Vladimir Shukhov was the first in the world to create hyperboloid structures - mesh metal structures based on an open surface formed by rotating a hyperbola around its axis. Other achievements of the engineer include the design of the first Russian oil pipelines and oil refinery, an apparatus for continuous fractional distillation of oil, a tubular steam boiler and many other inventions. 1. The world's first hyperboloid design in Polibino. The world first became acquainted with the creation of Vladimir Shukhov in the summer of 1896 at the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition - the largest in pre-revolutionary Russia, which took place in Nizhny Novgorod. For this event, the architect built as many as eight pavilions with mesh ceilings and a hyperboloid tower, which became his calling card. The elegant water-pressure structure was crowned with a water tank that could hold six and a half thousand buckets. A spiral staircase led to the tank, along which anyone could climb to the observation deck. Needless to say, the unusual openwork steel tower became the “highlight” of the program and instantly attracted the attention of not only the townspeople, but also the philanthropist and glass king Yuri Nechaev-Maltsev. A successful entrepreneur purchased it at the end of the exhibition and took it to his estate in Polibino, which Lipetsk region. The 25-meter structure still stands there today. 2. GUM. At the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition, Vladimir Shukhov presented an innovative approach to the use of mesh structures for floors and roofs of buildings. It was used in the Main Department Store (formerly Upper Trading Rows), built opposite the Kremlin. The glass roof of GUM is the work of a great master. It is based on a steel frame made of metal rods. More than 800,000 kg of metal were spent on its construction. But, despite such impressive figures, the semicircular openwork roof seems light and sophisticated. 3. Pushkin Museum named after A.S. Pushkin. This is perhaps the most famous building, in the construction of which Vladimir Shukhov took part. He was faced with a responsible task - to create durable roof coverings through which water could flow. sunlight. A hundred years ago, when the museum opened its doors, its design did not include electric lighting exposition, so the halls had to be naturally lit. Luckily for Shukhov, one of the sponsors of the construction was Yuri Nechaev-Maltsev, who had previously acquired the architect’s first work. So Shukhov had excellent recommendations in his pocket. The three-tier metal and glass roof he created is called a monument to engineering genius. 4. Kyiv railway station in Moscow. The construction of the landing stage of the former Bryansk station took several years, from 1914 to 1918, in conditions of metal and labor shortages. When the work was completed, the glazed space above the platforms, 230 meters long, became the largest in Europe. The spectacular canopy of the Kievsky station was a metal-glass ceiling, which rested on steel arches. Standing on the platform, it’s hard to believe that a structure that weighs about 1,300 tons rises above you! 5. Tower on Shabolovka. Shukhov's universally recognized masterpiece was erected in 1919-1922. The initial project assumed that the tower would rise 350 meters and become a “competitor” to the Eiffel Tower (324 m). Despite the fact that the implementation of the plan required three times less metal than its French rival, it had to be reduced to 160 m (including traverses and flagpole). The reason for this was the civil war and, as a consequence, the lack of the required amount of steel. When ambitious project was completed, the tower began working as intended - radio broadcasts began in 1922, and the first television broadcast took place in 1938. The airy, weightless design inspired the writer Alexei Tolstoy to write fantasy novel"Engineer Garin's Hyperboloid", which became a bestseller of that time. 6. Shukhov Tower on the Oka River. In 1929, 33 years after his high-profile debut in Nizhny Novgorod, Vladimir Shukhov returned to the city that brought him recognition. On the low bank of the Oka between Bogorodsk and Dzerzhinsk, according to his design, the world's only multi-section hyperboloid power transmission towers were installed. Of the three pairs of structures that supported the wires, only one has survived to this day. Shukhov’s creations were appreciated all over the world during the engineer’s lifetime, but even today his ideas are actively borrowed by famous architects. Examples of hyperboloid towers are found in Japan, Italy, Brazil, and Great Britain. His work is used by Ken Shuttleworth (Aspire Tower) and Norman Foster (covering the courtyard of the British Museum, the St. Mary Ax skyscraper 30). But most famous example the use of Shukhov's patent is considered to be a 610-meter television tower in Chinese city Guangzhou is the world's tallest mesh hyperboloid structure. It was erected for the 2010 Asian Games to broadcast this important sporting event.
“His technical ideas brought Russian engineering school global recognition and remain relevant to this day.”
Vladimir Putin, President of Russia
“The first oil pipeline, pumps for pumping oil, the first pipeline for transporting kerosene and tanks for storing petroleum products, the first tank barges, oil refining and the creation of cracking - all this is V. G. Shukhov. We, in fact, are developing his engineering ideas when today we increase production, lay pipelines, build a tanker fleet, and increase the depth of oil refining.”
Vagit Alekperov, president of the oil company Lukoil
Film for the 165th anniversary of V.G. Shukhov: "Engineer Shukhov. Universal genius"
Plan of events dedicated to the celebration of the 165th anniversary
since the birth of V.G. Shukhova(download)
Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov was born on August 16 (28), 1853 in the small and quiet provincial town of Grayvoron, then Belgorod district of Kursk province. His father, Grigory Petrovich Shukhov, came from a family in which for many generations men were officers in the Russian army. He graduated from law school Kharkov University, considered after St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kyiv one of the best. Thanks to his education, decisive and strong character, honesty, hard work and charm, Grigory Petrovich quickly made a brilliant career.
Already at the age of 29, he was promoted to titular councilor and received a bronze medal on the Vladimir ribbon in memory of Crimean War 1853-1856 (It is interesting that G.P. Shukhov, being a very young man, barely in his thirties, was for some time a mayor in the city of Grayvoron). Eight years later, Grigory Petrovich was transferred to work in St. Petersburg, where he was soon promoted to court councilor.
V. G. Shukhov’s mother, nee Vera Pozhidaeva, was the daughter of second lieutenant Kapiton Pozhidaev, who had a small estate in the Shchigrovsky district of the Kursk province.
His parents instilled in their son dedication, hard work, insight and a thirst for knowledge. In 1864, at the age of eleven, Volodya Shukhov entered the St. Petersburg gymnasium. Where he studied before this is not known for certain, most likely in Kursk and Kherson gymnasiums, but it is possible that only in Kursk. At the gymnasium, Vladimir studied well and showed ability to exact sciences, especially in mathematics. One day in class, he proved the Pythagorean theorem in a way that he himself invented. The teacher noted the originality of the proof, but gave a bad mark for deviating from dogma.
Vladimir graduated from high school in 1871 with an excellent certificate. The choice of profession was clear. In addition to outstanding mathematical abilities, Volodya Shukhov already had a dream by that time to become an engineer, to contribute through practical activities to the development of Russia and the prosperity of his country.
On the advice of his father, Vladimir enters the Imperial Moscow technical school. In those years, it was an educational institution where they provided the opportunity to receive fundamental physics and mathematics training, acquire deep knowledge according to others theoretical disciplines and at the same time master the applied crafts so necessary for a practicing engineer. Learning programs here were compiled on the basis of educational and practical courses St. Petersburg Institute of the Corps of Railway Engineers - the most advanced educational institution in Europe. Having endured entrance exams at the school, Vladimir Shukhov was enrolled in “state-owned pupils” and lived independently in state-owned dormitories, occasionally visiting his parents, who at that time lived in Warsaw.
