"His technical ideas brought world recognition to the Russian engineering school 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 storage tanks for petroleum products, the first tanker 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 are increasing production, laying pipelines, building a tanker fleet, increasing 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. Shukhov(download)

Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov was born on August 16 (28), 1853 in the small and quiet provincial town of Graivoron, then the Belgorod district of the Kursk province. His father, Grigory Petrovich Shukhov, came from a family in which for many generations men were officers of the Russian army. He graduated from the Faculty of Law of Kharkov University, which was considered one of the best after St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kyiv. Thanks to his education, decisive and firm character, honesty, diligence 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 the Crimean War of 1853-1856. (It is not without interest that G. P. Shukhov, being a very young man, barely in his twenties, 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 advisers.

The mother of V. G. Shukhov, nee - Vera Pozhidaeva - the daughter of Lieutenant Kapiton Pozhidaev, who had a small estate in the Shchigrovsky district of the Kursk province.

Parents brought up in their son purposefulness, diligence, insight and a thirst for knowledge. In 1864, at the age of eleven, Volodya Shukhov entered the St. Petersburg gymnasium. Where he studied before that is not known for certain, most likely in the Kursk and Kherson gymnasiums, but it is possible that only in Kursk. In the gymnasium, Vladimir studied well and showed an ability in the exact sciences, especially in mathematics. One day in class, he proved the Pythagorean theorem in a way that he invented himself. The teacher noted the originality of the evidence, but put a deuce for the deviation from the dogma.

Vladimir graduated from the gymnasium 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 to the development of Russia and the prosperity of his country through practical activities.

On the advice of his father, Vladimir enters the Imperial Moscow Technical School. In those years, it was an educational institution, where they provided an opportunity to receive fundamental physical and mathematical training, acquire in-depth knowledge of other theoretical disciplines and at the same time master applied crafts that were so necessary for a practical engineer. The curricula here were compiled on the basis of the training and practical courses of the St. Petersburg Institute of the Corps of Railway Engineers - the most advanced educational institution in Europe. Having passed the entrance exams at the school, Vladimir Shukhov was enrolled in "state students" and lived independently in state dormitories, occasionally visiting his parents, who at that time lived in Warsaw.

It was not easy to study at the school, the atmosphere here was difficult: a strict regime, barracks discipline, petty supervision, infringement of elementary rights. But strictness was not an end in itself, but encouraged diligent and conscientious study. The pupils were required to master the basics of physical and mathematical knowledge, on the basis of which the engineer has everything for his further independent growth. Accustomed by his parents to an independent and modest life, Vladimir Shukhov stubbornly studied physics and mathematics, worked in the reading room, drawing, carpentry and locksmith workshops. The successes of V. Shukhov were noticed and appreciated by his teachers at the school, well-known scientists: Associate Professor at the Department of Analytical Mechanics N. E. Zhukovsky, Professor at the Department of Mathematics A. V. Letnikov, Honorary Member of the Pedagogical Council Academician P. L. Chebyshev, who famous for his work on number theory, probability theory, 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 proposal to a young mechanical engineer about joint scientific and pedagogical work at the university. However, Vladimir Grigoryevich is more attracted not by theoretical research, but by practical engineering and inventive activities, the dreams of which are so close to being realized. He refuses the offer, and as part of a scientific delegation, as an encouragement, he is sent by the School Council to get acquainted with the achievements of industry in America at the World Exhibition held in honor of the celebration of the centenary of the independence of the United States. The exhibition opened in Philadelphia, in Fairmount Park, on the banks of a picturesque lake in May 1876.

A 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, supervising all the “metal work”, for which he received the Grand Prix and a gold medal. It was A. V. Bari who received the Russian delegation in America, assisted her in getting to know the country and with the exhibition, helped in the purchase of equipment, tools and product samples for the workshops of the technical school, showed the delegation members the Pittsburgh metallurgical plants, railways and the latest American technology .

Returning from America in 1877, V. G. Shukhov went to work in the drawing office of the Office of the Warsaw-Vienna Railway in St. Petersburg. After vivid impressions from the overseas trip, gray everyday life began, work on the drawings of railway embankments, station buildings, and locomotive depots. These skills were very useful later on, but work without the possibility of creativity, under the yoke of inert bosses, was oppressive. 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 returned to Russia with his family, remaining a citizen of the North American states. He understood that Russia was on the verge of rapid industrial development and planned to achieve rapid success here, relying on his abilities. Having become the chief engineer of the Nobel Brothers Partnership, he began to organize a bulk system for the transportation and storage of oil.

Perspicaciously assessing the creative potential of V. G. Shukhov while still in America, A. V. Bari invited him to take over the leadership 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 post of chief designer and chief engineer. Thus began a fruitful union of 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), unencumbered by prejudice engineer with brilliant characteristics, decent, fluent in three languages ​​(English, French, German), good looks and excellent education.

V. G. Shukhov, in the person of A. V. Bari, found an exceptional partner - an educated and cultured person with experience in entrepreneurial activity in America, a competent engineer, able to objectively evaluate ideas and proposals, able to communicate on an equal footing with both foreign entrepreneurs and major industrialists Russia. The Shukhov-Bari union was mutually beneficial and therefore long-term and fruitful.

In 1880, V. G. Shukhov, for the first time in the world, carried out industrial flare combustion of liquid fuel using a nozzle invented by him, which made it possible to efficiently burn fuel oil, which was previously considered a waste from oil refining. The young engineer made calculations and supervised the construction of the first oil pipeline in Russia from the Balakhani oil fields to Baku. In 1891, V. G. Shukhov developed and patented an industrial plant for the distillation of oil with decomposition into fractions under the influence of high temperatures and pressures. The unit for the first time provided for the implementation of cracking in the liquid phase.

Nature unusually generously endowed Vladimir Grigorievich with bright, multifaceted talents. The simple enumeration of the spheres of his activity is amazing. According to the Shukhov 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 parks, refrigerator plants, landing stages, boat ports, mines, etc.

No less extensive is the geography of distribution in Russia of the inventions of a remarkable engineer. Steam boilers of his system and tanks for various purposes have found application from Baku to Arkhangelsk, from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. V. G. Shukhov - the creator of the oil fleet in Russia. According to his projects, accurate drawings were created 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 pipes was created. The Bari company, after testing the project during the reconstruction of the water supply system in Moscow, carried out the construction of water pipes 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 Shabolov radio tower in Moscow. It is interesting that, having received an order in 1919 by order of the Council of People's Commissars, Vladimir Grigoryevich 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 become a monument of engineering art. The project had to change. The existing tower of six hyperboloid sections with a total height of 152 meters was erected using the unique method of "telescopic mounting" invented by Shukhov. For a long time the tower remained the tallest building in Russia.

Under the leadership of V. G. Shukhov, about 500 bridges were designed and built (through the Oka, Volga, Yenisei, etc.). Few people know that he designed the revolving 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 - the minaret of the famous madrasah in Samarkand was carried out. The tower tilted heavily after the earthquake, there was a threat of its fall. In 1932, a competition for projects to save the tower was announced. Shukhov presented an unusual project and became not only the winner of the competition, but also the head of the work to save the minaret.

But let's go back to the 19th century. For 15 years of work in the "Construction Office" (1880-1895), V. G. Shukhov received 9 privileges (patents) that are relevant to this day: horizontal and vertical steam boilers, an oil barge, a steel cylindrical tank, a hanging mesh cover for buildings , arched coating, oil pipeline, industrial cracking unit, openwork hyperboloid tower, which received a great response 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 V. G. Shukhov's engineering thought. More than four hectares of buildings and pavilions were covered and built up with its structures, which turned 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 roofs, 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 hanging roof of the elevator in Albany (USA) appeared only in 1932, and the roof in the form of an inverted truncated cone in the French Pavilion in Zagreb (Yugoslavia) - in 1937.

