petroleum engineer
Vladimir Shukhov was born in 1853 in the city of Graivoron in the Kursk province (now Belgorod region) in a poor noble family. He was educated at the Imperial Moscow Technical School, later transformed into the Bauman Moscow State Technical University. At first, the young Shukhov was not interested in architecture – in his last years he designed a nozzle for steam boilers, which was actively used at the end of the 19th century. After graduation, the engineer went to the United States to get acquainted with the American oil industry.
Shortly after returning to Russia, he was invited to work in Baku, where they began producing Russian oil. “Br. Nobel”, the company’s chief engineer, built Russia’s first 10 km long oil pipeline in 1878. Shukhov’s early patents also concerned the extraction, processing and transportation of oil – in a word, it was hard to imagine that he would name one of the Moscow towers at that time.
Shukhov’s designs were distinguished by rational design. They had minimal weights and always took into account price considerations, but it was especially important to “intelligently” handle the durability properties of the material. For example, it is known that steel holds a load well in pulling and worse in bending. Ideally, therefore, the steel parts of the product only need to be stretched. In the future, this principle is firmly entrenched in engineering practice: for example, the Ostankino TV tower is designed according to this principle, which is prevented from falling due to cables stretched inside.
openwork water tower
The prototype of the mesh structures of the Shabolovskaya Tower first appeared in 1896, during the design of the pavilions of the Nizhny Novgorod All-Russian Exhibition. In a world where almost everything was made of stone or wood, perforated steel structures were eye-catching and impressive.
“Their appearance, unlike anything else, is organically due to the properties of the material and completely exhausts the possibilities of forming a form, and this idea of u200bu200b”pure” engineering is in no way masked or embellished with “extra” elements,” the designs of his great-grandson, engineer Elena Shukhova. He tells in the article “The work and days of the engineer VG Shukhov” (Our Heritage magazine, No. 70, 2004).
At the same exhibition, Shukhov exhibited his first hyperboloid tower. The word “hyperboloid” is borrowed from mathematics. It is the name of two funnel-shaped surfaces connected by narrow parts (like an hourglass). This tower was small, only 25 m high, but impressing with its transparency, simplicity and lightness. At the same time, the building had a completely unromantic purpose and was simply a water tower.
Shukhov, looking at peasant baskets, found an openwork form.
“One day I come to my office earlier than usual and see this: my willow wastebasket is upside down and I have a pretty heavy ficus pot on it. And the future construction of the tower was very clearly in front of me. The formation of a curved surface from straight rods is very eloquently illustrated in this basket.– quoting the words of his grandson Shukhov.
This paradox continues in the other Shukhov towers: If you look closely, you can see that they are made of flat steel pieces, despite the curved shape of the surface. At the 1896 exhibition the design made a splash, and soon all of Russia, from Moscow to Sakhalin, was built with similar water towers.
Radio tower in Shabolovka
Construction of the famous Moscow Shukhov radio tower began in 1919 under Soviet rule. The construction order was signed personally by Vladimir Lenin and stated that it was necessary to build a radio station as soon as possible, since it was important for the Bolsheviks to maintain long-distance communication during the Civil War.
The study was carried out in conditions where resources were extremely scarce. “There is no press to bend the rings. There are no wires or blocks. No firewood for the workers. It is cold in the office, it is very difficult to write. There are no drawing accessories,” the engineer wrote in his diary. Therefore, it turned out to be particularly advantageous not to need scaffolding in the construction of such structures.
The Shukhov Radio Tower consists of six sections, each of which is a separate hyperboloid. Since the diameter of the upper parts is smaller than the lower parts, they are mounted inside the lower parts. After the assembly was completed, the section was fixed by lifting it up with the help of cranes. The fasteners were loosened and stretched so that the part to be lifted passes through the upper neck of the lower part.
All went well until June 29, 1921, when the fourth section was taking off, it fell and damaged those below. There was no loss of life, but Shukhov was still on the verge of death. At that time paranoia reigned in the country, spies and saboteurs were seen everywhere by the Soviet authorities. The engineer was called in for questioning at the GPU and would probably not have left under other circumstances. But the Bolsheviks needed a tower, and there was no second specialist at the Shukhov level in the country. So he was released and told to continue construction.
“Shukhov’s sentence is parole,” he wrote in his diary.
In fact, construction had to start from the very beginning. The radio station named after the Comintern became operational only on March 19, 1922.
communist symbol
The tower astonished his contemporaries and even before it was completed it became a symbol of young Soviet power. Pictures were painted on propaganda posters, poems were written about him, proletarian newspapers wrote enthusiastically.
Our proud work
Above the gloomy clouds
Sign – Freedom, Unity, –
The Tower of Joyful Ages…
– In 1919, he wrote the Petrograd magazine “Flame”.
He was under the influence of the Shukhov Tower, for which Alexei Tolstoy wrote the science fiction novel The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin in 1926. The fate of the title character is not at all similar to the life of engineer Shukhov. Its hyperboloid is a powerful source of radiation, which in modern science fiction would be called a laser. According to the story, Garin first becomes rich by mining gold with his invention, and then seizes power in the United States and establishes a dictatorship. And eventually, with the help of Soviet intelligence, he is overthrown and killed by rebel workers.
After the completion of construction, Shukhov continued to work as an engineer and in 1929 became an honorary member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He also took part in the GOELRO project for the electrification of the country. Under his leadership, hyperboloid power transmission towers, very similar to the Moscow tower, were built on the Oka River. Two power transmission towers existed as architectural monuments until the 21st century, until one of them was illegally dismantled for metal in 2005.
The Shukhov radio tower, built in Moscow in 1939, began to be used for broadcasting television programs and for many years became a symbol of Soviet television. Until now, its schematic representation could be seen in the screensaver of the New Year’s program “Blue Light”.