Studying at the school was not easy, the atmosphere here was difficult: strict regime, barracks discipline, petty supervision, infringement of basic rights. But rigor was not an end in itself, but encouraged diligent and conscientious study. Pupils were required to have an excellent mastery of the fundamentals of physical and mathematical knowledge, on the basis of which an engineer has everything for his further independent growth. Accustomed by his parents to an independent and modest life, Vladimir Shukhov persistently studied physics and mathematics, worked in the reading room, drafting, carpentry and metalworking workshops. The successes of V. Shukhov were noticed and appreciated by his teachers at the school, famous scientists: associate professor in the department of analytical mechanics N. E. Zhukovsky, professor in the department of mathematics A. V. Letnikov, honorary member of the pedagogical council academician P. L. Chebyshev, who became famous for his work on number theory, probability theory, and theoretical mechanics.
In 1876, V. Shukhov graduated from college with honors and a gold medal. In recognition of his outstanding abilities, he was exempted from defending his thesis project. Academician P. L. Chebyshev makes a flattering offer to the young mechanical engineer for joint scientific and pedagogical work at the university. However, Vladimir Grigorievich is more attracted not by theoretical research, but by practical engineering and inventive activity, the dreams of which are so close to coming true. He refuses the offer, and as part of a scientific delegation, as an incentive, he is sent by the School Council to familiarize himself with the achievements of industry in America at the World Exhibition, held in honor of the centenary of the independence of the United States. The exhibition opened in Philadelphia, in Fairmount Park, on the shores of a picturesque lake in May 1876.
The trip to the United States played a decisive role in the life of V. G. Shukhov. At the exhibition, he met Alexander Veniaminovich Bari, who had already lived in America for several years, participated in the construction of the main and other buildings of the World Exhibition, managing all the “metal work”, for which he received the Grand Prix and gold medal. It was A.V. Bari who received the Russian delegation in America, assisted it in getting to know the country and the exhibition, helped in the purchase of equipment, tools and product samples for the workshops of the technical school, showed the delegation members Pittsburgh metallurgical plants, railways and the latest American technology .
Returning from America in 1877, V. G. Shukhov went to work in the drawing bureau of the Warsaw-Vienna Railway Administration in St. Petersburg. After the vivid impressions of the overseas trip, gray everyday life began, working on drawings of railway embankments, station buildings, and locomotive depots. These skills were later very useful, but working without the opportunity for creativity, under the yoke of inert bosses, was depressing. Under the influence of a friend of the Shukhov family, surgeon N.I. Pirogov, he entered the Military Medical Academy as a volunteer.
In the summer of the same year, A.V. Bari and his family returned to Russia, remaining a citizen of the North American states. He understood that Russia was on the verge of rapid industrial development and planned to achieve quick success here, relying on his abilities. Having become the chief engineer of the Nobel Brothers Partnership, he began organizing a bulk oil transportation and storage system.
Having perspicaciously appreciated the creative potential of V. G. Shukhov back in America, A. V. Bari invited him to take over the management of the company’s branch in Baku, the new center of the rapidly developing Russian oil industry. In 1880, A.V. Bari founded his construction office and boiler plant in Moscow, inviting V.G. Shukhov to the position of chief designer and chief engineer. Thus began a fruitful union between a brilliant manager and a fantastically talented engineer. It lasted 35 years and brought great benefits to Russia.
Inviting V. G. Shukhov to cooperate, A. V. Bari received a young (25 years old), not burdened with prejudices, engineer with excellent characteristics, decent, fluent in three languages (English, French, German), pleasant appearance and excellent upbringing.
V. G. Shukhov, in the person of A. V. Bari, found an exceptional partner - an educated and cultured person with experience entrepreneurial activity in America, a competent engineer, capable of objectively evaluating ideas and proposals, able to communicate on equal terms with both foreign entrepreneurs and the largest industrialists in Russia. The Shukhov-Bari alliance was mutually beneficial and therefore long-term and fruitful.
In 1880, V. G. Shukhov was the first in the world to carry out industrial flaring of liquid fuel using a nozzle he invented, which made it possible to effectively burn fuel oil, which was previously considered a waste product from oil refining. The young engineer made calculations and supervised the construction of Russia's first oil pipeline from the Balakhani oil fields to Baku. In 1891, V. G. Shukhov developed and patented industrial installation for the distillation of oil with decomposition into fractions under the influence of high temperatures and pressures. The installation for the first time provided for cracking in the liquid phase.
Nature unusually generously endowed Vladimir Grigorievich with bright, multifaceted talents. The simple enumeration of the areas of his activity amazes the imagination. According to Shukhov’s system, steam boilers, oil refineries, pipelines, nozzles, tanks for storing oil, kerosene, gasoline, alcohol, acids, etc., pumps, gas tanks, water towers, oil barges, blast furnaces, metal floors of workshops and public buildings were created , grain elevators, railway bridges, aerial cableways, lighthouses, tram depots, refrigeration plants, landing stages, boat ports, mines, etc.
The geography of distribution of the inventions of this remarkable engineer in Russia is no less extensive. Steam boilers, systems and tanks for various purposes found application from Baku to Arkhangelsk, from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. V. G. Shukhov is the creator of the oil tanker fleet in Russia. Accurate drawings were created based on his designs in Moscow. The assembly of steel barges with a length of 50 to 130 m was carried out in Saratov and Tsaritsyn. Until 1917, 82 barges were built.
As a result of research by V. G. Shukhov and his colleagues (E. K. Knorre and K. E. Lembke), a universal method for calculating water pipelines was created. After testing the project during the reconstruction of the water supply system in Moscow, the Bari company carried out the construction of water pipelines in Tambov, Kharkov, Voronezh and other cities of Russia.
According to the designs of V. G. Shukhov, about 200 towers of original design were built in our country and abroad, including the famous Shabolovskaya radio tower in Moscow. It is interesting that, having received an order in 1919 by order of the Council of People's Commissars, Vladimir Grigorievich proposed a project for a radio mast of nine sections with a total height of about 350 meters. This exceeded the height of the Eiffel Tower, which is 305 meters high, but at the same time the Shukhov Tower was three times lighter. An acute shortage of metal in the devastated country did not allow the implementation of this project, which could have become a monument to engineering art. The project had to be changed. Existing tower of six hyperboloid sections with a total height of 152 meters was erected using the unique “telescopic installation” method invented by Shukhov. For a long time the tower remained the most tall building in Russia.
Under the leadership of V.G. Shukhov, about 500 bridges were designed and built (across the Oka, Volga, Yenisei, etc.). Few people know that he designed the rotating stage of the Moscow Art Theater. According to the project of V.G. Shukhov and under his leadership, the preservation of an architectural monument of the 15th century was carried out - the minaret of the famous madrasah in Samarkand. The tower tilted heavily after the earthquake, and there was a danger of it falling. In 1932, a competition for projects to save the tower was announced. Shukhov presented unusual project and became not only the winner of the competition, but also the leader of the work to save the minaret.
But let's go back to the 19th century. During 15 years of work in the “Construction Office” (1880-1895), V. G. Shukhov received 9 privileges (patents) that are important to this day: horizontal and vertical steam boilers, an oil barge, a steel cylindrical tank, a hanging mesh covering for buildings , arched covering, oil pipeline, industrial cracking plant, openwork hyperboloid tower, which received great resonance in the world after the All-Russian Exhibition of 1896 in Nizhny Novgorod.
This exhibition became the largest event in the cultural, industrial and technical life of the country and a true triumph of the engineering thought of V. G. Shukhov. More than four hectares of buildings and pavilions were covered and built up with his structures, turning each pavilion into a new achievement of Russian science and technology. IN total V. G. Shukhov designed eight exhibition pavilions with an area of about 27,000 m². Four pavilions had hanging coverings, the same number were covered with mesh shells with a span of 32 m. V. G. Shukhov’s designs were ahead of their time by at least 50 years. The suspended roof of the elevator in Albany (USA) appeared only in 1932, and the covering in the shape of an overturned truncated cone in the French Pavilion in Zagreb (Yugoslavia) - in 1937.