The tower design in the form of a hyperboloid exhibited in Nizhny Novgorod had the greatest commercial success. Shukhov patented this invention shortly before the opening of the exhibition. The shell of revolution of the hyperboloid was a completely new construction form never used before. It made it possible to create a spatially curved mesh surface from straight, obliquely installed rods. The result is a light, rigid tower structure that can be calculated and built 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. There was a viewing platform on the forecastle, which could be reached by a spiral staircase inside the tower. This first hyperboloid tower has remained one of the most beautiful buildings in Shukhov. It was sold to a wealthy landowner, Nechaev-Maltsev, who installed it on his Polibino estate near Lipetsk. The tower still stands there today. The rapidly growing demand for water towers as a result of accelerated industrialization brought many orders to Bari. Compared to the usual Shukhov mesh tower, in terms of construction technology, it was more convenient and cheaper. Hundreds of water towers were designed and built by Shukhov according to this principle. A large number of towers led to a partial typing of the overall structure and its individual elements (tanks, stairs). Nevertheless, these mass-produced towers show an amazing variety of forms. Shukhov, with undisguised pleasure, used the property of the hyperboloid to take on a variety of forms, for example, by changing the position of the braces or the diameters of the upper and lower edges.

And each tower had its own appearance, different from other appearances, and its own bearing capacity. Difficult, including from a constructive point of view, the task of installing heavy tanks at the height required in each particular case, without visually suppressing the extremely light structure, has always been solved with an amazing sense of form. The highest height among the hyperboloid towers of this type is the tower of the Adzhigol lighthouse - 68 meters. This beautiful building has survived 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 only what is durable and expedient 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 Grigoryevich designed oil barges, which had the most suitable shape for currents, as well as a very long and flat hull design. Installation was carried out in precisely planned stages using standardized sections at the shipyards in Tsaritsyn (Volgograd) and Saratov.>

When in 1886 a competition was announced in connection with the creation of a water supply system in Moscow, the Bari company took part in it. Even before that, Shukhov, using his experience in the construction of tanks and pipelines and applying new modifications of pumps, laid a water pipe in Tambov. Based on extensive geological research, Shukhov, together with his employees, drafted a new Moscow water supply system over the course of three years.

Simultaneously with the construction of bridges, the Russian engineer begins to develop floor structures. At the same time, he pursued the goal of finding systems of structures that could be manufactured and built with minimal material, labor and time. V.G. Shukhov succeeded in designing and practically implementing the constructions of the most diverse coatings, which were distinguished by such a fundamental novelty that only this would be enough for him to take a special, honorable place among the famous civil engineers of that time. Until 1890, he created exceptionally light arched structures with thin inclined puffs. 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 net coverings in the form of shells. In this case, meshes made of strip and angle steel with diamond-shaped cells were meant. Large-span light hanging roofs and mesh vaults were made from them. The development of these mesh covers marked the creation of a completely new type of load-bearing structure. Vladimir Grigoryevich for the first time gave a finished form of a spatial structure to a hanging covering, which was reused only decades later. Even compared to the then highly developed design of metal vaults, its mesh vaults, formed from only one type of rod element, represented a significant step forward. Christian Schedlich, in his fundamental study of metal building structures of the 19th century, notes the following in this regard: "Shukhov's designs complete the efforts of engineers of the 19th century in creating an original metal structure and at the same time point the way far into the 20th century. They mark a significant progress: relying on basic and auxiliary elements the bar lattice of the spatial trusses traditional for that time 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 during the All-Russian Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896 for the first time presented his new floor designs to the public. The Bari firm built a total of eight exhibition pavilions of quite impressive size. Four pavilions had hanging roofs, four others had cylindrical mesh vaults. In addition, one of the halls with a mesh hanging coating had a hanging coating of thin tin (membrane) in the center, which had never been used in construction before. 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 deeds 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 either the lighthouses of its design, or the floating gates of the dry dock, or platforms for heavy guns, or tram depots ... However, no matter how the author tries to make the list complete, still much will remain outside the list. Moreover, many of the developments of Vladimir Grigorievich are such that if they were the only ones that the engineer did, his name would still remain forever in the history of science and engineering.

Speaking of V. G. Shukhov and his works, one constantly has to repeat the words “first”, “for the first time” and add the most vivid epithets. It is also necessary to speak of him as a person in words in superlatives. His colleagues, partners, associates, friends always spoke of Vladimir Grigorievich with excellent warmth and love. His life, seemingly devoted only to work, in reality was bright and multifaceted. For many years he communicated with remarkable contemporaries from various fields of activity - scientists, engineers, architects, doctors, artists, was fond of cycling, chess, photography, was friends with O. Knipper-Chekhova and her noisy acting environment, loved to listen to F. Chaliapin , read poetry, design furniture. Colleagues wrote to him in a welcome address presented in 1910: “We will not touch on your inventions here: they are known throughout Russia and even beyond its borders, but we cannot ignore the fact that, playing such a huge role in life and growth throughout the entire enterprise, you have always been an accessible and sympathetic not only boss, but also a comrade and a teacher for us. Everyone could calmly bring their sorrows and their joys to you in the confidence that everything will 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 Grigoryevich Shukhov. The constant search for new ways in solving technical problems was also characteristic of Shukhov when working with a camera. His photographic interests are multifaceted: documentary-genre photography, photographs of engineering structures, the urban landscape, paintings of Moscow life and the life of the Russian provinces of the late nineteenth - early twentieth century, and portraits. The original free view of the Russian intellectual and scientist on the surrounding reality of Russia is interesting in that Vladimir Grigorievich took photographs not for publication, not by order, but for himself and his entourage. Shukhov was well versed in literature and art, knew five foreign languages, was a well-educated person and the height of his development is reflected in the depth of photographic works. He possessed a rare ability to see the uniqueness and originality of the environment and capture it with his camera.

In 1895, VG Shukhov met the famous Russian photographer Andrei Osipovich Karelin in Nizhny Novgorod. Then Vladimir Grigorievich supervised the construction of the unique steel mesh ceilings 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 in Vladimir Shukhov a keen interest in artistic photography as a matter requiring serious art.

In his photographic work, the experimenter opened up new directions decades before their heyday in the world of photography. Serious genre photographs of the beginning of the century are a rarity. Documentary-genre photography was recognized as art in the forties of the twentieth century. Moscow of that time through the eyes of Shukhov is not standard postcards, but a story full of life about the city, about its inhabitants, their holidays and everyday life. The family chronicle of the Shukhovs is a life story of the pre-revolutionary era in Russia: ice skating, children's lessons at home, country life, portraits of acquaintances, interiors of that time.

Shukhov's photo chronicle resembles the work of Cartier-Bresson, only Vladimir Grigoryevich took pictures almost half a century earlier. His reporting subjects are elections to the State Duma, revolutionary events in Krasnaya Presnya, the opening of a monument to Gogol in Moscow, the construction of the Kyiv railway station (formerly Bryansk), a religious procession in the Kremlin, car racing at the Moscow hippodrome, the life of the Yalta port and much more.

Photos of high-rise work during the construction of the Kievsky railway station can be attributed to the classics of Russian constructivism. Alexander Rodchenko filmed the Shukhov tower on Shabolovka, Andrey Karelin filmed the construction of the Shukhov pavilion at the Nizhny Novgorod fair - but besides these famous photographers, V. G. Shukhov himself filmed all this. Photos of unique designs made 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 facilities 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, an honorary member. The attitude of V. G. Shukhov to the new government and to what happened 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, it was written in his diary: “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 children, unjustified accusations, the death of his wife, and leaving the service due to the hated bureaucratic regime. All this undermined health, led to disappointment and depression. His last years are spent in seclusion. He received at home only close friends and old colleagues, read, thought.

On October 3, 2001, on the territory of the Belgorod State Technological Academy of Building Materials, the grand opening of the monument to the outstanding engineer of the twentieth century, our 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 in order to perpetuate the memory of an outstanding countryman. In the spring of 2003, almost immediately after the academy received the status of a university, by a decree of the head of the administration of the Belgorod region, BSTU was named after V. G. Shukhov.

