Among the talented people of the past, one can single out the Russian mechanic-inventor Ivan Kulibin, born 282 years ago on April 21.
It is interesting that his name has become a household name, but the majority use it in an ironic context: "I am Kulibin too!" - when someone comes up with something amusing, but useless. Kulibin had to put up with this attitude during his lifetime. At the Academy of Sciences, his inventions were laughed at, although they were no less revolutionary than those of Leonardo da Vinci. But the eccentric self-taught woman was loved by women, and the empress herself was supportive of him.
Kulibin's spotlight.
Kulibin was born in 1735 in the family of an Old Believer merchant and all his life he adhered to the Old Believer traditions: he did not play cards, did not smoke tobacco, did not drink alcohol, wore a beard. Even when Catherine II offered him to shave off his beard in exchange for receiving the nobility, he chose to remain in the merchant class. However, the empress condescended to the oddities of Kulibin - he was the author of so many revolutionary inventions for that time that he had the right to his eccentricities.
The watch created by Kulibin for the Empress.
The great inventor was self-taught: he never went to school and mastered mechanics on his own. In his room, all the devices available at that time for turning, locksmith and other works were collected. An acquaintance of his father, the merchant Kostromin, drew attention to his talent and invited him to make unusual watches to present to the empress.
Kulibin coped with the task: despite the fact that the work stopped for a while - he was carried away by the creation of a microscope - the watch turned out to be really unusual. They were made in the shape of a duck egg, in which small doors were opened every hour, and behind them was the Holy Sepulcher and the guards guarding it. The watch also had a jukebox with several melodies. Catherine appreciated the gift and talent of the inventor and soon appointed Kulibin the head of the mechanical workshop of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
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One-arch bridge project across the Neva.
Kulibin directed the workshops of the Academy of Sciences for 30 years, proposing a considerable number of inventions: a 300-meter single-arch bridge across the Neva, a screw lift, a searchlight, a mechanical prosthetic leg, a self-propelled river vessel with a water-powered engine that could sail against the current, an optical telegraph, a mechanical crew with pedal drive, etc.
Kulibin's navigable ship.
Unfortunately, most of his inventions remained projects. None of the Kulibin bridges were built, despite the successful tests of a reduced model of a single-arch bridge. The elevator built for the empress - a "lifting chair" that moves in a special shaft with the help of a screw mechanism - was not used after Catherine's death, and the shaft was bricked up.
Model * self-run stroller * Kulibin.
Kulibin's inventions were in no hurry to implement, since pundits treated them with great doubt and even irony. None of them took a self-taught person without an engineering education seriously, they considered him an eccentric and an inventor. The project of the bridge was laughed at: they say, an ignoramus does not know elementary things and offers a structure that will immediately collapse. For some reason, the director of the Academy of Sciences Ekaterina Dashkova disliked the inventor. Kulibin wrote to his student Ivan Pyaterikov: "I work a lot and hard, but my position among proud academicians is far from pleasant, and only with hard work I drown out the grief that they inflict on me incessantly with their ridicule and contemptuous treatment of me, poor self-taught."
Model * self-run stroller * Kulibin.
They say that the great inventor was very loving and enjoyed great success with women. Neither Kulibin's eccentricity, nor his conservatism in everyday life and habits scared the ladies away. He was distinguished by a cheerful disposition, he loved to attend parties, where he willingly joked around, wittily answered any ridicule, knew how to win over. In addition, Kulibin wrote poetry and looked very unusual: always in a long caftan, high boots, with a thick beard, he seemed extravagant and mysterious to the fair sex, which attracted them even more.
Kulibin's spotlight.
Kulibin was married three times, and the third time he married at 70 years old. He had 12 children, and three of them appeared in a third marriage, when the inventor was over 70. He gave all the boys a good education, and they became mining engineers.
Monument to Ivan Kulibin in Nizhny Novgorod.