Biggest commercial success had a hyperboloid-shaped tower design exhibited in Nizhny Novgorod. Shukhov patented this invention shortly before the opening of the exhibition. The hyperboloid rotation shell was completely new, never used before construction form. It made it possible to create a spatially curved mesh surface from straight, obliquely installed rods. The result is a lightweight, rigid tower structure that can be designed and constructed simply and elegantly. The Nizhny Novgorod water tower carried a tank with a capacity of 114,000 liters at a height of 25.60 m to supply water to the entire exhibition area. On the forecastle there was a viewing platform, which could be reached by a spiral staircase inside the tower. This first hyperboloid tower remained one of the most beautiful building structures in Shukhov. It was sold to the wealthy landowner Nechaev-Maltsev, who installed it on his Polibino estate near Lipetsk. The tower still stands there today. The lightning-fast increase in demand for water towers due to accelerated industrialization brought many orders to the Bari company. Compared to conventional ones, the Shukhov mesh tower was more convenient and cheaper in terms of construction technology. Hundreds of water towers were designed and built by Shukhov according to this principle. A large number of towers led to a partial typification of the general structure and its individual elements (tanks, stairs). However, these mass-produced towers exhibit an astonishing variety of shapes. Shukhov with undisguised pleasure used the property of a hyperboloid to accept the most different shapes, for example by changing the position of the braces or the diameters of the top and bottom edges.
And each tower had its own appearance, different from other ones, and its own load-bearing capacity. A difficult task, including from a constructive point of view, is to install heavy tanks at the required level in each specific case height, without visually overwhelming the extremely light structure, was always solved with an amazing sense of form. Greatest height Among the hyperboloid towers of this type is the tower of the Adzhigol lighthouse - 68 meters. This beautiful structure has been preserved and is located 80 kilometers southwest of Kherson. Vladimir Grigorievich himself said: “What looks beautiful is durable. The human eye is accustomed to the proportions of nature, and in nature that which is durable and purposeful survives.”
The engineer Shukhov, who had already gained fame by that time, began building the first Russian tankers around 1885 (the first German ocean tanker with a displacement of 3000 tons was built in 1886). Vladimir Grigorievich designed oil barges that had the most suitable shape for currents, as well as a very long and flat hull design. The installation was carried out in precisely planned stages using standardized sections at the shipyards in Tsaritsyn (Volgograd) and Saratov.>
When a competition was announced in 1886 in connection with the creation of a water supply system in Moscow, the Bari company took part in it. Even before this, Shukhov, using his experience in the construction of reservoirs and pipelines and using new modifications of pumps, laid a water supply system in Tambov. Based on extensive geological research, Shukhov and his collaborators over the course of three years drafted a new water supply system for Moscow.
Simultaneously with the construction of bridges, the Russian engineer begins to develop floor structures. At the same time, he pursued the goal of finding structural systems that could be manufactured and built with minimal costs material, labor and time. V.G. Shukhov managed to design and practically implement designs for a wide variety of coatings, distinguished by such fundamental novelty that only this would have been enough for him to take a special, honorable place among the famous civil engineers of that time. Until 1890, he created exclusively light arched structures with thin inclined ties. And today these arches serve as load-bearing elements of glass vaults over the largest Moscow stores: GUM (former Upper Trading Rows) and Petrovsky Passage.
In 1895, Shukhov applied for a patent on mesh coverings in the form of shells. This meant meshes made of strip and angle steel with diamond-shaped cells. Long-span lightweight hanging roofs and mesh vaults were made from them. The development of these mesh coverings marked the creation of an entirely new type of load-bearing structure. Vladimir Grigorievich was the first to give a hanging covering a finished form of a spatial structure, which was used again only decades later. Even compared with the then highly developed metal vault design, its reticulated vaults, formed from only one type of core element, represented a significant advance. Christian Schedlich, in his seminal study of metal building structures of the 19th century, notes the following in this regard: “Shukhov’s designs complete the efforts of engineers XIX century in creating an original metal structure and at the same time pointing the way far into the 20th century. They mark significant progress: the core lattice of the traditional spatial trusses, based on the main and auxiliary elements, was replaced by a network of equivalent structural elements" (Schadlich Ch., Das Eisen in der Architektur des 19.Jhdt., Habilitationsschrift, Weimar, 1967, S .104) After the first experimental buildings (two mesh vaults in 1890, a hanging roof in 1894), V.G. Shukhov first presented his new floor designs to the public during the All-Russian Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896. The company Bari built a total of eight exhibition pavilions of quite impressive size.Four of the pavilions had hanging coverings, four others had cylindrical mesh vaults.In addition, one of the halls with a hanging mesh covering had a hanging covering made of thin tin (membrane) in the center, which never before used in construction.In addition to these pavilions, a water tower was built, in which the engineer transferred his grid to a vertical lattice structure of a hyperboloid shape.
The more you learn about the affairs and works of V.G. Shukhov, the more you are amazed at the genius of this Russian engineer and scientist. It seems that so many of his unique inventions and projects have already been listed here. But this list can go on and on. We have not yet mentioned the lighthouses of his design, nor the floating gates of the dry dock, nor the platforms for heavy guns, nor the tram depots... However, no matter how the author tries to make the list complete, much will still remain outside the list. Moreover, many of Vladimir Grigorievich’s developments are such that even if they were the only ones that the engineer did, his name would still remain forever in the history of science and engineering.
Speaking about V. G. Shukhov and his works, we constantly have to repeat the words “first”, “for the first time” and add the most bright epithets. It is also necessary to speak about him as a person in words superlatives. His colleagues, partners, associates, and friends always spoke of Vladimir Grigorievich with excellent warmth and love. His life, seemingly devoted only to work, was in fact bright and multifaceted. For many years he communicated with remarkable contemporaries from different fields of activity - scientists, engineers, architects, doctors, artists, was fond of cycling, chess, photography, was friends with O. Knipper-Chekhova and her noisy acting circle, loved listening to F. Chaliapin , read poetry, design furniture. Colleagues wrote to him in a greeting addressed to him in 1910: “We will not touch on your inventions here: they are known throughout Russia and even beyond its borders, but we cannot pass over in silence the fact that, playing such a huge role in life and growth of the entire enterprise, you have always been an accessible and sympathetic not only boss, but also a comrade and teacher. Everyone could calmly bring their grief and their joys to you in the confidence that everything would find a lively response from you...”
Photography occupied a special, and perhaps one of the main places in the life of the great Russian engineer, designer and scientist Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov. Constantly searching for new ways to solve technical problems was also characteristic of Shukhov when working with a camera. His photographic interests are multifaceted: documentary-genre photography, photographs of engineering structures, city landscapes, pictures of Moscow life and the life of the Russian province of the late nineteenth - early twentieth centuries and portraits. The original free view of the Russian intellectual and scientist on the surrounding reality of Russia is interesting because Vladimir Grigorievich took photographs not for publication, not by order, but for himself and his environment. Shukhov was well versed in literature and art, knew five foreign languages, was a widely educated person, and the height of his development is reflected in the depth of his photographic works. He had the rare ability to see the uniqueness and originality of his surroundings and capture it with his camera.