The polytechnic activity of Vladimir Grigoryevich Shukhov, which manifested itself in brilliant engineering developments related to the most diverse fields, 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 scientific and technological progress for decades to come. The scale of engineering achievements of V. G. Shukhov is comparable with 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 world recognition of Russian science. Already during his lifetime, contemporaries called V. G. Shukhov the Russian Edison and “the first engineer of the 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, he can rightfully occupy the first lines.

Today in Russia, probably, everyone knows the name of the American inventor Edison, but only a few know V. G. Shukhov, whose engineering, 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 countryman. V. G. Shukhov is for us and for the whole world the personification of a genius in engineering, just as A. S. Pushkin is rightfully recognized as the poetic genius of Russia, P. I. Tchaikovsky - its musical pinnacle, and M. V. Lomonosov - a scientific genius. Intuitive insight and fundamental scientific erudition, fine artistic taste and ideal engineering logic, sober calculation and deep spirituality organically combined in Vladimir Grigorievich's work.

Today, when the 21st century is outside, the memory of Vladimir Grigoryevich Shukhov, a wonderful person and brilliant engineer, is 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 serving his cause, his Fatherland.

From now on, the university square is overshadowed by a sculptural statue of Vladimir Grigoryevich 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 that it will always be a symbol of the invincibility of thought and the inevitable revival of Russia.

We continue a series of materials about scientists who have left the most notable contribution to the history of mankind "Life of Remarkable Minds"

For just one developed and patented oil cracking process, Shukhov's name 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, who was not rich noblewoman Vera Shukhova. Father, court counselor 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, excessively active and terribly curious about all kinds of technology. The initial concepts of reading and counting were given to him at home, and at the age of 11 he was assigned to the Fifth Petersburg Gymnasium.

Vova used to love to count and draw various boyish inventions, but here he went 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 his own way, without drawing the “Pythagorean pants” that bothered everyone. The teacher looked sternly at the blackboard, at the boy, again at the blackboard, chewed his lip, adjusted his pince-nez and summed it up: "That's right... but immodestly." And brought in the magazine an unsatisfactory assessment.

This did not break the boy's love of science. After successfully graduating from the 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 beat such luminaries as creator of aerodynamics Nikolai Zhukovsky, mathematician Alexei Letnikov, mechanic Dmitry Lebedev, feeling the huge potential of the young student, did not seek 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 a student Shukhov was a special steam nozzle. Until that time, fuel oil obtained during the distillation of oil was considered waste due to severe ignition and simply merged into rivers, seas and pits.

The world's first hyperboloid Shukhov tower, Nizhny Novgorod, photograph by A. O. Karelin, 1896. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

However, Shukhov's nozzle, which sprayed thick fuel oil into the furnace with the help of water vapor created by the steam engine, turned it into a 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 its drawing on the cover of his book "Fundamentals of the Factory Industry", and the basic principles of its system are still used by engineers. The power of the nozzle was felt by the chief Russian oilman of that time 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 award Alfred Nobel. In 1879, he acquired a patent for its production from Shukhov and began to equip the steam engines of his tankers with it. This is how the nozzle was described in the Technik magazine in the article “L.E. Nobel’s oil sprayer with a rotating flame”: “This nozzle consists of a cylindrical box with two cylindrical processes: steam flows along the lower process, oil flows along the upper one. The size of the steam and oil holes can be adjusted by hand, and thus the desired oil inflow can be set. ... The improvement here consists mainly in the fact that the atomizing flame in the furnace has a rotational movement around the burning axis, through which a more complete combustion of the fuel and a completely uniform heating are achieved ... Mr. Nobel's atomizers are made in his own factory and cost about 130 rubles. For information: a Russian official of a small rank received 130 rubles for a year of work.

In 1876 Shukhov graduated from the college with honors. He did not have to defend his graduation project, since he was given a diploma and the title of mechanical engineer "according to the totality of merit." Patriarch of Russian mathematics Pafnuty Chebyshev offered him a promising position as an assistant, Zhukovsky called to remain a teacher, but Shukhov was attracted by practice. As the best graduate, he was awarded a one-year business trip to the technically advanced USA (then they were called the USA - the North American United States). Here he visited the World Exhibition in Philadelphia (today's EXPO), visited the locomotive factories of Pittsburgh and returned to Russia completely fascinated by Western technological 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 the 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 called 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 whole,” 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 work was paid modestly in comparison with the income that the office received from my work. But I also exploited him, forcing him to fulfill even my most daring proposals! I was given the choice of orders, the expenditure of funds in the agreed amount, the selection of employees and the hiring of workers.

In addition, A.V. Bari was not only a smart entrepreneur, but also a good engineer who knew how to appreciate the novelty of a technical idea. Which of the entrepreneurs of that time would have taken up the construction of the pavilions of the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition in six months, if they, even built, raised doubts about their reliability? I had to endure injustice in wages for the sake of the possibility of engineering creativity. “... My main condition for working in the office is to win a profitable order under the contract, and at the expense of lower cost and shorter deadlines than competitors, and at the same time ensure the profit of the office is not 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 capitals were circulating in the oil-bearing regions of the Caspian, and Bari transferred his main office, together with Shukhov, to Baku. The industry was technically in the most primitive state, oil was often pumped out in buckets from wells, transported exclusively in barrels, on donkeys, stored in excavated earthen pits, and distilled using the most primitive installations resembling moonshine stills. Therefore, one should not be surprised that the most progressive oil owners, led by the millionaires Nobels, Kokorev, Lianozova 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 oilmen was then transportation. Oil production grew at such a pace that the donkeys did not have time to breed and there were simply not enough of them. Therefore, the first order was the design and construction of the first oil pipeline in Europe for the company of the Nobel brothers. Shukhov brilliantly coped with the task assigned to him. In order to avoid sabotage and sabotage by the local population, who profited from donkey transportation, the pipes were buried to a depth of two meters, and Cossacks were placed at the pumping stations and along the pipeline, repelling 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 line about 13 kilometers long. The diameter of the pipe was 3 inches (7.62 centimeters), and the product, driven by special pumps, walked along it at a speed of 1 meter per second. Up to 1,300 tons of oil were pumped through the pipeline per day. In December 1878 alone, 841,150 poods of oil were pumped through it. As a result, the cost of transportation from the well to the plant was first brought up to 10 kopecks (against 35 in a barrel), and then generally to half a kopeck per pood. Later, Ludwig Nobel wrote about this brainchild of Shukhov: “What was the significance of this first iron pipe ... is shown by the fact that pumping oil through it cost less than 1 kopeck per pood, while transporting it in carts - up to 9 kopecks per pood. Considering that it takes three poods of oil to produce one pood of kerosene, the breeder's expenses have decreased by 25 kopecks per pood. The money invested by the Nobels in the pipeline, taking into account the costs of the Cossacks and firefighters, returned in less than a year. Shukhov's next step was to lay a "kerosene pipeline" from the factory 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 commissioned by the merchant Lianozov. In the next three years, he laid three more pipes along the routes of Balakhany - Surukhansky Plant, Surukhansky Plant - Zykh Spit, Balakhany - Black City.

The next problem posed to the engineer, again by the stubborn Nobels, was storage and savings. Large storage facilities were required to evenly and constantly load their giant oil production and processing complex. Previously, Baku oil producers stored their raw materials in special open-air ponds. Such a primitive storage technology could satisfy serious entrepreneurs only at the very early stage, but it was impossible to rely on "lake storages". Not only did some of the oil from such, almost natural, storages simply disappear, they still burned quite often. In the United States, metal specialized oil storage facilities already existed, but they did not suit the Nobels. These were huge, terribly expensive and heavy rectangular iron structures, erected on a powerful foundation. Engineer Shukhov, who had already adequately shown his talents, pleased the brothers here too. The cylindrical oil storage facility he designed, with a conical or flat roof and a thin bottom, was built on a specially prepared cushion of ordinary sand. It was much lighter than the American counterpart due to Shukhov's ingenious know-how: the thickness of the walls in it was not constant: 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 Reservoirs”: “a tank with a variable wall thickness has the least weight, provided that the volume of all iron in the bottom and coating is equal to the volume of all 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 was 11.4 meters, the thickness of the metal sheets from which it was riveted was 4 millimeters (against 5 millimeters for the Germans and 6.35 for the Americans), the capacity was 160,000 pounds (about 2600 tons) of kerosene. All this, plus many other innovations, led to the fact that Shukhov's storage facilities, with the same capacity, were one 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. In a very short time, they became the de facto world standard. Only in Russia, 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 designs have hardly changed, Shukhov created them so perfect.

