with this work I. I. Borgman pointed out the possibility of determining the distribution of potential in the earth’s atmosphere by using small flames as probes. This method found wide application; it is practiced even at the present time. In the theoretical part of the work I. I. Borgman expressed an idea, advanced for those years, that electric current in air can be explained by the transfer of electric charges by ions.

I. I. Borgman developed extensive popularizing activity. In addition to the popular lectures he delivered and the book Magnetic Flux and Its Actions, the collections New Ideas in Physics, published under his editorship, played a major role in scientific education. Borgman himself contributed to the first issue of New Ideas the article “The Origin of the Electron Theory of Matter.”

Nikolai Grigorievich Egorov (1849–1919) was, together with V. N. Chikolev, the organizer of the Electrotechnical Section of the Russian Technical Society and enjoyed great authority

among the Russian electricians of that time. He was the initiator and organizer of the First All-Russian Congress of Electricians in Petersburg in December 1899. From the moment of the founding of the Physical Department of the R.Ph.Ch.S. in 1872 and to the end of his life, N. G. Egorov was one of the leading members of the department. In 1884 N. G. Egorov was elected professor of physics at the Military Medical Academy, to the very chair that had once been occupied by V. V. Petrov. In 1891–1892, on N. G. Egorov’s initiative, a high-voltage laboratory named after V. V. Petrov was built at the Military Medical Academy, with a transformer of half a million volts. N. G. Egorov was the first in Russia to demonstrate Hertzian waves to a broad audience. After the discovery of X-rays, he organized the first roentgenographic laboratory in Russia. Egorov’s master’s dissertation (1877) was devoted to the study of an electric photometer and was electrotechnical in character. The subject of his doctoral dissertation (1882) was “Atmospheric Lines of the Solar Spectrum.” In 1883 he succeeded in proving that the Fraunhofer lines $A$ and $B$ of the solar spectrum belong to oxygen. In 1894 N. G. Egorov was invited by D. I. Mendeleev to work in the Main Chamber of Weights and Measures in order to organize new laboratories there. This work so captivated N. G. Egorov that he devoted to it entirely the last two decades of his life. After the death of D. I. Mendeleev he replaced him in the post of director of the Chamber of Weights and Measures. When the metric system was introduced in our country by decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR of January 14, 1918, N. G. Egorov could state with great satisfaction that the Chamber of Weights and Measures possessed at that time, thanks to his many years of labor, first-class standards of electrical units. N. G. Egorov took an active part in preparing the decree and in putting it into effect. In his theoretical views in the field of electromagnetic phenomena, N. G. Egorov, like I. I. Borgman, was a convinced adherent of the ideas of Faraday and Maxwell. This was clearly reflected in his popular articles “Electric Light” (an address delivered at the solemn assembly of the Military Medical Academy in 1889), “Hertz’s Experiments” (an address at the Eighth Congress of Russian Naturalists and Physicians), “The Centenary of the Electric Current,” and others.

Alexander Lvovich Gershun (1868–1915) dealt with questions of electrical engineering in his younger years. Subsequently he became a major specialist in optical engineering. His chief merit was the establishment in Russia of the production of glass and optical instruments. As a teacher of electricity in the Officers’ Artillery Classes in Kronstadt, A. L. Gershun developed questions of the application of electrical engineering in naval affairs. In the field of electrophysics he succeeded in showing that the filament of the Nernst lamp is especially suitable for reproducing the “Edison effect” directly in air at atmospheric pressure. To this study of his refer-

is given by V. F. Mitkevich in his already mentioned major work on the electric arc. A. L. Gershun has the honor of having “discovered” the forgotten works of V. V. Petrov. A. L. Gershun, then still a student of Petersburg University, while on vacation in Vilna, found in the library of Vilna University a copy of Petrov’s book Information on Galvanic Experiments, etc. and reported it to the Petersburg electricians*).