In 1895, V.G. Shukhov met the famous Russian photographer Andrei Osipovich Karelin in Nizhny Novgorod. Then Vladimir Grigorievich supervised the construction of the unique steel mesh floors he invented for the pavilions of the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition of 1896. Karelin photographed the stages of construction of the world's first steel mesh shells of the Shukhov pavilions and the world's first hyperboloid structure - the steel mesh shell of the Shukhov water tower. Communication with Andrei Karelin aroused Vladimir Shukhov’s keen interest in artistic photography as a matter that requires serious art.
In his photographic work, the experimenter discovered new directions decades before their heyday in the world of photography. Serious genre photographs from the beginning of the century are a rarity. Documentary genre photography was recognized as an art in the forties of the twentieth century. Moscow of that time through the eyes of Shukhov is not standard postcards, but full of life a story about the city, its inhabitants, their holidays and everyday life. The Shukhov family chronicle is a description of the everyday life of the pre-revolutionary era of Russia: ice skating, children's lessons at home, country life, portraits of acquaintances, interiors of that time.
Shukhov's photo chronicles are reminiscent of the works of Cartier-Bresson, only Vladimir Grigorievich shot almost half a century earlier. His reporting subjects are elections in State Duma, revolutionary events on Krasnaya Presnya, the opening of the monument to Gogol in Moscow, the construction of the Kievsky station (formerly Bryansk), the religious procession in the Kremlin, car racing at the Moscow Hippodrome, the life of the Yalta port and much more.
Photographs of high-rise works during the construction of the Kievsky railway station can be attributed to the classics of Russian constructivism. Alexander Rodchenko photographed the Shukhov Tower on Shabolovka, Andrei Karelin filmed the construction of the Shukhov Pavilion on Nizhny Novgorod Fair- but besides these famous photographers, V. G. Shukhov himself photographed all this. Photographs of unique structures taken by their creator himself are doubly unique.
All major construction projects of the first five-year plans are associated with the name of V. G. Shukhov: Magnitka and Kuznetskstroy, the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant and the Dynamo Plant, the restoration of objects destroyed during the civil war and the first main pipelines, and much more. In 1928, Vladimir Grigorievich was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and in 1929 - its honorary member. V.G. Shukhov’s attitude towards the new government and what was happening in the country after 1917 was, to put it mildly, ambiguous. But, remaining a true Russian patriot, he rejected many flattering offers to go to Europe, to the USA. He transferred all rights to his inventions and all royalties to the state. Back in 1919, his diary wrote: “We must work regardless of politics. Towers, boilers, rafters are needed, and we will be needed.”
The last years of Vladimir Grigorievich’s life were overshadowed by the Inquisition of the 30s, constant fear for his children, unjustified accusations, the death of his wife, and leaving service due to the hated bureaucratic regime. All this undermined my health and led to disappointment and depression. His last years take place in solitude. He received only close friends and old colleagues at home, read and reflected.
October 3, 2001 on the territory of the Belgorod State Technological Academy building materials The grand opening of the monument to the outstanding engineer of the twentieth century, our fellow countryman V. G. Shukhov, took place. The authors (sculptor A. A. Shishkov, architect V. V. Pertsev) created the monument at the request of the public and the regional administration to perpetuate the memory of an outstanding fellow countryman. In the spring of 2003, almost immediately after the academy received university status, by decree of the head of the administration of the Belgorod region, BSTU was named after V. G. Shukhov.
The polytechnic activity of Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov, manifested in ingenious engineering developments related to the most various areas, has no analogues in the world. Our fellow countryman V. G. Shukhov belongs to that brilliant galaxy of domestic engineers whose inventions and research were far ahead of their time and changed the direction of development for decades to come scientific technical progress. Scale engineering achievements V. G. Shukhov is comparable to the contributions to science of M. V. Lomonosov, D. I. Mendeleev, I. V. Kurchatov, S. P. Korolev. It was these names that created authority and ensured worldwide recognition Russian science. Already during his lifetime, contemporaries called V. G. Shukhov the Russian Edison and “the first engineer Russian Empire“, and in our time Vladimir Grigorievich is included in the list of one hundred outstanding engineers of all times and peoples. And even in such a list it can rightfully occupy the first lines.
Today in Russia, probably everyone is familiar with the name of the American inventor Edison, but only a few know V.G. Shukhov, whose engineering and inventive gift is incomparably higher and more significant. The reason for ignorance is the unforgivable sin of many years of silence. We are obliged to eliminate the lack of information about our outstanding fellow countryman. V. G. Shukhov is for us and for the whole world the personification of genius in the art of engineering, just as A. S. Pushkin is rightfully recognized as the poetic genius of Russia, P. I. Tchaikovsky is its musical pinnacle, and M. V. Lomonosov - a scientific genius. In the work of Vladimir Grigorievich, intuitive insight and fundamental scientific erudition, subtle artistic taste and ideal engineering logic, sober calculation and deep spirituality are organically combined.
Today, when the 21st century is outside the window, the memory of Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov, wonderful person and a brilliant engineer, alive and fresh. For new and new generations of Russian engineers and researchers, he was and remains a symbol of engineering genius and an example of service to his work, his Fatherland.
From now on, the university square is overshadowed by a sculptural statue of Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov. Embodied in metal, it will remind future engineers of the great deeds of the sons and daughters of Russia, that the Motherland still needs talented engineers and devoted patriots, and it will always be a symbol of the indestructibility of thought and the inevitable revival of Russia.
February 2 marks the 75th anniversary of the death of the Russian genius Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov. Engineers and architects all over the world call him Russian Leonardo. The famous Shukhov Tower on Shabolovka is recognized as one of the architectural masterpieces of the Russian avant-garde and is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. By the way, the unusual hyperboloid design inspired the writer Alexei Tolstoy to write the novel “The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin.”
And yet, today in Russia few people know about Shukhov. Perhaps in connection with the tower on Shabolovka. But he is included in the list of the 100 most outstanding engineers of all time. First of all, the mere enumeration of the areas of his activity is striking. In addition to various architectural structures, he created steam boilers, oil refineries, pipelines, nozzles, liquid storage tanks, pumps, gas tanks, water towers, oil barges, blast furnaces, metal floors of workshops and public buildings, grain elevators, railway bridges, aerial cableways roads, lighthouses, tram depots, refrigeration plants, landing stages, mines, etc. According to his designs, more than 500 bridges were built in our country; almost all major construction projects of the first five-year plans are associated with his name: Magnitka, Kuznetskstroy, Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant, Dynamo Plant and even the rotating stage of the Moscow Art Theater, etc.
Today "RG" talks about six great creations of Vladimir Shukhov.
1. Tower on Shabolovka. This masterpiece by Shukhov was erected in 1919-1922. The Bolsheviks timed its construction to coincide with the opening of the Genoa Conference. It was important for the government of the RSFSR, which did not have international recognition. According to the original design, the tower was supposed to have a height of 350 meters, surpassing the famous Eiffel design by 50 meters. But there is a shortage of metal during civil war forced to reduce the height to 160 meters. One day an accident occurred, and Shukhov was sentenced to suspended execution with a suspended sentence until the completion of the work. In 1922, radio broadcasting began.
Shukhov was the first in the world to use mesh shells and hyperboloid structures in construction. Due to this, his 350-meter-high tower should have weighed only 2,200 tons, which is more than three times less than the weight of Eiffel’s creation. Shukhov's ideas became a revolution in architecture, it acquired amazing lightness, and gained the opportunity to create a wide variety of structures, sometimes of bizarre shape.