Stored in them and not only oil products. If you remember, in the film "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 facilities.

The world's first metal tankers were also built by the Nobels, but they did not order them from Shukhov. Russified Swedes did not believe that in Russia even the most brilliant engineer could create a worthy sea or river vessel. Therefore, their "tank barges" were designed and built in Norway. But when the Russian merchants saw what profits the Nobels were extracting from their oil flotilla, they had already turned to Bari, or rather, to Shukhov. And he, to the envy of the Nobels, developed much more reliable domestic tankers than the Norwegian ones. In 1885, by order of the shipowners Baranov and Shitov, he built two tanker barges with a carrying capacity of 640 and 800 tons. The barges were relatively small, 70 m long and 10 wide. However, by the end of the century, the size of Shukhov's tankers had grown to 150-170 m, and the carrying capacity - up to 1600 tons.

Installation of V. G. Shukhov for thermal cracking of oil, 1931. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

But the main gift that Shukhov made to the oilmen was, of course, the cracking process he developed, with the help of which, during the distillation of oil, it was possible to obtain not only kerosene, but also a lot 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 a 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 unit for the same Nobels two years earlier.

In 1885, the Bari company took part in a competition for the creation of a city-wide water supply system in Moscow. For 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 were 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 immersed himself in 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, the engineer simply created several standard designs of economical and prefabricated bridges, which could be adjusted to almost any conditions in a short time .

Around the same time, he became interested in what we still admire to this day - the amazing Shukhov glass ceiling ceilings. In 1890, a competition was announced in Moscow for the construction of a new building for the Upper Trading Rows. The joint project of architect Pomerantsev and engineers Shukhov and Loleit won. Vladimir Grigoryevich in it was responsible, in particular, for the overlapping of the galleries. When in 1893 the rows, now known to us as GUM, were opened, people walked along them with their heads up: so fantastically beautiful were the openwork, as if woven from the air, giant glass ceilings.

GUM metal-glass ceilings designed by Shukhov, Moscow, 2007. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

Until that time, Shukhov was considered a convinced bachelor in the Moscow environment. Although novels from time to time twisted. 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. Because of what exactly the gap occurred, we do not know, 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 in my personal life I had passed the tragedy of the disappointment of the first young feeling ... ". However, she did not specify who was responsible for the disappointment. And in 1886, Shukhov "twisted" a new romance, now with a young provincial dowry, the daughter of a railway doctor, also 18 years old. Anna Nikolaevna Medintseva. The engineer met her during a business trip to Voronezh. And immediately fell in love with this young green-eyed beauty. Anna reciprocated, her parents were not at all against such a successful game, but Shukhov's mother was categorically against it. Vladimir obeyed a strict parent and tried to forget the girl. It wasn't there. After suffering for two years, he, secretly from his mother, brought Anna to Moscow and settled in a specially rented four-room apartment on Novaya Basmannaya Street. For more than five years they lived in a civil marriage, at first secretly, and then more and more openly. Finally, in 1894, Vladimir's mother gave in and gave her blessing for the marriage, which took place immediately. Shukhov never once regretted what he had done. Anna lived a long life with him, brought her husband two daughters and three sons and helped him even in the most difficult times that were just around the corner.

Construction of an oval pavilion with a mesh steel hanging cover for the All-Russian Exhibition of 1896 in Nizhny Novgorod, photograph by A. O. Karelin, 1895. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

But in the meantime, the engineer had some successes, and one after another. In 1896, he developed and patented a new, fundamentally new scheme of 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 "mesh shells". For the All-Russian Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896, the Bari company built eight large exhibition pavilions, four of which were covered with hanging glass ceilings, and four others were cylindrical.

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 held on a ghostly lightweight mesh elegant structure made of thin metal rafters.

If we take two rings, connect them with a series of parallel lines of equal size, and then rotate the rings relative to each other, then absolutely straight lines form a curved figure in space - a single-sheeted hyperboloid. This magical transformation of straight lines into three-dimensional curved figures fascinated Shukhov even at the school, but for the time being he could not imagine what useful things could be turned into. The system was beautiful, but not strong. The decision that visited Shukhov in the mid-1990s was brilliantly simple. Shukhov calculated how strong the structure would be if in it the lines 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 surprisingly elegant, but also surprisingly strong. At the same time, she had two more fabulous features: fabulous simplicity and fabulous cheapness. For its construction, only metal base rings, straight metal battens and fasteners were required.

The water tower built for the exhibition held a tank, which contained 114,000 liters of water. At its top, an observation deck was arranged, which could be reached by climbing a spiral staircase. The tower provided water for the entire exhibition, and after closing it was bought out and moved to his estate Polibino 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 flooded with dozens of orders for the construction of similar towers in all parts of the empire. And Shukhov, turning the rafters a little differently, changing the shape of the bases, using ovals instead of circles, made each tower unlike the others. The largest of these hyperbaloid towers was the 68-meter (22 floors) handsome Adzhigol Lighthouse, built 80 kilometers from Kherson. And he, too, has lived safely to this day.

At the beginning of the last century, only in Moscow, glass ceilings of various shapes designed by Shukhov were covered with a passage Merchants Vera Firsanova(“Petrovsky Passage”), the Museum of Fine Arts ((The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts), the Metropol Hotel, the Moscow Main Post Office, the Bakhmetevsky Garage (the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture), the Bryansk (Kyiv) Station and many more buildings.

Shukhov 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 that time was designing sea mines, boat docks of sea docks, platforms for heavy artillery. Here the engineer again showed real miracles of ingenuity. For example, he created a rotary artillery platform, which calmly rotated by one soldier and turned from a stationary into a transport platform in half an hour.

Shukhov accepted the revolution relatively calmly. Bari, of course, immediately emigrated. He persistently called for the chief engineer to follow him, but he did not agree. He also turned down numerous offers from various Western companies that dreamed of getting themselves a brilliant Russian. Shukhov firmly knew that the new government, whatever it was, could not 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.

The project of the tower on Shabolovka in 1919. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org

Partly Shukhov was right. At least the Bolsheviks treated him quite loyally. The office of Bari was nationalized and turned into the organization "Stalmost" (today - "TsNII Projectstalkonstruktsiya").

The workers elected Shukhov the director of the firm. 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 on.

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 government responded with a rather cool attitude. In September 1918, he was evicted from his own house on Smolensky Boulevard, and he was forced to move with his family to an office. Here they lived until moving into 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 result of the collapse of the country. Therefore, if this collapse is eliminated, then Bolshevism will also be eliminated. And he bravely fought in the only way he knew how - good and high-quality work. Therefore, no matter how hard his opponents tried in all the following years to accuse the “bourgeois specialist” of sabotage or industrial sabotage, they never succeeded to the end: in all of Shukhov’s works, it was literally impossible to find fault with anything, even with the arising some have a very strong desire. Until the end it was not possible, but not until the end - as much as you like. He was also reminded that he was friends with Kolchak, and that his sons fought the Bolsheviks, while the youngest son died, and once even almost shot. Saved by the tower.

The young Republic of Soviets urgently needed a mouthpiece with which to communicate 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 the People's Commissariat of Posts and Telegraphs was instructed "to ensure reliable and constant communication between the center of the Republic with the Western states and the outskirts of the Republic, to urgently establish in Moscow a radio station equipped with the most advanced instruments and machines and possessing power sufficient to perform the specified task. A few months before this decision, 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 as much. The project, after the decision was adopted, but in a truncated version. It was hard with iron in the country, 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 generally 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 to begin in the Shabolovka area on August 29 and be completed exactly 8 months later, on March 29, 1920. At the same time, Shukhov drafted 8 more towers, from 175 to 350 meters high, 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 get in a howling country. The start of work was constantly delayed. It took a personal order from Lenin in order for the Military Commissariat to begin to allocate 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 reshape the project on the fly, adapting it to the real situation.

