Remember, in Gogol's "Dead Souls", talking about Captain Kopeikin, the postmaster mentions amazing mechanical prostheses made in England? So, the inventor of such prostheses was, in fact, our Kulibin at the end of the 18th century.
A watch as a gift to the empress is the key to a career
Ivan Petrovich Kulibin was the son of a wealthy Nizhny Novgorod flour merchant. But from childhood he showed great interest in various technical tricks. Once, in the garden of his house, he built a device so that the water in the dam was always flowing, and there was no fish killing. The father, seeing this, agreed that his son would never be a merchant.
Kulibin became a capable apprentice of a watchmaker, and soon he himself began to make watches, which were famous throughout Nizhny Novgorod. Already a mature man, he conceived to make such an amazing watch, which could please the empress herself. His idea was sponsored by the merchant Mikhail Kostromin. In 1767, during the trip of Catherine II along the Volga, Kostromin introduced Kulibin to Count Grigory Orlov, and through that - to the Empress. The Empress took the floor from Kulibin that the watch would be made and presented to her.
This happened in 1769. A small pocket watch of the size and shape of a goose egg contained, however, a clockwork musical mechanism, which every hour showed a model of the temple, and at noon they performed a cantata in honor of the empress to the words of Kulibin himself. The delighted Catherine II awarded Kulibin a thousand rubles and appointed him to the post of head of the mechanical workshop of the Academy of Sciences with a decent salary. In this position, Kulibin enjoyed the honor and respect of the three monarchs and retired due to old age under Alexander I with the preservation of a generous pension.
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Valuable and funny inventions of Kulibin
The most practical invention of Kulibin turned out to be a mechanism for the safe opening of window vents. Once Kulibin noticed that in the Tsarskoye Selo Palace the vents in the windows are high and inconvenient. The servants who opened and closed them had to climb the cornices, risking falling off. Kulibin proposed a simple mechanism for opening them using laces that could be pulled while standing below. Everyone who remembers the heavy transoms on the windows of Soviet schools is now familiar with this mechanism.
We have already mentioned prostheses for arms and legs. Kulibin first made them in 1791, during the war with Turkey. In Europe, they were invented after the end of the Napoleonic wars, and obviously not without stealing Kulibin's ideas.
Another useful invention of Kulibin was a mirror lantern - a searchlight. In it, the light of even a weak oil lamp was amplified by the surrounding mirrors. During the tests of 1779, the fire of the Kulibinsk searchlight from St. Petersburg was seen 24 miles away from it, in Krasnoe Selo. This lantern was used to fire lighthouses. But only in 1794, under the influence of French works, Kulibin proposed to use his invention to build the first optical telegraph line in Russia. This idea was implemented after the death of Kulibin.
Other inventions of Kulibin had the character of funny toys and did not find practical application. Kulibin himself believed in the possibility of creating a perpetual motion machine. The "waterway" built by him, moving upstream, supposedly by the force of the water falling on it, turned out, as one would expect, useless. An arched bridge across the Neva would have been too expensive. The elevator in the Tsarskoye Selo Palace, which he built in 1785 for the sick and elderly empress, was set in motion by several serfs who rotated a lifting screw. "Self-running stroller" only in the 20th century served as the basis for pedal children's cars. By the way, Kulibin was not the first to invent it - in the first half of the 18th century it was invented by the peasant Leonty Shamshurenkov. The prototype of the wheelchair was neither the one nor the other, as it was driven by pedals for both legs.
What was he like in life
Kulibin gave the impression of a curiosity at court, which he himself skillfully maintained. He received from the Empress a special privilege not to shave his beard and appear at court in a common bourgeois dress. His caustic lackey jokes delighted the nobles. Kulibin deftly used dividends from this.
He was on his own mind and in his heart, of course, despised these meager, white-handed bar, who in life were not able to invent anything useful. Agreeing to play an almost buffoonish role in the depraved Catherine's court, in his personal life Kulibin adhered to the rules of old Russian piety, did not drink alcohol and did not smoke.
Kulibin was married three times. The last time he married at the age of 68 was a 20-year-old girl who gave birth to three children from him. In total, Ivan Petrovich raised twelve children and he gave all of them a good education.