2. The world's first hyperboloid design in Polibino. The world first became acquainted with the work of Vladimir Shukhov in the summer of 1896 at the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition - the largest in pre-revolutionary Russia, which was held in Nizhny Novgorod. For it, the architect built eight pavilions with mesh ceilings and a hyperboloid tower, which became his calling card. It attracted the attention of not only the townspeople, but also the glass king Yuri Nechaev-Maltsev, who purchased it at the end of the exhibition and took it to his estate in Polibino, in the Lipetsk region. The 25-meter structure still stands there today.
3. GUM. Shukhov used an innovative approach to the floors and roofs of buildings in the Main Department Store (formerly Upper Trading Rows), built opposite the Kremlin. The glass roof of GUM is the work of a great master. Its construction took more than 800 tons of metal. But, despite such impressive figures, the semicircular openwork roof seems light and sophisticated.
4. Pushkin Museum named after A.S. Pushkin. The engineer was faced with a difficult task. After all, the project did not provide for electric lighting of the exposition. The halls had to be illuminated natural light. Therefore, it was necessary to create durable roof coverings through which the sun's rays could enter. The three-tier metal and glass roof created by Shukhov is today called a monument to an engineering genius.
5. Kyiv railway station in Moscow. Construction was carried out for several years, from 1914 to 1918, in conditions of metal and labor shortages. When the work was completed, the glazed space above the platforms, 230 meters long, became the largest in Europe. The canopy of the Kievsky station was a metal-glass ceiling, which rested on steel arches. Standing on the platform, it’s hard to believe that a structure weighing about 1,300 tons towers above you!
6. Tower on the Oka. In 1929, on the low bank of the Oka River between Bogorodsk and Dzerzhinsk, according to Shukhov’s design, the world’s only multi-section hyperboloid power transmission towers were installed. Of the three pairs of structures that supported the wires, only one has survived to this day.
Shukhov’s creations were appreciated all over the world during his lifetime, but even today his ideas are actively used by famous architects. The best architects of the world - Norman Foster, Basminster Fuller, Oscar Niemeyer, Antonio Gaudi, Le Corbusier based their work on Shukhov's designs.
The most famous example of the use of Shukhov's patent is the 610-meter television tower in the Chinese city of Guangzhou - the world's tallest mesh hyperboloid structure. It was erected for the 2010 Asian Games to broadcast this important sporting event.
We continue our series of materials about scientists who have made the most significant contribution to the history of mankind, “Lives of Remarkable Minds”
For the developed and patented process of cracking oil alone, the name of Shukhov should remain in human memory forever.
Volodya Shukhov was born on August 16 (28), 1853 in the village of Pozhidaevka - the Kursk estate of his mother, a poor noblewoman Vera Shukhova. Father, court councilor Grigory Petrovich Shukhov, was the director of a branch of the St. Petersburg State Bank, was fluent in several languages and was friends with the famous surgeon Nikolai Pirogov. The boy was the same as millions of other boys: moderately reckless, extremely active and terribly curious about all kinds of technology. He was given the basic concepts of reading and counting at home, and at the age of 11 he was sent to the Fifth St. Petersburg Gymnasium.
Vova had previously loved to count and draw various boyish inventions, but here he became completely naughty. It got to the point that in the 4th grade, a young high school student dared to prove the Pythagorean theorem at the blackboard in my own way, without drawing the boring Pythagorean Pants. The teacher looked sternly at the board, at the boy, back at the board, chewed his lip, adjusted his pince-nez and summed up: “Correct..., but immodest.” And he gave an unsatisfactory rating in the magazine.
This did not break the boy’s love for science. After successful completion gymnasium, on the advice of his father, in 1871 he entered the best technical educational institution in the country - the Imperial Moscow Technical School (IMTU), now known to us as the Bauman Moscow State Technical University. Teachers, among whom were such luminaries as creator of aerodynamics Nikolai Zhukovsky, mathematician Alexey Letnikov, mechanic Dmitry Lebedev, sensing the young student’s enormous potential, did not strive to develop modesty in him.
On the contrary, they strongly encouraged and diligently developed in him perseverance, ambition and the belief that any technical issue can be solved in an unconventional and beautiful way. The first officially registered invention of Shukhov, still a student, was a special steam nozzle. Until this time, the fuel oil obtained during the distillation of oil was considered a waste due to severe combustion and was simply poured into rivers, seas and pits.
The world's first hyperboloid tower Shukhov, Nizhny Novgorod, photograph by A. O. Karelin, 1896. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org
However, Shukhov's nozzle, which sprayed thick fuel oil into the firebox using the steam generated by the steam engine, turned it into good fuel for steam engines. The design of the nozzle was so simple, original and reliable that the great Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, by the way, who predicted a great future for fuel oil as a type of fuel, even placed a drawing of it on the cover of his book “Fundamentals of the Factory Industry,” and the basic principles of its system are still used by engineers today. The main Russian oilman of that time felt the power of the nozzle Ludwig Nobel, head of the oil giant Nobel Brothers Partnership, elder brother of the famous creator of dynamite and founder of the most prestigious scientific prize Alfred Nobel. In 1879, he acquired a patent for its production from Shukhov and began to equip it steam engines their tankers. This is how the nozzle was described in the magazine “Technician” in the article “L.E. Nobel’s Oil Sprayer with a Rotating Flame”: “This nozzle consists of a cylindrical box with two cylindrical branches: steam flows along the lower branch, oil flows through the upper branch. The size of the steam and oil holes can be adjusted by hand, and thus the desired oil flow can be set. ... The improvement here lies mainly in the fact that the spray flame has in the firebox rotational movement around the burning axis, through which more complete combustion of fuel and completely uniform heating are achieved... Mr. Nobel’s spray guns are manufactured at his own factory and cost about 130 rubles.” For information: a Russian official of low rank received 130 rubles for a year of work.
In 1876, Shukhov graduated from college with honors. He did not have to defend his thesis project, since the diploma and title of mechanical engineer were given to him “based on the totality of his merits.” Patriarch Russian mathematics Pafnutiy Chebyshev offered him a promising position as an assistant, Zhukovsky invited him to remain as a teacher, but Shukhov was attracted by practice. As the best graduate, he was awarded a year-long business trip to the technically advanced USA (then called the USA - North American United States). Here he visited the World Exhibition in Philadelphia (today's EXPO), visited the steam locomotive factories of Pittsburgh and returned to Russia completely fascinated by Western technical progress.
In St. Petersburg, Vladimir got a job at the Warsaw-Vienna railway company as a designer of railway depots, but did not work there for long. In 1876, a very active American of Russian origin came to Russia. Alexander Bari. He met Shukhov back in the USA, in Philadelphia, and it was conversations with the young engineer that forced Bari to return to the homeland of his ancestors. Having founded his own design bureau in Russia, he immediately invited his friend there. Shukhov immediately became his leading engineer and remained so for the rest of the time. “My personal life and the life and fate of the office were one,” he later wrote in his memoirs, “... They say A.V. Bari exploited me. This is right. Legally, I always remained a hired employee of the office. My labor was paid modestly in comparison with the income that the office received from my labor. But I also exploited him, forcing him to carry out even my most daring proposals! I was given the choice of orders, spending funds in the agreed amount, selecting employees and hiring workers.
In addition, A.V. Bari was not only a clever entrepreneur, but also a good engineer who knew how to appreciate novelty technical idea. Which of the entrepreneurs of that time would have undertaken the construction of the pavilions of the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition in six months, if they, even when built, raised doubts about their reliability? I had to endure wage injustices for the sake of engineering creativity. “...My main condition for working in the office is to win a profitable order under the contract, due to a lower cost than competitors and shorter deadlines, and at the same time provide the office with a profit no lower than that of other offices. The choice of the theme of the competition is up to me.”