Tower on Shabolovka. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Ivtorov

Sections, each 25 meters high, were assembled on the ground and then, with the help of winches, went up. Shukhov wrote in his notebooks: “There are no presses for bending rings. There are no shelves 4 inch x 0.5 inch. There are no cables or blocks. There is no firewood for the workers... It is cold in the office, it is very difficult to write. There are no drawing supplies ... Our artel is disintegrating. IP Tregubov is full of indignation at a small reward. He does not hide his mocking contempt for me as for a person who does not know how to make money and grab ... Not receiving rations makes our work impossible .... Top climbers receive one million a day. Counting for bread, this is 7 pounds (2.8 kg., - V.Ch.), or less than 25 kopecks for work at a height of 150 meters ... "

Nevertheless, the construction went quite well. Until it's 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 the first at seven o'clock in the evening. Luckily, none of the workers were hurt. But the construction had to be started almost anew.

The commission set up to investigate the accident, which included the best engineering minds, concluded that the cause was the poor quality of the metal. The act directly stated: "The project is impeccable." But for the new government, the opinion of the “former” meant little, and Shukhov began to be summoned for interrogation at the Cheka. Finally, on July 30, 1921, he wrote in his diary: "Shukhov's sentence is conditional execution." This means one thing: while you finish building 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 most Parisians and almost the entire world's intelligentsia after its construction terribly scolded, calling it tasteless, ugly, mechanistic and even shameful, Shukhov's Shabolov's creation was accepted almost immediately by everyone. Muscovites fell in love with her immediately and irrevocably, the newspapers scattered with laudatory articles, and only the architects were significantly silent. The tower towering above the city was immediately recorded as 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 the mail plane hit a thick cable, stretched at an angle from the top of the tower to the ground, and there it was fixed on a concrete base. As a result, the cable was pulled out of the base, the plane crashed in a neighboring yard, and the tower remained standing as if nothing had happened. The examination showed that she 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, the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant, and the Dynamo plant. In 1931, the engineer launched the Soviet Cracking oil refinery, the first in the USSR, in Baku. He restored destroyed bridges, oil pipelines, built hyperboloid high-rise power transmission towers 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, an honorary member.

The 80-year-old engineer categorically refused to run for full membership for reasons of principle. Despite a cool attitude towards Bolshevism, he transferred all his patents and royalties on them to the state. Meanwhile, the commission of Sinclair, Rockefeller's competitor in the oil business, estimated only one patent for the cracking process in the United States at several tens of thousands of dollars (at today's exchange rate - several million), which Shukhov categorically refused to accept, stating: "I work for state and do not need anything.

Hyperboloid nets 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, after a rather strong earthquake at the beginning of the 20th century, it began to gradually deviate from the 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. In order to avoid a possible fall, it was then secured with cables. In 1932, Shukhov undertook to remedy the situation. Under his leadership, a team of workers with the help of jacks, winches and cables returned the minaret to a strictly vertical state in three days. In which he continues to stay and now.

Shukhov's mother had a 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, however, it came true after almost 19 years. On January 29, 1939, Shukhov, as usual, shaved in the morning and sprinkled cologne liberally. Then he awkwardly turned around and knocked over a burning candle. The cologne-soaked shirt immediately caught fire. 85-year-old Vladimir Shukhov was taken to the hospital with extensive burns. Five days later, on February 2, 1939, he died. The engineer Shukhov was buried at the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent.

And Vladimir Grigoryevich Shukhov loved sports, owned a bicycle at the level of a professional athlete and participated in competitions. Passionately fond of photography and left behind a great many albums with photographs. He was an avid theater-goer and even built a unique multi-level revolving stage for the new building of the Moscow Art Theater in Kamergersky Lane.

Shukhov's 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, 610 meters high, was built in 2009 in Guangzhou (China). At the exhibition "Engineering Art" in the Pompidou Center in Paris, it was her image that was used as a logo.

Cover-shell of the courtyard of the British Museum (reconstruction), 2000 Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Andrew Dunn

At the exhibition "The Best Designs and Buildings in the Architecture of the 20th Century", held in 2003 in Munich, its gilded six-meter model was installed. And in 2006, 160 participants of the International Conference “Heritage at Risk. Preservation of 20th-Century Architecture and World Heritage” from 30 countries in their declaration called for this “masterpiece of the Russian avant-garde” to be included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

In 1999 the famous architect Norman Foster for the netting of the courtyard of the British Museum 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 fund for the restoration of the Shukhov Tower:

“Vladimir Grigoryevich Shukhov was one of the greatest civil engineers of the early twentieth century and undoubtedly the leading engineer of his era in Russia. He was the initiator of 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 construction is magnificent and has the greatest historical significance. At that time, the filigree mesh construction was the most expression of technological progress - a symbol of faith in the future.

... I really hope that Moscow realizes its ability to return this majestic masterpiece to its rightful status»

On February 2, 1939, Vladimir Grigoryevich Shukhov, the famous Russian inventor, died.andscientist.He is known as the creator of the famous Shukhov Tower. But Shukhovalso made outstanding contributions to the technology of the oil industry and pipeline transport. We will talk about five brilliant inventions of Vladimir Shukhov.

Nozzle

Nature generously endowed Vladimir Shukhov with talents. He was the largest specialist in the field of structural mechanics; petrochemistry, energy. While still a student of the first special class, Vladimir Grigorievich made his first valuable invention: he developed his own design of a steam nozzle for burning liquid fuel and made its experimental model in the workshops of his school.

This invention was highly appreciated by Dmitri Mendeleev himself, who even placed the image of Shukhov's nozzle on the cover of the book Fundamentals of the Factory Industry (1897). The principles of this constructive system are still used today. According to the Shukhov system, steam boilers, oil refineries and cracking plants, pipelines, oil tanks, oil and water pumps, nozzles, oil barges, air heaters, spatial rod systems and hanging metal ceilings were created.

Oil pumping method

Shukhov developed a new method of lifting oil using compressed air and invented an airlift (jet pump) for the oil industry. Vladimir Grigoryevich Shukhov is the author of the project and the chief engineer for the construction of the first Russian oil pipeline Balakhani - Black City, built for the oil company Br. Nobel".

The scientist designed and then supervised the construction of oil pipelines of the Br. Nobel", "Lianozov and K" and the world's first heating oil pipeline.

Tubular steam boilers

In 1896, Shukhov invented a new water-tube steam boiler in horizontal and vertical design. In 1900, his steam boilers were awarded a high award - at the World Exhibition in Paris, Shukhov received a gold medal. According to Shukhov's patents, thousands of steam boilers were produced before and after the revolution.

Shukhov and his assistant Gavrilov invented an industrial process for producing motor gasoline - a continuously operating tubular installation for thermal cracking of oil. The plant consisted of a furnace with tubular serpentine heaters, an evaporator, and distillation columns. The invention of original designs of gas holders and the development of standard designs for natural gas storage facilities with a capacity of up to 100 thousand cubic meters. meters.

Hyperboloid structures and mesh shells

Shukhov is the inventor of the world's first hyperboloid structures and metal mesh shells of building structures. For the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition in 1896 in Nizhny Novgorod, Shukhov built eight pavilions with the world's first ceilings in the form of mesh shells, the world's first ceiling in the form of a steel membrane (Shukhov's Rotunda) and the world's first hyperboloid tower. The shell of the hyperboloid of revolution was a completely new form, never before used in architecture.

Vladimir Shukhov developed designs for various mesh steel shells and used them in hundreds of structures: ceilings of public buildings and industrial facilities, water towers, sea lighthouses.

