Bibliography

M. A. Shatelen, Russian Electrical Engineers of the Second Half of the 19th Century. Gosenergoizdat, Moscow—Leningrad, 1949, 23.75 printed sheets + 8 inserts.

Electrical engineering occupies a special place, an exceptionally honorable one for our great Motherland, among those numerous branches of science and technology in which Russian and Soviet scientists and engineers have worked and continue to work. All the major achievements of the nineteenth century in the practical application of electricity—achievements that radically transformed all the old technology and turned the “age of steam” into the “age of electricity”—are connected in one way or another with the names of Russian scientists. Moreover, Russian scientists in these world achievements were responsible not only for the first pioneering steps, but also for the leading role. The first broad application of electric current for illumination—the “Russian light” of P. N. Yablochkov; the invention and development of incandescent lamps by A. N. Lodygin; the scientific and practical work of the founder of radio, A. S. Popov; the creation of the three-phase-current system by M. O. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky; the invention of transformers by P. N. Yablochkov and I. F. Usagin; the discovery of electroplating by B. S. Jacobi; the invention of the electric telegraph by P. Schilling; the discovery of the electric arc by V. V. Petrov; the explanation by V. F. Mitkevich of the processes occurring in the cathode spot of the electric arc—all this is the glory and pride of Russian electrical engineering. Meanwhile, in the first two decades of the twentieth century much of this glorious past had been forgotten. The younger generation that was growing up then had heard almost nothing about it. The reason for this attitude toward the achievements of advanced Russian scientists and engineers was the servility toward everything foreign that prevailed in tsarist Russia, especially in its ruling classes, as Griboedov so aptly ridiculed it in his immortal creation “Woe from Wit.” After the Great October Revolution, the traces of servility and kowtowing were not at once eliminated in our country, and they have not yet been fully eliminated even now. As a result, our information about major Russian scientists and engineer-innovators of the nineteenth century is still incomplete. These more or less fragmentary data can be drawn either from scattered, hard-to-obtain brochures, each devoted to only one of the Russian scientists and not organically connected with one another, or from collections, fairly substantial in size, but devoting only a few pages to individual persons. Such are Danylevsky’s Russian Technology and People of Russian Science, published by Gostekhizdat. Therefore the appearance of every book that truthfully, in detail, and coherently recounts the life and activity of Russian electrical engineers of the nineteenth century must be welcomed in every way. But especially valuable is the publication of a book written by an author such as M. A. Shatelen, who personally knew both Yablochkov and Chikolev

and of many others from the older generation of famous Russian electricians; and a contemporary of A. S. Popov and other members of the younger generation of Petersburg physicists of the late nineteenth century.

M. A. Shatelen wrote his book not only as an eyewitness setting forth his recollections and personal impressions, but also as a thoughtful and serious historian who had carefully studied all the literary and archival material at his disposal, who had systematized and pondered this material and permeated the entire book with a single idea: the inseparable connection between advanced science and the national-economic tasks of each given epoch. In the last chapter of his book M. A. Shatelen vividly shows what an abundant harvest was yielded in our Soviet time by the sowings made by the most Russian electricians in the difficult years of the nineteenth century, and what decisive role in bringing about this harvest was played by the vitalizing conditions of Soviet reality.

The content of the book Russian Electrical Engineers of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century is broader than its title. In addition to chapters IV–X, devoted successively to major Russian electrical engineers of the second half of the nineteenth century—Yablochkov, Lodygin, Chikolev, Dolivo-Dobrovolsky, Benardos, Slavyanov, and Popov—it contains a detailed description and characterization of the activity of V. V. Petrov—chapter III; a survey of the history of the doctrine of electrical and magnetic phenomena from Lomonosov and Gilbert to the middle of the nineteenth century—chapter I; “The Development of Applications of Electrical Energy in the National Economy of Russia in the Nineteenth Century”—chapter II; and “Russian Electrical-Engineering Society in the Last Decades of the Nineteenth Century”—chapter XI, describing in detail the founding and activity of the Electrical-Engineering (VI) Section of the Russian Technical Society, as well as the All-Russian Electrotechnical Congresses convened on the initiative of this section. At the end of this chapter the author points to the exceptional great role played by the VIII and XI All-Russian Electrotechnical Congresses, convened in Soviet times, in considering the Lenin plan for the electrification of Russia, the famous GOELRO plan. “It is enough to recall,” writes M. A. Shatelen, “the resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars of February 8, 1921, which assigned to the VIII Electrotechnical Congress the discussion of the GOELRO plan, in order to assess the significance of this congress,” and further, at the very end of chapter XI: “At the IX Congress of Soviets Vladimir Ilyich gave an appraisal of the work of the VIII Electrotechnical Congress. This was the triumph of our Soviet electrotechnical community, which had begun to organize and had grown up around the VI Section of the Russian Technical Society, which had organized and produced the pioneers of Russian electrical engineering.” With these vivid words M. A. Shatelen connects the activity of the glorious pioneers of Russian electrical engineering with our epoch, with our present day. Chapter XII is devoted to the history of the journal Electricity, which was the mouthpiece of the Electrical-Engineering Section of the Russian Technical Society. The editorial office of the journal served as a second center uniting Russian electrical engineers and Russian physicist-electricians. A third such center was the Physical Section of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society at Petersburg University. “The editorial office of Electricity,” writes M. A. Shatelen, “gradually became a place where the journal’s contributors gathered, where heated debates were held concerning the content of the issues, where current questions of Russian electrical engineering were discussed. All the contributors were members of the VI Section, many were professors or teachers in higher schools, many carried on responsible practical work... After the Great October Revolution, in the years of the GOELRO plans and in the years of the Stalin five-year plans, Electricity continued to fulfill its task, the task of the public-scientific organ of Soviet electrical engineering.” This task the journal Electricity, which is a part of that rich heritage that has come down to us from the pioneers