Then the oil boom had just begun in the country. Huge capital was circulating in the oil-bearing regions of the Caspian Sea, and Bari moved his main office, together with Shukhov, to Baku. The industry was technically in the most primitive state, oil was often pumped out of wells in buckets, transported exclusively in barrels, on donkeys, stored in dug earthen pits, and distilled using the most primitive installations, reminiscent of moonshine stills. Therefore, one should not be surprised that the most progressive oil industrialists, led by millionaires Nobels, Kokorev, Lianozov and others, immediately loaded the company with orders.
Hyperboloid tower designed by V. G. Shukhov in Nikolaev. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org
The main problem facing the oil industry at that time was transportation. Oil production grew at such a pace that donkeys did not have time to reproduce and there simply weren’t enough of them. Therefore, the first order was to design and lay the first oil pipeline in Europe for the Nobel brothers company. Shukhov brilliantly coped with the task assigned to him. To avoid sabotage and sabotage local population, who profited from donkey transportation, the pipes were buried two meters deep, and Cossacks were stationed at the pumping stations and along the pipeline to repel the raids of disgruntled donkey and mule owners. It began in the very center of Balakhan, from where it went to the Nobel oil refinery in the Black City. In case of accidents or fire, 8 fire stations were equipped on the approximately 13-kilometer-long line. The diameter of the pipe was 3 inches (7.62 centimeters), and the product, driven by special pumps, flowed through it at a speed of 1 meter per second. Up to 1,300 tons of oil were pumped through the oil pipeline per day. In December 1878 alone, 841,150 pounds of oil were pumped through it. As a result, the cost of transportation from the well to the plant was brought up first to 10 kopecks (versus 35 in a barrel), and then even to half a kopeck per pound. Later, Ludwig Nobel wrote about this brainchild of Shukhov: “What significance this first iron pipe had... is shown by the fact that pumping oil through it cost less than 1 kopeck per pood, while transporting it in carts cost up to 9 kopecks per pood. Taking into account that three pounds of oil are required to produce one pound of kerosene, the manufacturer’s expenses decreased by 25 kopecks per pound.” The money the Nobels invested in the pipeline, taking into account the costs of the Cossacks and firefighters, was returned in less than a year. The next step was for Shukhov to lay a “kerosene pipeline” from the plant to the port. Having learned about this, other industrialists began to order their own pipes. Already in 1879, Shukhov built a second oil pipeline, 12 kilometers long, now by order of the merchant Lianozov. In the next three years, he laid three more pipes along the routes Balakhany - Surukhansky plant, Surukhansky plant - Zykh Spit, Balakhany - Black City.
The next problem posed to the engineer, again by the persistent Nobels, was storage and saving. To ensure even and constant loading of their gigantic oil production and refining complex, large storage facilities were required. Previously, Baku oil producers stored reserves of their raw materials in special ponds under open air. Such a primitive storage technology could satisfy serious entrepreneurs only at a very early stage, but it was impossible to rely on “lake storage facilities”. Not only did some of the oil from such almost natural storage facilities simply disappear, but they also often burned. In the USA, metal specialized oil storage facilities already existed, but the Nobels were not satisfied with them. These were huge, terribly expensive and heavy rectangular iron structures, erected on a powerful foundation. Engineer Shukhov, who had already adequately demonstrated his talents, pleased the brothers here too. The cylindrical oil storage tank he designed with a conical or flat roof and a thin bottom was erected on a specially prepared bed of ordinary sand. It was much easier American analogue due to Shukhov's ingenious know-how: the thickness of the walls in it was inconsistent: at the base, where the pressure was greatest, they were much thicker than at the top. Shukhov himself wrote about this in his book “On the Calculation of Oil Tanks”: “a tank with variable wall thickness has the least weight, provided that the volume of all the iron in the bottom and coating is equal to the volume of all the iron in the walls necessary to absorb tensile forces in the belts.” Accurate calculations allowed him to optimize the design as much as possible. The height of the storage facility was 11.4 meters, the thickness of the metal sheets from which it was riveted was 4 millimeters (versus 5 millimeters for the Germans and 6.35 for the Americans), the capacity was 160,000 poods (approximately 2,600 tons) of kerosene. All this, plus many more innovations, led to the fact that the Shukhov storage facilities, with the same capacity, were a third cheaper than American ones and much more reliable. The first was built with the money of Ludwig Nobel at the Balakhna fields, where the Nobel-Shukhov oil pipeline began. At the very a short time they have become the de facto global standard. In Russia alone, and only before 1917, more than 20,000 storage facilities of the Shukhov system were built. They have remained the world standard to this day. That’s right: over the past almost a century and a half, these structures have hardly changed, Shukhov created them so perfect.
Not only petroleum products were stored in them. If you remember, in the movie “White Sun of the Desert,” the Red Army soldier Sukhov saved the lives of eight wives of the bandit Abdula in the Shukhov oil storage tanks.
The world's first metal tankers were also built by the Nobels, but they did not order them from Shukhov. The Russified Swedes did not believe that in Russia even the most brilliant engineer could create a worthwhile sea or river vessel. Therefore, their “tank barges” were designed and built in Norway. But when Russian merchants saw what kind of profits the Nobels were making from their oil flotilla, they already turned to Bari, or more precisely, to Shukhov. And he, to the envy of the Nobels, developed domestic tankers that were much more reliable than the Norwegian ones. In 1885, by order of shipowners Baranov and Shitov, he built two tank barges with a carrying capacity of 640 and 800 tons. The barges were relatively small, 70 m long and 10 m wide. However, by the end of the century, the size of the Shukhov tankers increased to 150-170 m, and the carrying capacity - to 1600 tons.
V. G. Shukhov’s installation for thermal cracking of oil, 1931. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org
But the main gift that Shukhov gave to the oil workers was, of course, the cracking process he developed, with the help of which, when distilled from oil, it was possible to obtain not only kerosene, but also a host of other valuable products: gasoline, motor oils, diesel fuel, fuel oil, asphalt , tar and a whole bunch of other useful hydrocarbons. And all this in continuous process, without stopping to load a new portion of raw materials and unload waste, which was simply unthinkable before. Shukhov patented cracking in 1891 (patent of the Russian Empire No. 12926 dated November 27, 1891). Although he built the first cracking installation for the same Nobels two years earlier.
In 1885, the Bari company took part in a competition to create a citywide water supply system in Moscow. In three years, Shukhov and his comrades completely designed the water supply system for the second capital of the empire. Together with a group of hydrogeologists, he personally traveled around the city in order to find suitable sources. They became the Mytishchi springs in the Yauza basin.
Bari constantly expanded its activities and opened branches of its design office in the largest cities of Russia. And Shukhov demanded more and more complex tasks from him. In the early 1890s, he plunged into the construction business, beginning with the design of railroad bridges. Over the following years, 417 of them were built in Russia according to Shukhov’s designs. This does not mean, of course, that he designed 10 bridges a year, just that the engineer created several standard designs for economical and prefabricated bridges, which short term could be adjusted to almost any conditions.
Around the same time, he became interested in what we admire to this day - Shukhov’s amazing glass ceilings. In 1890, a competition was announced in Moscow for the construction of a new building of the Upper shopping arcades. The joint project of architect Pomerantsev and engineers Shukhov and Loleit won. Vladimir Grigorievich was responsible, in particular, for the ceilings of the galleries. When the rows, now known to us as GUM, were opened in 1893, people walked along them with their heads raised: the openwork, as if woven from thin air, giant glass ceilings were so fantastically beautiful.