The construction in 1919-1922 of a tower for a radio station on Shabolovka in Moscow was Shukhov's most famous work. The tower is a telescopic structure 160 meters high, consisting of six meshed hyperboloid steel sections. On March 19, 1922, radio broadcasts began from the Shukhov tower.

Rotating artillery platform

Vladimir Shukhov made an invaluable contribution not only to construction and industry, but also to military affairs. In particular, the engineer invented several types of naval mines and platforms for heavy artillery systems. In addition, he designed the batoports of sea docks.

In particular, Shukhov created a movable rotating artillery platform, which was easily rotated by the efforts of one soldier. In twenty minutes, the platform turned from stationary to transport and vice versa.

Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov , photograph 1891, author photo unknown, is in public domain.

Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov(16 (28) August 1853 - February 2, 1939) - Russian and Soviet engineer, architect, inventor, scientist; corresponding member (1928) and honorary member (1929) of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Hero of Labor. He is the author of projects and technical manager of the construction of the first Russian oil pipelines (1878) and an oil refinery with the first Russian oil cracking units (1931). He made an outstanding contribution to the technology of the oil industry and pipeline transport.

V. G. Shukhov was the first in the world to use steel mesh shells for the construction of buildings and towers. Subsequently, high-tech architects, the famous Buckminster Fuller and Norman Foster, finally introduced mesh shells into modern construction practice, and in the 21st century, shells became one of the main means of shaping avant-garde buildings.

Shukhov introduced the form of a one-sheeted hyperboloid of revolution into architecture, creating the world's first hyperboloid structures.

In 1876 he graduated with honors from the Imperial Moscow Technical School (now the Moscow State Technical University) and completed a one-year internship in the United States.

The main areas of activity of V. G. Shukhov

Shukhov Tower on Shabolovka in Moscow, photo by the author Vaskin A.A.,Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 .

• Design and construction of the first oil pipelines in Russia, development of theoretical and practical foundations for the construction of trunk pipeline systems.
• Invention, creation and development of equipment and technologies for the oil industry, cylindrical oil storage tanks, river tankers; introduction of a new method of oil airlift.
• Theoretical and practical development of the foundations of oil hydraulics.
• Invention of the thermal cracking of oil. Design and construction of an oil refinery with the first Russian cracking units.
• The invention of original designs of gas holders and the development of standard designs for natural gas storage facilities with a capacity of up to 100 thousand cubic meters. m.
• Invention and creation of new building structures and architectural forms: the world's first steel mesh ceiling-shells and hyperboloid structures.
• Development of methods for designing steel structures and structural mechanics.
• Invention and creation of tubular steam boilers.
• Designing large urban water supply systems.
• Invention and creation of naval mines and platforms for heavy artillery systems, batoports.

Member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Lenin Prize (1929). Hero of Labor (1932).

Development of the oil industry and thermal engines

Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov is the author of the project and chief engineer for the construction of the first Russian oil pipeline Balakhani - Black City (Baku oil fields, 1878), built for the oil company "Br. Nobel". He designed and then supervised the construction of oil pipelines of the firms "Br. Nobel, Lianozov & Co., and the world's first heated fuel oil pipeline. While working in the oil fields in Baku, V. G. Shukhov developed the basics of lifting and pumping oil products, proposed a method for lifting oil using compressed air - an airlift, developed a calculation method and technology for the construction of cylindrical steel tanks for oil storage facilities, invented a nozzle for burning fuel oil.

In the article "Oil pipelines" (1884) and in the book "Pipelines and their application in the oil industry" (1894), V. G. Shukhov gave exact mathematical formulas for describing the processes of oil and fuel oil flowing through pipelines, creating the classical theory of oil pipelines. V. G. Shukhov was the author of the projects of the first Russian main pipelines: Baku - Batumi (883 km, 1907), Grozny - Tuapse (618 km, 1928).

In 1896, Shukhov invented a new horizontal and vertical water-tube steam boiler (Russian Empire patents No. 15,434 and No. 15,435 of June 27, 1896). In 1900, his steam boilers were awarded a high award - at the World Exhibition in Paris, Shukhov received a gold medal. According to Shukhov's patents, thousands of steam boilers were produced before and after the revolution.

Shukhov, around 1885, began building the first Russian river barge tankers on the Volga. Installation was carried out in precisely planned stages using standardized sections at the shipyards in Tsaritsyn (Volgograd) and Saratov.

V. G. Shukhov and his assistant S. P. Gavrilov invented an industrial process for obtaining motor gasoline - a continuously operating tubular installation for thermal cracking of oil (patent of the Russian Empire No. 12926 dated November 27, 1891). The plant consisted of a furnace with tubular serpentine heaters, an evaporator, and distillation columns.

Thirty years later, in 1923, a delegation from the Sinclair Oil company arrived in Moscow to get information about oil cracking invented by Shukhov. The scientist, comparing his 1891 patent with the American patents of 1912-1916, proved that the American cracking units repeat his patent and are not original. In 1931, according to the project and under the technical guidance of V. G. Shukhov, the Soviet Cracking oil refinery was built in Baku, where for the first time in Russia Shukhov's patent for the cracking process was used to create installations for producing gasoline.

Creation of building and engineering structures

V. G. Shukhov is the inventor of the world's first hyperboloid structures and metal mesh shells of building structures (patents of the Russian Empire No. 1894, No. 1895, No. 1896; dated March 12, 1899, declared by V. G. Shukhov 03/27/1895 - 01/11/1896 ). For the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition of 1896 in Nizhny Novgorod, V. G. Shukhov built eight pavilions with the world's first ceilings in the form of mesh shells, the world's first ceiling in the form of a steel membrane (Shukhov's Rotunda) and the world's first hyperboloid tower of amazing beauty ( was bought after the exhibition by the philanthropist Yu. S. Nechaev-Maltsov and transferred to his estate Polibino (Lipetsk region), has survived to this day). The shell of the hyperboloid of revolution was a completely new form, never before used in architecture. After the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition in 1896, V. G. Shukhov developed numerous designs of various mesh steel shells and used them in hundreds of structures: ceilings of public buildings and industrial facilities, water towers, sea lighthouses, masts of warships and power transmission towers. The 70-meter mesh steel Adzhigol lighthouse near Kherson is the highest single-section hyperboloid structure of V. G. Shukhov. The radio tower on Shabolovka in Moscow has become the tallest of the multi-section Shukhov towers (160 meters).

“Shukhov's designs complete the efforts of 19th century engineers in creating an original metal structure and at the same time point the way far into the 20th century. They mark a significant progress: the bar lattice of the spatial trusses traditional for that time, based on the main and auxiliary elements, was replaced by a network of equivalent structural elements ”(Schädlich Ch., Das Eisen in der Architektur des 19.Jhdt., Habilitationsschrift, Weimar, 1967, S .104).

Shukhov also invented arched constructions of roofs with cable puffs. The arched ones have survived to this day: the glass vaults of V. G. Shukhov’s coverings over the largest Moscow stores: the Upper Trading Rows (GUM) and the Firsanovsky (Petrovsky) passage. At the end of the 19th century, Shukhov, together with his employees, drafted a new water supply system for Moscow.

In 1897, Shukhov built a workshop for a metallurgical plant in Vyksa with spatially curved mesh sail-like steel shells of double-curved ceilings. This workshop has been preserved at the Vyksa Metallurgical Plant to this day. This is the world's first vaulted convex overlap-shell of double curvature.

Translucent three-tiered metal-glass roof of Academician V.G. Shukhov over the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, photo by Arssenev,

From 1896 to 1930, according to the designs of V. G. Shukhov, over 200 steel mesh hyperboloid towers were built. No more than 20 have survived to this day. The water tower in Nikolaev (built in 1907, its height with a tank is 32 meters) and the Adzhigol lighthouse in the Dnieper estuary (built in 1910, height - 70 meters) are well preserved.

