FOUNDER OF THE SIBERIAN SCHOOL OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS

I. T. LOZOVSKII

(Presented by Professor Doctor E. V. Kononenko)

Built at the end of the nineteenth century, the Trans-Siberian Railway had a great influence on the development of the economy and culture of Siberia. It contributed to the concentration of capital in the gold-mining industry, promoted the emergence and rapid development of the coal industry in Siberia, and the creation of large joint-stock companies possessing enormous capital. Thus, the Lena Gold-Mining Company, which arose at the end of the last century, had at the time of its creation a capital of 4.5 million rubles¹.

The largest enterprise in Siberia became the railway, with its enormous locomotive and rolling-stock fleets, track facilities, workshops and depots, in which more than 120 thousand workers and employees were employed.

In pursuit of maximum profits, which could be obtained only through a sharp increase in labor productivity, enterprises spared no money for the mechanization of production processes and for the practical application of new achievements of science and technology.

However, along this path they encountered great difficulties, which consisted above all in the absence of the necessary number of engineering and technical workers capable of establishing the proper operation of machines and mechanisms and organizing their repair.

The development of the economy made it necessary to establish in Siberia a technical higher educational institution for the training of engineers in various specialties.

Presenting in February 1896 to the State Council a draft law on the establishment in Tomsk of a Technological Institute of Practical Engineers, the Minister of Public Education drew special attention to the necessity of training electrical engineers in this institute. He wrote: “Electrical engineering is at present developing so rapidly that it promises, in the very near future, to embrace almost all, without exception, branches of factory and industrial activity. Without touching upon the well-known and extraordinarily rapidly spreading application of electricity to the lighting of cities and private houses, plants and factories, railway stations, workshops, and so forth, it is sufficient to point to the successful application of electrical transmission not only for transmitting power over great distances, but also within the limits of a single factory for the electrical transmission of motion from a central

POTEBNYA A. A.

[[unclear: beginning of line]] motive power to various machines and individual machine tools or groups of machine tools, to electrical installations of railways for the removal and transportation of materials, products, and production waste, and for convenient internal communication between individual shops or workshops of a single plant; to electric hoisting mechanisms or cranes for lifting or moving loads; to electric soldering and welding of metals; and, finally, to the numerous metallurgical and chemical-technological applications of electricity. The introduction at the present time of special instruction in electrical engineering at the Irkutsk Technical School was prompted by the local needs of the country. There is no doubt that the demand for electrical engineers with both secondary and higher technical education, already quite considerable at the present time, must grow continuously and rapidly as the Great Siberian Railway approaches completion and as the rapid development of the country’s productive forces, expected in connection with it, proceeds. The timely satisfaction of this need of the country must “constitute the object of urgent concern for the Ministry of Public Education.”² In conclusion, the minister proposed opening, within the mechanical

departments of the Tomsk Technological Institute, an electrical-engineering subdivision.

At the end of the nineteenth century, electrical engineers in Russia were trained only by the St. Petersburg Electrotechnical Institute, whose graduating classes were very small. The few graduates of this institution, as a rule, settled mainly in the capital cities of Russia. Siberia, however, had almost no electrical engineers.

Meanwhile, the need for electrical engineers in Siberia was growing rapidly. In 1896, at the Pavlovsk mine of “Lenzoloto,” the first hydroelectric power station in Russia, with a capacity of 300 kW, was built. For the first time in Russia, current at a voltage of 10 thousand volts was generated and transmitted to production facilities.^3 In the next few years, in the Lena district alone, another 8 power stations were built, whose energy was used for production needs. In those same years, for the first time in Russia, a narrow-gauge electric direct-current railway was built at the Lena mines; its current was supplied through a wire located in the middle of the track at a height of 4 meters. The railway had two electric locomotives.^4

A significant number of power stations were built at the mines of other gold-mining companies.^5

The lack of specialists substantially hindered the development of power engineering in Siberia and created great difficulties for enterprises. The Irkutsk Technical School graduated from 3 to 6 technicians per year, which in no way met the industry’s need for specialists of this profile. Matters reached the point where even enterprise fitters had to be brought in from foreign countries.^6

Therefore, from the very beginning great importance was attached to the question of training electrical engineers at the Tomsk Technological Institute.

On June 7, 1900, the director of the institute, Professor E. L. Zubashev, sent a submission to the Ministry of Public Education in which he requested that the engineer-technologist Alexander Potebnia be appointed to the position of instructor in electrical engineering.^7

Professor Zubashev knew Alexander Alexandrovich Potebnia well from their joint work at the Kharkov Technological Institute. The son of the world-famous philologist, Academician A. A. Potebnia—Alexander Alexandrovich—did not follow in his father’s footsteps. Having graduated with distinction in 1892 from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Kharkov University, he took a position as laboratory assistant at the Kharkov Technological Institute, became interested in electrical engineering, and worked extensively in this field. Feeling a lack of engineering knowledge, he at the same time as his work studied persistently and, in 1900, after passing the external examination for the course of a higher technical educational institution, received a second diploma—that of engineer-technologist. By 1900 he was already a broadly erudite and highly educated specialist in the field of electrical engineering.

Since classes at the Tomsk Technological Institute were expected to begin only in the autumn of 1900, and according to the curriculum electrical engineering was to be taught to students beginning with the third year, the director requested that A. A. Potebnia be granted an extended assignment for familiarization with the organization of teaching electrical engineering in higher educational institutions of Russia and foreign countries, for visiting enterprises producing electrotechnical equipment and machines, and also for his dissertation,

^3 N. D. Ovsyannikova. From the History of the Gold-Mining Industry of Eastern Siberia and the Far East in the Era of Capitalism. p. 166, 1966.