Metal-glass floors of GUM designed by Shukhov, Moscow, 2007. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org
Until this time, Shukhov was considered a confirmed bachelor in the Moscow environment. Although I did have affairs from time to time. In 1885, he met the future star of the Moscow Art Theater and Chekhov's future wife, 18-year-old Olga Leonardovna Knipper, however, this acquaintance did not lead to anything. We don’t know why exactly the breakup occurred, but Knipper-Chekhova herself later wrote in her memoirs: “I entered the stage with the firm conviction that nothing would ever tear me away from it, especially since personal life The tragedy of the disappointment of my first young feeling has passed through mine...” However, she did not specify who was responsible for the disappointment. And in 1886, Shukhov began a new romance, now with a young provincial dowry girl, the daughter of a railway doctor, also 18 years old. Anna Nikolaevna Medintseva. The engineer met her during a business trip to Voronezh. And I immediately fell in love with this young green-eyed beauty. Anna reciprocated his feelings; her parents were not at all against such a successful match, but Shukhov’s mother was categorically against it. Vladimir listened to his strict parent and tried to forget the girl. Not so. After suffering for two years, he, secretly from his mother, brought Anna to Moscow and settled her in a specially rented four-room apartment on Novaya Basmannaya Street. For more than five years they lived in a civil marriage, first secretly, and then more and more openly. Finally, in 1894, Vladimir’s mother gave in and gave her blessing to the marriage, which took place immediately. Shukhov never regretted what he did. Anna lived a long life with him, brought her husband two daughters and three sons and helped him even in the most difficult times. Hard times, which were just around the corner.
Construction of an oval pavilion with a mesh steel hanging covering for the 1896 All-Russian Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod, photograph by A. O. Karelin, 1895. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org
But in the meantime, the engineer had successes, one after another. In 1896, he developed and patented a new, fundamentally new scheme steam boilers - water tube. Soon he received a gold medal for them at the World Exhibition in Paris. In 1895 he received a patent for his “shell mesh floors.” To hold the All-Russian Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896, the Bari company built eight large exhibition pavilions, four of which were covered with suspended glass ceilings, and the other four with cylindrical ones.
But the real highlight of the exhibition was Shukhov’s first “hyperboloid”: a huge, 27 meters high (9 floors) water tower, in which a heavy tank was firmly supported by a ghostly lightweight mesh elegant structure made of thin metal rafters.
If you take two rings, connect them with a series of parallel equal-sized slings, and then rotate the rings relative to each other, then absolutely straight slings form a curved figure in space - a single-sheet hyperboloid. This magical transformation Shukhov was fascinated by straight lines into voluminous curved figures even in school, but until then he could not imagine what useful things it could be turned into. Although the system was beautiful, it was not durable. The solution that came to Shukhov in the mid-1990s was brilliantly simple. Shukhov calculated how strong the structure would be if the slings in it, turned relative to the bases, say, to the right, were compensated by the same ones, only turned in the opposite direction. The result truly exceeded all expectations: the resulting hyperbolic mesh structure was not only amazingly elegant, but also just as amazingly strong. At the same time, it had two more fabulous features: fabulous simplicity and fabulous cheapness. To build it, only metal base rings, straight metal slats and fasteners were required.
The water tower built for the exhibition held a tank containing 114 thousand liters of water. At its top there was an observation deck, which could be reached by climbing a spiral staircase. The tower provided water for the entire exhibition, and after closing it was bought and transported to his Polibino estate near Lipetsk by the wealthy landowner Nechaev-Maltsev. There it stands to this day, protected by the state as a monument of architecture and technology. After the exhibition, the Bari company was inundated with dozens of orders for the construction of similar towers in all parts of the empire. And Shukhov, by turning the rafters slightly differently, changing the shape of the bases, using ovals instead of circles, made each tower different from the others. The largest of these hyperbaloid towers was the 68-meter (22 floors) beautiful Adzhigol Lighthouse, built 80 kilometers from Kherson. And he, too, has lived happily to this day.
The glass ceilings developed by Shukhov are the most various forms were at the beginning of the last century only in Moscow covered passage merchant's wife Vera Firsanova(“Petrovsky Passage”), the Museum of Fine Arts ((Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts), the Metropol Hotel, the Moscow Main Post Office, the Bakhmetyevsky Garage (the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture), the Bryansky (Kievsky) Station and many more buildings.
Shukhovsky metal-glass landing stage of the Kievsky railway station in Moscow. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org
During the First World War, the Bari company switched to military orders. Shukhov at this time designed sea mines, naval dock ports, and platforms for heavy artillery. Here the engineer again showed real miracles of ingenuity. For example, he created a rotating artillery platform, which could be easily rotated by one soldier and in half an hour turned from a stationary platform into a transport platform.
Shukhov accepted the revolution relatively calmly. Bari, of course, immediately emigrated. He persistently called for the chief engineer, but he never agreed. He also rejected numerous offers from various Western companies that dreamed of getting the Russian genius. Shukhov firmly knew that the new government, no matter what it was, would not be able to do without engineers, technicians, mechanics and designers, which means that he would not be left without a piece of bread. “We must work and work regardless of politics. Towers, boilers and rafters are needed, and we will be needed,” he wrote in his diary.
Project of the tower on Shabolovka 1919. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org
Shukhov was partially right. At least the Bolsheviks treated him quite loyally. The Bari office was nationalized and turned into the Stalmost organization (today the Central Research Institute of Proektstalkonstruktsiya).
The workers elected Shukhov as director of the company. The young state immediately overwhelmed the company with tasks for the construction of new towers, bridges, ceilings, tanks, pipelines, drilling rigs, cranes and so on, so on, so forth.
But the proud engineer was in no hurry to fully accept Soviet power. Moreover, he did not hide the fact that he blessed his sons to participate in the White movement. The authorities responded to him with a rather cool attitude. In September 1918, he was evicted from his own house on Smolensky Boulevard, and he and his family were forced to move into an office. Here they lived before moving to the apartment of the escaped Bari.
But despite all this, the engineer continued to work hard. If you read his diaries, you can understand what motivated him in this difficult era, what kept him in the country and why he tried so hard, in fact - for the benefit of the Bolsheviks. Shukhov firmly believed that Bolshevism arose as a consequence of the collapse of the country. Therefore, if this collapse is eliminated, then Bolshevism will be eliminated. And he fought bravely for the only one in a known way- good and high-quality work. Therefore, no matter how much his opponents tried in all the following years to accuse the “bourgeois specialist” of sabotage or industrial sabotage, they never fully succeeded: in all of Shukhov’s works it was literally impossible to find fault with anything, even when the some have a very strong desire. It was not possible until the end, but not until the end - as much as possible. He was reminded that he was friends with Kolchak, and that his sons fought with the Bolsheviks, while the youngest son died, and once was even almost shot. The tower saved me.