Russian electrical engineering, and it continues to do so to this day. And here again Shatelen’s glorious past is intertwined in the book with a radiant present. The book ends with an “Afterword.” In it M. A. Shatelen reveals those conditions of old Russia which prevented the full introduction and widespread implementation of Russian inventions in Russia. Chief among these was the dominance of foreign capital. “Therefore,” says M. A. Shatelen, “the road for Russian inventors was closed even to those few small electrical-engineering plants which these organizations (foreign firms) founded in Russia.”

To this semi-colonial position of Russian engineering of those times he vividly contrasts, on the last pages of the book, the contemporary successes of our electrical-engineering industry and the grand successes of the electrification of the Soviet Union, proceeding in each individual case from the works of Petrov, Benardos, Slavyanov, Lodygin, Yablochkov, Dolivo-Dobrovolsky, Popov, and ending with data relating to the present day.

“Thus,” M. A. Shatelen concludes his exposition, “the labors of our pioneer electricians, despite what seemed at first to be small success, proved in the end to be far from fruitless. On Soviet soil, in the atmosphere of the Soviet commonwealth of science and technology, the sprouts they once planted have grown luxuriantly. And we, who make use of the results of the work of our pioneers, we ourselves working under the conditions of the Soviet Union, can only bow before the memory of those who, under the most difficult conditions of tsarist Russia, encountering nowhere either help or sympathy, labored tirelessly and selflessly at the creation of electrical engineering, who laid the foundation for many of its branches, and who forever glorified the name of the Russian electrician.”

The main chapters of the book contain much that is interesting and new, or that previously had been treated little and incompletely in our literature. Thus, in the chapter on M. O. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky, interesting information is given about the military engineer F. A. Pirotsky, who demonstrated as early as 1874, i.e., much earlier than Deprez, the full possibility of transmitting over a distance much greater quantities of electric current than Deprez had done. Namely, F. A. Pirotsky arranged, on the Volkovo Field near Petersburg, an electric transmission of about 6 horsepower over a distance of up to 1 km. On the basis of his experiments Pirotsky proposed using water currents as sources of energy, transmitting this energy over long distances. After a detailed account of the achievements of M. O. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky himself in the field of three-phase current and energy transmission over long distances, M. A. Shatelen thoroughly illuminates the role played by Dolivo-Dobrovolsky in the organization of the Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. Up to the beginning of the First World War, Mikhail Osipovich took an active part in developing the principles of the academic plan for the electromechanical department and in organizing its laboratories; he gave advice concerning methods of teaching and the character of electrical-engineering laboratories, and so on. As a result, “the new electrical-engineering school was created on foundations different from those of the higher technical schools that had previously existed in Russia, and served in many respects as a model for them.” A number of new data are found in M. A. Shatelen’s chapter on N. N. Benardos. We learn, for example, about him not only as the inventor of a method of electric welding of metals, but also as the author of a design for a hydroelectric station on the Neva River and a line of power transmission connecting, in this design, the station with Petersburg in order to supply the latter with cheap electric current. According to Benardos’s plan, the station was to have been very powerful for that time, namely, “ten or two tens of thousands of (horse) powers.” “Thus,” writes M. A. Shatelen, “more than half a century ago Benardos propos—”