^4 Ibid. p. 166, 1966.

^5 Reports on the Siberian Mining Region. 1900—1912. Tomsk, 1912.

^6 N. D. Ovsyannikova. From the History of the Gold-Mining Industry of Eastern Siberia and the Far East in the Era of Capitalism, 1966, p. 166.

^7 TsGIA USSR. F. 741, Op. 1, D. 72a, L. 7.

which he had to defend in order to obtain the right to head a department at the institute.

Professor Zubashev’s request was granted by the ministry, and, having received notice at the end of May 1900 of his appointment to work in Tomsk, A. A. Potebnya set off on a long scientific trip, during which he visited higher educational institutions and enterprises in Moscow, Petersburg, and a number of cities in Germany, France, and England. During this trip he carefully acquainted himself with the system of training electrical engineers, teaching methods, the organization of practical classes, visited many enterprises where students underwent practical training, and met with a number of outstanding scientists in the field of electrical engineering.

In Russia in those years almost no laboratory equipment was manufactured, and therefore Potebnya ordered in Germany a considerable quantity of instruments, machines, and materials for the electrical engineering laboratory that he was to create at the Tomsk Technological Institute.

Soon after Potebnya’s arrival in Tomsk, equipment for the laboratory began to arrive from Germany. Dynamos and motors of various systems, a considerable number of instruments and materials arrived. In subsequent years the laboratory’s equipment was continually replenished, and this made it possible to train highly qualified electrical engineers.

In July 1902 A. A. Potebnya was appointed acting extraordinary professor and, beginning in September, started teaching a course in electrical engineering, which in those years was given to students of all departments for 2 hours a week and to future electrical engineers for 6 hours a week.

The need to teach a course in electrical engineering to students who had chosen an entirely different specialty was caused by the following circumstances: first, most Siberian enterprises were small and could not afford to maintain several highly paid engineers. Therefore, the Siberian engineer, in addition to his main specialty, had to know electrical engineering, construction, motors of various systems, etc. Secondly, even at large enterprises where a staff of engineers was provided for, there were usually not enough of them, and because of this the engineer had to solve a number of problems beyond the scope of his main specialty.

For this reason the Tomsk Technological Institute gave its graduates definite knowledge in the field of all those applied sciences with which they would have to deal in production.

Professor Potebnya was greatly assisted in conducting classes by the department laboratory assistants B. G. Groman and A. A. Levchenko, who later became professors at Moscow higher educational institutions.

Simultaneously with teaching, A. A. Potebnya devoted much time to scientific work; at the beginning of 1907 he brilliantly defended his dissertation, “On the Theory of the Parallel Operation of Alternators,” and was appointed full professor.

In 1903 he published in the Proceedings of the Tomsk Technological Institute the article “On the Theory of the Parallel Operation of Alternators,” and in 1908—the monograph Commutator Motors of Single-Phase Current³.

These works were of very great current significance, since at that time there was an intense struggle between supporters of the use of direct and alternating current. Aleksandr Aleksandrovich spoke out decisively in favor of the use of alternating current and, through his work, made a major contribution to the development of the theory of alternating currents. Independently of other researchers, he was the first to formulate the conditions for parallel ope-

the operation of synchronous generators in the form of a ratio of electromagnetic power, showed the significance and influence of the separating reactance.

The works of Professor A. A. Potebnya were a continuation and development of the views of such outstanding electrical engineers as Steinmetz, Blondel, and Kapp, and were the first attempt to apply the works of the outstanding Russian scientist A. M. Lyapunov on the stability of motion to electrical systems. At that time, however, A. A. Potebnya’s works were of purely theoretical interest, and since they were considerably ahead of their time, they remained unnoticed and are now undeservedly forgotten.

Professor A. A. Potebnya worked in Tomsk for almost a quarter of a century. Here he trained the first Siberian electrical engineers, carried out extensive scientific research, and served as a scientific consultant to many enterprises.

Alexander Alexandrovich devoted much effort to work at the institute. For several years he was a member of the committee for the construction of the institute’s buildings, dean of the mechanical department, and frequently and for long periods performed the duties of director of the institute. But his chief merit was the training of highly educated engineers.

Even the first graduating classes of Siberian electrical engineers demonstrated their broad erudition, their knowledge of the specific features of work in Siberia, and the high quality of their training.

Many of Professor A. A. Potebnya’s students became well-known scientists. Among them were Academician Vasilii Mikhailovich Khrushchev,^9 who took his first steps in science under the guidance of A. A. Potebnya, and the oldest research worker of our institute, Associate Professor of our institute Vladimir Alexandrovich Nadezhnitskii.

In 1923 Professor A. A. Potebnya returned to his native Kharkov and worked there at one of the departments of the Polytechnic Institute.

Our institute preserves many documents, reports, articles, and scientific works belonging to Professor A. A. Potebnya, which tell of the life and activity of this major scientist.

^9 Archive of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. 0.1, file 256.

1. N. D. Ovsyannikova. From the history of the gold-mining industry of Eastern Siberia in the era of capitalism (1861–1914). Collection Questions of the History of Siberia and the Far East. Novosibirsk, Publishing House of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1966, p. 166. ↩

2. Collection of Decrees of the Ministry of Public Education. Vol. 14, 1896, p. 520. ↩

3. Reports of the Tomsk Technological Institute for 1902 and 1903. ↩