Vladimir Konstantinovich Lebedinsky (1868—1937) was an exceptional and very distinctive figure among Russian electricians. Lebedinsky began his almost 45-year activity as a scientific researcher, brilliant teacher, and remarkable popularizer and propagandist of scientific knowledge and ideas while closely connected with the circle of Petersburg physicists and electricians of the end of the last century. Lebedinsky was a pupil of Borgman in the theory of electromagnetic phenomena, a successor to Chikolev in his literary activity, and an ardent and convinced continuer of the work of A. S. Popov in the development of radio engineering in Russia. To the seething activity and energy of V. K. Lebedinsky the USSR owes the creation of numerous personnel, now active in the field of radio engineering, and the realization of the necessary prerequisites for the development of extensive scientific-research work in this field. His extensive literary and organizational work left V. K. Lebedinsky only little time for the full development of his own personal experimental works. But even these few works stood, each in its own time, at the level of contemporary science and reflected new urgent questions.

In his younger years V. K. Lebedinsky investigated the properties of the electric spark—this then mysterious link in the first generators of electric oscillations. His work on the investigation of the behavior of “elementary magnets” in a ferromagnetic body in alternating magnetic fields belongs to the last months of V. K. Lebedinsky’s life and was printed in the journal Electricity simultaneously with his obituary**). According to the testimony of those who knew him well, V. K. Lebedinsky never limited himself to simple acquaintance with new facts and theories, but “literally with his whole being experienced that gigantic creative work, that tension of thought, which led mankind to the modern brilliant successes of creative natural science”***). This trait found vivid expression in the numerous articles in which he set forth new discoveries and conceptions in the field of electrophysics and in his annual surveys of advances in the field of electricity and its applications. V. K. Lebedinsky began his teaching activity in 1895 at

*) Electricity, 1887, No. 4, pp. 37–38. Note by N. Popov.
**) Electricity, 1938, No. 5, pp. 67–70.
***) B. Ostroumov, In Memory of V. K. Lebedinsky, Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk, 19, 441—447 (1938).

in the Electrotechnical Institute. In the same year his first experimental work was printed, “On Some Experiments with Rumkorff’s Coil.” In 1916 Lebedinsky defended a dissertation for the master’s degree on the topic “The Origin of the Electric Spark and the Photoelectric Effect.” When, on the instructions of V. I. Lenin, the radio laboratory in Nizhny Novgorod (now the city of Gorky) was being established, Lebedinsky took an active part in its organization, was chairman of the laboratory’s Scientific and Technical Council, and in 1919 moved to Gorky. From 1919 to 1925 Lebedinsky stood at the center of Russian radio engineering. The journal he edited, Telegraphy and Telephony without Wires, played a major role in the development of radio engineering in Russia. He also published the journal Radio Technician, accessible to the understanding of practical radio technicians and radio amateurs. In 1921 V. K. Lebedinsky organized a congress of radio specialists. The first radio-amateur circles in the USSR owe their origin to him. From 1930 he headed the department of the physical foundations of radio engineering at the Leningrad Institute of Railway Transport.

In his works on the investigation of the electric spark, which formed the basis of his dissertation, Lebedinsky discovered a new fact: under certain conditions ultraviolet rays, falling upon a spark gap, do not ignite but, on the contrary, extinguish the spark, i.e., they cause not a lowering but an increase of the breakdown voltage. The final chapter of Lebedinsky’s dissertation is entitled “The Law of the Normal Photoelectric Effect and Metallic Dispersion. The Electrical Constant of a Metal.” In this chapter Lebedinsky arrives at the conception that, with respect to light phenomena, a metal is a medium with a dielectric constant equal to zero.

In his last work, “Variations of the Barkhausen Phenomenon,” published in 1938, after V. K. Lebedinsky’s death, a number of details not noticed by previous investigators are described and explained. The continuation of these experiments promised much of interest, including new technical applications.