V. G. Shukhov invented new designs of spatial flat trusses and used them in the design of coatings for the Museum of Fine Arts (the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts), the Moscow Main Post Office, the Bakhmetevsky Garage and numerous other buildings. In 1912-1917. V. G. Shukhov designed the floors of the halls and the landing stage of the Kievsky railway station (former Bryansk) in Moscow and supervised its construction (span width - 48 m, height - 30 m, length - 230 m).

Working on the creation of load-bearing structures, Shukhov made a significant contribution to the final design of buildings and unwittingly acted as an architect. In the architectural appearance of the pavilions of the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition of 1896, GUM and the Kyiv railway station, Shukhov's authorship determined the most impressive features of the buildings.

During the First World War, V. G. Shukhov invented several designs of naval mines and platforms for heavy artillery systems, and designed the batoports of sea docks.

Construction in 1919-1922 the tower for the radio station on Shabolovka in Moscow was the most famous work of V. G. Shukhov. The tower is a telescopic structure 160 meters high, consisting of six meshed hyperboloid steel sections. After an accident at the construction of a radio tower, V. G. Shukhov was sentenced to death with a reprieve until the construction was completed. On March 19, 1922, radio broadcasts began and V. G. Shukhov was pardoned.

Regular broadcasts of Soviet television through the transmitters of the Shukhov Tower began on March 10, 1939. For many years, the image of the Shukhov Tower was the emblem of Soviet television and the screensaver of many television programs, including the famous Blue Light.

Now the Shukhov Tower is recognized by international experts as one of the highest achievements of engineering art. International scientific conference “Heritage at Risk. Preservation of 20th-Century Architecture and World Heritage”, which was held in April 2006 in Moscow with the participation of more than 160 specialists from 30 countries, in its declaration named the Shukhov Tower among the seven architectural masterpieces of the Russian avant-garde recommended for inclusion in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

In 1927-1929. V. G. Shukhov, taking part in the implementation of the GOELRO plan, surpassed this tower structure by building three pairs of mesh multi-tiered hyperboloid supports for the crossing of the Oka River by the power transmission line of the NiGRES near the city of Dzerzhinsk near Nizhny Novgorod.

The Shukhov Towers in Moscow and on the Oka are unique architectural monuments of the Russian avant-garde.

The last major achievement of V. G. Shukhov in the field of construction equipment was the straightening of the minaret of the ancient Ulugbek madrasah in Samarkand, which tilted during the earthquake.

last years of life

The last years of Vladimir Grigorievich's life were overshadowed by the repressions of the 1930s, constant fear for children, unjustified accusations, the death of his wife, and leaving the service under pressure from the bureaucratic regime. These events undermined his health, led to disappointment and depression. His last years are spent in seclusion. He received at home only close friends and old colleagues, read, thought.

Photo gallery of designs

Shukhov's metal-glass landing stage at the Kievsky railway station in Moscow, photo by Kucharek , 19 August 2006 (UTC),is in public domain.

GUM metal-glass ceilings designed by Shukhov, Moscow, 2007, photo by Donskoy, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0.

Named after Shukhov and bear his name

• Hyperboloid mesh towers, corresponding to the patent of V. G. Shukhov, built in Russia and abroad.
• Belgorod State Technological University named after V. G. Shukhov
• Shukhov Street in Moscow (former Sirotsky Lane). Renamed in 1963. On it (street) is the famous Shukhov radio tower.
• Street in Tula
• Park in Grayvoron city
• School in Grayvoron
• V. G. Shukhov Gold Medal, awarded for the highest engineering achievements
• Shukhov Tower in Bukhara, Uzbekistan
• Shukhov Auditorium at the Moscow Architectural Institute

Memory

• On December 2, 2008, a monument to Vladimir Shukhov was unveiled on Turgenevskaya Square in Moscow. The team of authors working on the monument was headed by Salavat Shcherbakov. Shukhov is immortalized in bronze, in full growth with a roll of blueprints and a cloak thrown over his shoulders. There are bronze benches around the monument. Two of them are in the form of a split log with a vice, hammers and other carpentry tools lying on them; another is a structure of wheels and gears.
• On the territory of TsNIIPSK them. N. P. Melnikov erected a bust of Shukhov.
• In 1963, a USSR postage stamp dedicated to Shukhov was issued.

Publications

• Shukhov V. G., Mechanical structures of the oil industry, "Engineer", volume 3, book. 13, No. 1, pp. 500-507, book. 14, No. 1, pp. 525-533, Moscow, 1883.
• Shukhov V. G., Oil pipelines, "Bulletin of Industry", No. 7, pp. 69 - 86, Moscow, 1884.
• Shukhov V. G., Direct acting pumps and their compensation, 32 pages, “Bul. Polytechnic Society, No. 8, Appendix, Moscow, 1893-1894.
• Shukhov VG, Pipelines and their application to the oil industry, 37 pages, Ed. Polytechnic Society, Moscow, 1895.
• Shukhov VG, Pumps of direct action. Theoretical and practical data for their calculation. 2nd ed. with additions, 51 pages, ed. Polytechnic Society, Moscow, 1897.
• Shukhov V. G., Rafters. The search for rational types of rectilinear roof trusses and the theory of arch trusses, 120 pages, ed. Polytechnic Society, Moscow, 1897.
• Shukhov V. G., The combat power of the Russian and Japanese fleets during the war of 1904-1905, in the book: Khudyakov P. K. "The Way to Tsushima", pp. 30 - 39, Moscow, 1907.
• Shukhov V. G., Note on patents on the distillation and decomposition of oil at elevated pressure, "Oil and shale industry", No. 10, pp. 481-482, Moscow, 1923.
• Shukhov V. G., Note on oil pipelines, "Oil and shale economy", volume 6, no. 2, pp. 308-313, Moscow, 1924.
• Shukhov V. G., Selected Works, volume 1, “Construction Mechanics”, 192 pages, ed. A. Yu. Ishlinsky, USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1977.
• Shukhov V. G., Selected works, volume 2, "Hydrotechnics", 222 pages, ed. A. E. Sheindlin, USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1981.
• Shukhov V. G., Selected works, volume 3, “Oil refining. Heat engineering”, 102 pages, ed. A. E. Sheindlin, USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1982.

Inventions of V. G. Shukhov

• 1. A number of early inventions and technologies of the oil industry, in particular, the technology of building oil pipelines and reservoirs, are not issued with privileges and are described by V. G. Shukhov in the work “Mechanical structures of the oil industry” (Engineer magazine, volume 3, book 13, No. 1, pp. 500-507, book 14, No. 1, pp. 525-533, Moscow, 1883) and subsequent works on the facilities and equipment of the oil industry.
• 2. Apparatus for continuous fractional distillation of oil. Privilege of the Russian Empire No. 13200 dated 12/31/1888 (co-author F. A. Inchik).
• 3. Airlift pump. Privilege of the Russian Empire No. 11531 for 1889.
• 4. Hydraulic dephlegmator for distillation of oil and other liquids. Privilege of the Russian Empire No. 9783 dated September 25, 1890 (co-author F. A. Inchik).
• 5. Cracking process (installation for the distillation of oil with decomposition). Privilege of the Russian Empire No. 12926 dated 11/27/1891 (co-author S.P. Gavrilov).
• 6. Tubular steam boiler. Privilege of the Russian Empire No. 15434 dated 06/27/1896.
• 7. Vertical tubular boiler. Privilege of the Russian Empire No. 15435 of 06/27/1896.
• 8. Mesh coverings for buildings. Privilege of the Russian Empire No. 1894 of 03/12/1899. Cl. 37a, 7/14.
• 9. Mesh vaulted coverings. Privilege of the Russian Empire No. 1895 dated 03/12/1899. Cl. 37a, 7/08.
• 10. Hyperboloid constructions (openwork tower). Privilege of the Russian Empire No. 1896 of 03/12/1899. Cl. 37f,15/28.
• 11. Water tube boiler. Privilege of the Russian Empire No. 23839 for 1913. Class. 13a, 13.
• 12. Water tube boiler. USSR patent No. 1097 for 1926. Class. 13a, 13.
• 13. Water tube boiler. USSR patent No. 1596 for 1926. Class. 13a, 7/10.
• 14. Air economizer. USSR patent No. 2520 for 1927. Class. 24k,4.
• 15. A device for discharging liquid from vessels with lower pressure into a medium with higher pressure. USSR patent No. 4902 for 1927. Class. 12g,2/02.
• 16. Cushion for sealing devices for pistons of dry gas tanks. USSR patent No. 37656 for 1934. Class. 4 s, 35.
• 17. Device for pressing O-rings for pistons of dry gas tanks to the tank wall. USSR patent No. 39038 for 1938. Class. 4 s,35

Literature

The Shukhov Tower in Moscow is currently not accessible to tourists, photo by Maxim Fedorov, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0.