Bibliography

...proposed using the Ivanovskie Rapids of the Neva River for the electric supply of our city, i.e., made the proposal that at present figures among the proposals connected with the electric supply of Leningrad.” The chapter on Benardos also contains new biographical information about him and many technical data, accompanied by corresponding drawings, diagrams, and details of his inventions. The same can also be said of Chapter IX, which tells us about N. G. Slavyanov, and of the other chapters: the text is everywhere accompanied by the same kind of illustrations. M. A. Shatelen describes in especially great detail the young years of A. S. Popov, in particular his participation in the Krasnoyarsk expedition to observe the total solar eclipse of 1887, in which M. A. Shatelen himself took part—then still a student. He also recounts the history of the laconic entry in the minutes of the meeting of the Physics Section of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society concerning Popov’s report of March 12/24, 1896: “§ 8. A. S. Popov demonstrated instruments for the lecture demonstration of Hertz’s experiments.” N. A. Shatelen explains in detail what actually lay behind this modest entry, “...when on March 12/24, 1896, in Petersburg on Vasilievsky Island, on the territory of Petersburg University, a telegram by wireless telegraph was transmitted for the first time in the world.” The struggle for Popov’s priority, conducted in 1908 by the Physics Section of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society, is also shown in detail. Of interest is also the report brought by M. A. Shatelen of the Marine Technical Committee to the admiral Tyrtov, head of the Ministry of the Navy, containing a proposal to use the results of Popov’s experiments in wireless telegraphy to establish communication with the battleship that had suffered an accident, and the cautious resolution of the admiral: “An attempt may be made. Consent to entrust this matter to the persons named in the report” (i.e., to Popov and Rybkin). As is known, the attempt, carried out under the immediate direction and almost literally by the hands of the founder of radio and his faithful assistant, ended in brilliant success, despite the enormous difficulties caused by the late season and the severe winter weather. M. A. Shatelen vividly describes these difficulties. He also describes in detail the further successes of A. S. Popov and the reasons why the order issued in 1900, after Popov’s success, by the head of the Ministry of the Navy “to take measures so that apparatuses and all necessary items for telegraphing without wires could be manufactured here in Russia itself and not depend on foreign factories” was not carried out. Despite all Popov’s efforts, the conditions of tsarist Russia, with the Russian industry of that time almost completely dependent on foreign capital, made this impossible. The result was the Tsushima catastrophe, the death of many sailors known to A. S. Popov, and grievous personal experiences for him. “During the Japanese war,” writes M. A. Shatelen, “he suffered very painfully from the fact that what was happening was a disgrace to the Russian fleet, but that in reality it was a disgrace to the regime of that time.” The other chapters of M. A. Shatelen’s book—about V. V. Petrov, P. N. Yablochkov, A. N. Lodygin, and V. N. Chikolev—are likewise rich in factual content, subtle analysis, profound ideas, and ardent patriotism. In each of them he shows both a living, thinking person and a scientist-innovator struggling for his ideas and for their realization in life.

We have no opportunity here to set forth in detail the content of each chapter. We shall limit ourselves only to a few quotations that give an idea of the fine style of the book and of the high assessment which M. A. Shatelen rightly gives to the works of the glorious Russian electrical engineers. Speaking of the death of P. N. Yablochkov, he writes: “Thus ended his life in a room of a provincial hotel, abandoned by all, the greatest inventor...

and one of the world's greatest pioneers of electrical engineering. Until the last hours of his life the great inventor worked on his inventions and died unsatisfied. His principal invention, which brought him worldwide fame—the “candle”—had by that time almost lost its significance. The work with galvanic cells, on which he had placed many hopes up to the last hours of his life, remained unfinished. But there remained, after Yablochkov’s work and inventions, others that will never lose their significance: the introduction into practice of alternating currents and the invention of alternating-current transformers. It was precisely to these inventions that Yablochkov’s contemporaries paid the least attention, and he himself seems to have lost interest in them. But, unquestionably, these inventions, together with his “candle,” were the principal inventions of Pavel Nikolaevich.

By no means all of Yablochkov’s inventions were appreciated by his contemporaries; perhaps this is explained by the fact that the technology of Yablochkov’s time was not ready to assimilate many of his very advanced ideas. On A. N. Lodygin, M. A. Shatelen writes: “Now, 75 years after the first attempts of A. N. Lodygin with incandescent lamps, one can see how right and farsighted our Russian inventor was in conducting a stubborn struggle for his idea of using the phenomenon of the incandescence of a conductor by electric current to create sources of light, and in defending his idea against almost all the greatest electrical engineers of his time... The name of the Russian inventor who created this type of lamp will never be forgotten.” M. A. Shatelen masterfully described V. N. Chikolev. He was a remarkable Russian electrical engineer and popularizer, whose entire activity “shows that he had an extraordinarily strong desire to make his ideas and thoughts accessible to the broad masses.”

M. A. Shatelen’s monograph is a splendid book, written captivatingly, vigorously propagating our knowledge of the leading electricians of the nineteenth century and showing their great world achievements not only in historical perspective, but also in the light of the present day. The book shows that Soviet electrical and radio engineering developed so brilliantly not on an empty foundation. They owe much to their predecessors, the Russian electrical engineers of the nineteenth century, and its glorious pioneers. They traveled a difficult and arduous path under the reactionary regime of tsarist Russia, but under the new Soviet conditions this path led their pupils and followers, as the author vividly shows, both to the Lenin- and Stalin-inspired great plan of GOELRO and to the glorious present of Soviet radio and electrical engineering, and it continues to lead us toward a radiant future.

Against this background the minor shortcomings of the book under review pale. Still, it is regrettable that the book’s generally good external design has not been carried through to the end: the portraits included in the book are executed quite unsatisfactorily. The Soviet reader has the right to demand from the publishing house a more careful attitude toward the memory of outstanding figures of Russian science.

N. Kaptsov