But however interesting and original V. K. Lebedinsky’s research works may be, they are submerged in the mass of his scientific and popular-scientific literary activity. He wrote more than 150 articles and more than 200 books and brochures. In the breadth of the questions covered, and in the depth and originality of their treatment, Lebedinsky is here a completely exceptional figure. Here we encounter such beautiful and well-ordered surveys as “The Theory of Electricity”), “Physics in 1906”), “The Science of Electricity during the Last Twenty-Five Years”**), “The Principle of Relativity in Modern

) Electricity, 1911, No. 1, p. 17.
) Ibid., 1907, No. 4, pp. 129–132.
**) Ibid., 1906, No. 2, pp. 17–22.

physics”), “Electricity in the Atom according to Modern Views”) and so on, and articles full of profound content on the works of E. H. Lenz), masterfully revealing the whole course of the latter’s scientific thought, and many others. These articles not only acquaint readers with new ideas and achievements in the field of physics, but also embrace these ideas from the most diverse classical and newest points of view and present to readers broad prospects for the future development of the questions and conceptions under consideration. Among V. K. Lebedinsky’s books, special attention is deserved by the book written in 1905, Electromagnetic Waves and the Foundations of Wireless Telegraphy—the first original Russian work on this subject; the course Electricity and Magnetism, which went through six editions; the brochures Electricity and Radio, Electricity in the Service of Mankind, The Elementary Doctrine of Energy. An important role was played by the collections Electromagnetic Oscillations and Waves, published in 1911 under Lebedinsky’s editorship, containing the principal classical and leading works in this field.

In conclusion, to characterize V. K. Lebedinsky’s views on the relationship between physics and technology, we shall cite the following excerpts from his speech at the general meeting of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1936.****) This is all the more appropriate since Lebedinsky’s words, as it were, sum up the role of Russian electrophysics over the period we have considered in this essay.

Referring to the former, very unfavorable conditions of tsarist Russia, he says: “Even then physics, by virtue of its inherent capacity to respond to the interests of technology, responded to them. For example, let us take the 1880s of the last century. Electrical engineering was only beginning. On whose shoulders did it begin in former Russia? Of course, on the shoulders of physicists. Physicists were everyone, from the fitter to the person explaining what a direct-current electric motor was... Take the 1890s, when electrical engineering turned to alternating currents, when it became much more difficult. On whose shoulders did it proceed? Of course, on the shoulders of physicists... In 1895 radio engineering arose. This too we must acknowledge: not only did a physicist carry this technology on his shoulders, but in our country it was the first in the world. A. S. Popov, the founder of radio engineering, did not simply construct a receiving apparatus, but in fact gave the whole direction of the nearest radio engineering... Further I shall recall physicists who were already pupils of A. S. Popov and who carried the Nizhny Novgorod laboratory on their shoulders from 1918 to 1928... Our thinking is not the result of sol—

*) Ibid., 1914, No. 1, p. 1.
*) Ibid., 1915, No. 1, p. 2.
*) Zh. R. F. Kh. O., physical part, 36, 57–64 (1904), Electricity, 1895, No. 11/12, pp. 153–161.
*) Izv. AN SSSR, OMEN, for 1936, pp. 251–254.

[[unclear: beginning of word]]: let us pass from physics to technology. Both are something whole; technology is part of that worldview which is called physics.”

Bearing in mind Frenkel’s first work, Lebedinsky says: “Such isolated works are typical. They sometimes belong to great geniuses. They at once belong both to science and to technology.” One may boldly say that V. K. Lebedinsky himself, as well as Chikolev, Yablochkov, Lodygin, Popov, Slavyanov, and a number of other glorious Russian names, “at once belonged both to science and to technology,” and that only the extremely unfavorable, sometimes outright murderous, Russian conditions of the nineteenth century and of the milieu in which they lived and created prevented them from developing their activity still more broadly and fully and from giving still more than they did. All the more must we value everything accomplished by these great Russian men.