The young Republic of Soviets urgently needed a mouthpiece with which it could convey its ideas to the world proletariat. At the very end of July 1919, Shukhov's namesake Vladimir Lenin signed a resolution of the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense, according to which People's Commissariat Posts and telegraphs were prescribed “to ensure reliable and constant communication between the center of the Republic and Western states and the outskirts of the Republic, to extremely urgently establish in Moscow a radio station equipped with the most advanced instruments and machines and with power sufficient to perform the specified task.” A few months before this decree, Shukhov proposed to the new government a project for a nine-section hyperboloid tower, 350 meters high and weighing 2,200 tons. For comparison, the Eiffel Tower then had a height of 305 meters and weighed three times more. The project, after the resolution, was adopted, but in a truncated version. The country had a hard time with iron, so it was decided to limit it to six sections with a total height of 150 meters. At the same time, the weight of the entire structure was reduced to an almost symbolic 240 tons. On August 22, the State Association of Radiotelegraph Plants signed an agreement with Shukhov for the construction of the tower. According to it, work was supposed to begin in the Shabolovka area on August 29 and end exactly 8 months later, on March 29, 1920. At the same time, Shukhov drew up designs for another 8 towers, ranging from 175 to 350 meters in height, since it was assumed that Shabolovskaya would be the first in the country, but by no means the only one.
But even 220 tons of good iron for the first tower was extremely difficult to obtain in a warring country. The start of work was constantly delayed. It took Lenin’s personal instruction for the Military Commissariat to begin allocating the necessary materials. Work on the construction of the tower began on March 14, 1920. The quality of the iron was far from perfect and Shukhov had to literally redesign the project on the fly, adapting it to the real situation.
Tower on Shabolovka. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Ivtorov
The sections, each 25 meters high, were assembled on the ground and then, using winches, lifted to the top. In his notebooks, Shukhov wrote: “There are no presses for bending rings. There are no 4" x 0.5" shelves. There are no cables or blocks. There is no firewood for the workers... It's cold in the office, it's very difficult to write. There are no drawing supplies... Our artel is disintegrating. I.P. Tregubov is full of indignation at the small reward. He does not hide his mocking contempt for me as a person who does not know how to make money and grab... Not receiving rations puts our work in impossible conditions.... The climbers receive one million a day. Counting on bread, that’s 7 pounds (2.8 kg - V.Ch.), or less than 25 kopecks for work at an altitude of 150 meters...”
Nevertheless, construction proceeded quite successfully. Until it was time to lift section 4. “June 29, 1921,” Shukhov wrote in his diary. — When lifting the fourth section, the third broke. The fourth fell and damaged the second and first at seven o’clock in the evening.” Luckily, none of the workers were injured. But construction had to start almost all over again.
A commission created to investigate the accident, which included the best engineering minds, concluded that the cause was poor quality metal. The act directly stated: “The project is impeccable.” But for the new government, the opinion of the “formers” meant little, and Shukhov began to be summoned for interrogation by the Cheka. Finally, on July 30, 1921, he wrote in his diary: “The sentence to Shukhov is conditional execution.” This means one thing: while you are completing the tower, which no one else can do, you live, and then we’ll see. Now any mistake could cost the engineer his life. But there were no mistakes, and on March 19, 1922, the work was successfully handed over to the state commission.
Unlike the Eiffel Tower, which the majority of Parisians and almost the entire world intelligentsia terribly scolded after its construction, calling it tasteless, ugly, mechanical and even shameful, Shukhov’s Shabolov creation was accepted almost immediately by everyone. Muscovites fell in love with her immediately and irrevocably, newspapers scattered laudatory articles, and only the architects remained significantly silent. The tower, rising above the city, was immediately considered one of the main attractions of the capital, along with the Kremlin’s Tsar Cannon and Tsar Bell. The execution of the engineer had to be postponed indefinitely.
The strength of the structure created by Shukhov was confirmed in 1939, when a mail plane touched a thick cable stretched at an angle from the top of the tower to the ground, and there it was secured to a concrete base. As a result, the cable was torn from its base, the plane fell in a neighboring yard, and the tower remained standing as if nothing had happened. An examination showed that it did not even need repairs.
After the end of the civil war and the announcement of the NEP, the country finally began to recover. And Shukhov actively participated in this restoration. All the largest construction projects in the country are associated with his name: Magnitka, Kuznetskstroy, Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant, Dynamo plant. In 1931, the engineer launched the Soviet Cracking oil refinery, the first in the USSR, in Baku. He restored destroyed bridges and oil pipelines, built hyperboloid high-rise power transmission line supports for the GOELRO plan, and even took part in the design of the Moscow metro. In 1928 he was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and in 1929 - its honorary member.
The now 80-year-old engineer categorically refused to run for full membership for reasons of principle. Despite his cool attitude towards Bolshevism, he transferred all his patents and royalties on them to the state. Meanwhile, the patent for the cracking process in the United States alone was valued by the commission of Sinclair, Rockefeller’s competitor in the oil business, at several tens of thousands of dollars (at today’s exchange rate - several million), which Shukhov categorically refused to accept, declaring: “I work for state and I don’t need anything.”
Hyperboloid grids of the Shukhov towers on the Oka, bottom view, 1989. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Igor Kazus
The last major project of Vladimir Shukhov was the straightening of one of the two minarets of the famous Ulugbek madrasah in Samarkand. Built back in 1417 it, after quite strong earthquake at the beginning of the 20th century, began to gradually deviate from vertical axis. By the beginning of the 1920s, the deviation was already clearly visible to the eye and amounted to more than one and a half meters. To avoid a possible fall, it was then secured with cables. In 1932, Shukhov undertook to correct the situation. Under his leadership, a team of workers, using jacks, winches and cables, returned the minaret to a strictly vertical state in three days. Which he continues to be in now.
Shukhov's mother had fantastic intuition. Shortly before her death in 1920, she had a terrible dream: a family crypt, and in it was her son Volodya, engulfed in flames. The dream turned out to be prophetic, although it came true almost 19 years later. On January 29, 1939, Shukhov, as usual, shaved in the morning and sprayed himself generously with cologne. After which he awkwardly turned around and knocked over the burning candle on himself. The cologne-soaked shirt immediately burst into flames. 85-year-old Vladimir Shukhov was taken to the hospital with extensive burns. Five days later, on February 2, 1939, he died. Engineer Shukhov was buried in the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent.
Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov also loved sports, he owned a bicycle at the level of a professional athlete and participated in competitions. He was passionate about photography and left behind a great many albums with photographs. He was an avid theatergoer and even built a unique multi-level rotating stage for the new Moscow Art Theater building on Kamergersky Lane.
The Shukhov hyperboloid towers continue to be built to this day and will continue to be built for a long time, their design is so perfect. One of the last significant ones, 610 meters high, was built in 2009 in Guangzhou (China). At the Art of Engineering exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, her image was used as a logo.
British Museum courtyard shell (reconstruction), 2000 Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Andrew Dunn
At the exhibition “The best designs and structures in the architecture of the 20th century”, held in 2003 in Munich, its gilded six-meter model was installed. And in 2006 there were 160 participants International conference"Heritage at Risk." Preservation of 20th Century Architecture and World Heritage” from 30 countries in their declaration called for inclusion of this “masterpiece of the Russian avant-garde” on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
In 1999, the famous architect Norman Foster For the mesh covering of the courtyard of the British Museum, he received the privileges of a life peer and the title of Lord. And he never hid that it was Shukhov’s designs that inspired him in his work. On the day of the 150th anniversary of the great Russian engineer, he sent a letter to the leadership of the foundation for the restoration of the Shukhov Tower:
“Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov was one of the greatest civil engineers of the early twentieth century and, undoubtedly, the leading engineer of his era in Russia. He initiated the use of completely new building systems, creating hyperboloid structures of double curvature.
The radio tower on Shabolovka, built in 1919-1922, is his masterpiece. This structure is magnificent and has the greatest historical significance. At that time, the filigree mesh design was the most expressive of technological progress - a symbol of faith in the future.
... I really hope that Moscow realizes its opportunity to return this majestic masterpiece to its rightful status»