• Arnautov L. I., Karpov Ya. K. Tale of a great engineer. - M.: Moskovsky worker, 1978. - 240 p.
• Shammazov A. M. and others. History of oil and gas business in Russia. - M.: Chemistry, 2001. - 316 p. - ISBN 5-7245-1176-2
• Khan-Magomedov S. O. One hundred masterpieces of the Soviet architectural avant-garde. - M.: URSS, 2004. - ISBN 5-354-00892-1
• V. G. Shukhov (1853-1939). The art of construction. / Rainer Grefe, Ottmar Perchi, F. V. Shukhov, M. M. Gappoev and others. - M .: Mir, 1994. - 192 p. - ISBN 5-03-002917-6.
• Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov. The first engineer of Russia. / E. M. Shukhova. - M.: Ed. MSTU, 2003. - 368 p. - ISBN 5-7038-2295-5.
• V. G. Shukhov - an outstanding engineer and scientist: Proceedings of the Joint Scientific Session of the USSR Academy of Sciences, dedicated to the scientific and engineering work of the honorary academician V. G. Shukhov. - M.: Nauka, 1984. - 96 p.
• Documentary heritage of the outstanding Russian engineer V. G. Shukhov in the archives (inter-archival directory) / Ed. Shaposhnikov A. S., Medvedeva G. A.; Russian State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation (RGANTD). - M.: Ed. RGANTD, 2008. - 182 p.

• Peter Gössel, Gabriele Leuthäuser, Eva Schickler: "Architecture in the 20th century", Taschen Verlag; 1990, ISBN 3-8228-1162-9 and ISBN 3-8228-0550-5
• "The Nijni-Novgorod exhibition: Water tower, room under construction, springing of 91 feet span", "The Engineer", No. 19.3.1897, P.292-294, London, 1897.
• Elizabeth C. English, "Invention of Hyperboloid Structures", Metropolis & Beyond, 2005.
• William Craft Brumfield, "The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture", University of California Press, 1991, ISBN 0-520-06929-3.
• "Arkhitektura i mnimosti": The origins of Soviet avant-garde rationalist architecture in the Russian mystical-philosophical and mathematical intellectual tradition", Elizabeth Cooper English, Ph. D., a dissertation in architecture, 264 p., University of Pennsylvania, 2000 .
• Karl-Eugen Kurrer, "The History of the Theory of Structures: From Arch Analysis to Computational Mechanics", 2008, ISBN 978-3-433-01838-5

• "Vladimir G. Suchov 1853-1939. Die Kunst der sparsamen Konstruktion.", Rainer Graefe, Ph. D., und andere, 192 S., Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1990, ISBN 3-421-02984-9.
• Jesberg, Paulgerd Die Geschichte der Bauingenieurkunst, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart (Germany), ISBN 3-421-03078-2, 1996; pp. 198-9.
• Ricken, Herbert Der Bauingenieur, Verlag für Bauwesen, Berlin (Germany), ISBN 3-345-00266-3, 1994; pp. 230.

• "Vladimir G. Shukhov e la leggerezza dell "acciaio", Fausto Giovannardi, Borgo San Lorenzo, 2007.

• Picon, Antoine (dir.), "L" art de l "ingenieur: constructeur, entrepreneur, inventeur", Éditions du Center Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1997, ISBN 2-85850-911-5.

Notes

• Retina
• First Russian oil pipeline
• Oil pipeline Grozny - Tuapse
• Oil pipeline Baku - Batumi
• Cracking
• Refinery
• Airlift
• Shukhov oil storage tanks
• Shukhov steam boilers
• Rotunda Shukhov
• Shukhov tower
• First hyperboloid tower
• Shukhov Tower on the Oka River
• Adzhigol lighthouse
• Hyperboloid constructions
• Hyperboloid masts of ships
• The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts
• Kyiv railway station
• Petrovsky passage
• Garage on Novoryazanskaya street
• Bakhmetevsky garage
• Moscow gas plant
• Miussky tram park
• Zamoskvoretsky tram depot
• All-Russian Exhibition 1896
• Shell Slabs
• TsNIIPSK them. N. P. Melnikova
• The building of the Moscow International Bank
• Vyksa

source: article in the Russian-language Wikipedia on the date of publication en.wikipedia.org

Vladimir Shukhov was the first in the world to create hyperboloid structures - mesh metal structures based on an open surface formed by the rotation of a hyperbola around its axis. Other merits of the engineer include the project of the first Russian oil pipelines and an oil refinery, an apparatus for continuous fractional distillation of oil, a tubular steam boiler and many other inventions. 1. The world's first hyperboloid construction in Polibino. For the first time the world got 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 was held in Nizhny Novgorod. For this event, the architect built as many as eight pavilions with mesh ceilings and a hyperboloid tower, which became his hallmark. An 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 - an 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 bought it after the exhibition and took it to his estate in Polibino, in the Lipetsk region. The 25-meter structure still stands there to this day. 2. GUM. At the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition, Vladimir Shukhov presented an innovative approach to using mesh structures for floors and roofs of buildings. It was used in the Main Department Store (former Upper Trading Rows), built opposite the Kremlin. The glass roof of GUM is the work of the great master. It is based on a steel frame made of metal rods. It took more than 800,000 kg of metal to build it. But, despite such impressive numbers, the semicircular openwork roof seems light and sophisticated. 3. The Pushkin Museum named after A.S. Pushkin. This is perhaps the most famous building, in the construction of which Vladimir Shukhov took part. Before him was a responsible task - to create a solid roofing, through which sunlight can enter. A hundred years ago, when the museum opened its doors, its project did not provide for electric lighting of the exposition, so the halls had to be lit naturally. For Shukhov's luck, one of the sponsors of the construction was Yuri Nechaev-Maltsev, who had previously acquired the first work of the architect. So Shukhov had excellent recommendations "in his pocket." The three-tier metal-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 railway station was carried out for several years, from 1914 to 1918, in the face of a shortage of metal and labor. When the work was completed, the 230-meter-long glazed space above the platforms became the largest in Europe. The spectacular canopy of the Kievsky railway station was a metal-glass ceiling, which was supported by steel arches. Being on the platform, it is hard to believe that a structure that weighs about 1300 tons rises above you! 5. Tower on Shabolovka. The universally recognized masterpiece of Shukhov was erected in 1919-1922. The original project assumed that the tower would rise to 350 meters and become a "competitor" of the Eiffel Tower (324 m). Despite the fact that the implementation of the plan required three times less metal than the French rival, it had to be reduced to 160 m (including traverses and the flagpole). The reason for this was the civil war and, as a result, the lack of the required amount of steel. When the ambitious project was completed, the tower began to work as intended - in 1922, radio broadcasts began, and in 1938, the first television broadcast took place. The airy weightless structure inspired the writer Alexei Tolstoy to write the science fiction novel The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin, which became a bestseller of that time. 6. Shukhov Tower on the Oka. 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 project, the world's only multi-section hyperboloid towers-supports of power transmission lines 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 life of the engineer, but even today his ideas are actively borrowed by famous architects. Samples of hyperboloid towers are found in Japan, Italy, Brazil, Great Britain. His work is used by Ken Shuttleworth (Aspire Tower) and Norman Foster (covering the courtyard of the British Museum, St. Mary Ax 30 skyscraper). But the most famous example of the use of Shukhov's patent is the 610-meter TV 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.