The discovery of the "Kirlian Effect" was patented by the Krasnodar inventor Semyon Davidovich Kirlian together with his wife Valentina Khrisanfovna in 1949 and made a lot of noise among domestic and foreign scientists. However, for a very long time in the USSR, "Kirlianography" was almost completely classified and at the same time was not studied, unlike foreign scientists. All experiments were carried out only due to the enthusiasm of this amazing married couple.
Semyon Davidovich Kirlian was born in 1898. in Yekaterinodar. He had only 4 classes of education at the School of Salesmen, but from childhood he was fond of music, photography and electromechanics. The difficult financial situation allowed him to master many professions. He was a salesman, plumber, piano tuner, electrician, decorator. In 1923, he married Valentina Khrisanfovna Lototskaya, who became his support and assistant throughout his long and difficult life.
Working in his workshop, Semyon was constantly inventing and inventing something. The wife fully shared her husband's hobbies and for almost half a century was a real co-author of all his inventions. The master's fantasy was unstoppable. Once he decided to get from ordinary sugar … a diamond. Indeed, the strong pressure from the explosion of a sealed container with sugar turned it into crystals that cut glass perfectly. By 1937, he independently developed a technology for producing artificial diamonds and wrote a letter to Stalin about this. After a while, NKVD officers came to him, took the finished crystals, equipment and all the documentation. More about this invention no one remembered.
The Kirlian couple in the home laboratory.
The city printing house used an electric furnace made by him for casting fonts, flour grinders - magnetic devices for cleaning grain. Ideas for creating equipment for thermal processing of products in the canning industry also proved to be very promising. Already before the war, Kirlian invented a system of electrical shielding for showers to treat people who could be affected by poisonous gases. For many developments, the couple received copyright certificates, but all ideas were evaluated at the level of private invention.
The Kirlian couple and their first device.
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However, the discovery of the Kirlians that made the world famous, as often happens, happened by accident. In 1939, Semyon Davidovich was admitted to the city hospital as a repairman for electrical equipment. While repairing a physiotherapy apparatus that used high-frequency current, he drew attention to the glow between the electrodes. Being an inquisitive and inventive person, he decided to photograph this glow around an object. The first shot was a coin. In the picture of the coin, there was a sliding discharge along its edges. This was followed by photographs of a wide variety of objects from tree leaves to their own hands.
Kirlian's photograph was black and white. The photo shows a modern version.
This is not to say that the glow of objects in electromagnetic fields was previously unknown. Back in 1777, the German physicist G. Lichtenberg observed fan-shaped glow on insulators and recorded them on a photographic plate, later called "Lichtenberg figures". Nikola Tesla carried out experiments in photographing luminescence on living organisms, and at the end of the 19th century, a scientist from Russia Ya. O. Nardkevich-Iodko discovered luminescence on the surface of hands in the field of a high-voltage generator and learned how to fix them on a photographic plate. This method was named "Electrography". There were also foreign studies in this area, but all of them did not become widespread due to the complexity and danger of use and were forgotten for a long time.
For 10 long years, Kirlian and his wife conducted experiments in their home laboratory and, as a result, received a full-fledged device for filming. In 1949, the author's certificate No. 106401 was issued for "a method of photographing objects in high-frequency currents" and … it was immediately classified. Only 25 years later it was possible for the first time to publish the results of their research, which caused a lot of noise all over the world, but did not bring fame to the USSR.
All these years the Kirlians lived very poorly, but continued to work on their invention. Here, for example, is an entry in V. Kirlian's diary dated March 19, 1966: "… For 17 years (17!) Official correspondence has been conducted between ministries, committees, research institutes about the opening of a special laboratory for the development of our research methodology for obtaining images by means of high-frequency currents. To this day, since 1949, the question of this laboratory is in the air, no one undertakes to head it, while in France (what we accidentally learned) a method has already been developed and is practically used in biology … I wonder if there will be any sense from this scribble, it is already sitting in our livers … "Only in 1974 (after the death of his wife in 1971) Kirlian received the title of Honored Inventor of the RSFSR, and in 1976 he received the title of Honored Inventor of the RSFSR.becomes the head of a special laboratory at the Krasnodar NPK Saturn, where he could work for only 2 years. Semyon Davidovich passed away on August 1, 1978.
If in the USSR they hardly remembered Kirlian, then abroad he was very popular. He was constantly invited to various scientific congresses and rallies, but he was not allowed to travel abroad and could only carry on business correspondence. The archives of letters from 130 countries have been preserved. Since the Kirlians did not have the means to patent the discovery abroad, they began to freely use it in many countries, but as a sign of respect they called it "Kirlianography". For example, in the United States, a special institute was created to study this phenomenon, as well as an international association.
Many ways have now been found to apply the Kirlian effect. Among them - a method of non-destructive testing, a method of high-frequency registration of air pockets in a solid material, a method of defectometry in a high-frequency electric field, a device for visualizing the magnetic relief on the surface of an object, etc., etc.
A different glow of a tomato just cut and after a while.
However, the most important direction is the application of the effect in biology, botany and medicine. At the very beginning of their research, the Kirlians established an interesting pattern: "any living object placed in a high-frequency current field gave a glow on the film, the nature of which depended on the state of the object being shot."
This conclusion is still the subject of much scientific controversy. Representatives of purely materialistic views categorically reject it and call it charlatanism, their main argument is the glow around “inanimate” objects - coins, keys, etc.
The glow of a * tainted * and * clean * apple.
However, there are other scientists who continue to seriously investigate this effect. Differences were established between the glow of a freshly plucked leaf of a tree and its own after a while. Also different were the photographs of the hands of a healthy person, a sick person, simply tired or in a state of depression. The pictures changed when the person prayed, meditated, or was in a state of hypnosis.
A person in different health conditions.
For example, the German scientist and physician P. Mandel, after researching hundreds of thousands of photographs of the luminescence of the "aura" of the hands and feet of various patients, created tables that make it possible to diagnose various diseases, both at the active stage of development and at the preclinical level. Opponents of his research argue that these are simply changes in the conductance of people's skin and have nothing to do with their medical abnormalities. However, there are domestic and foreign devices for diagnosing diseases based on the glow of the finger zones. Whether to believe the results of such studies or not - everyone decides for himself, but unlike visiting psychics and fortune-tellers, in this case at least something can be seen with your own eyes.
In our country, K. Korotkov, an employee of the Department of Physical Electronics of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, has become one of the leading experts in the application of "Kirlianography". In the end, K. Korotkov went out on research, which even today may seem mystical or blasphemous to many. In Russia and the United States, Korotkov's book "Light after Life" was published - the result of many years of research into the processes of human energy activity during several days after death. By the time of its publication, he had already become a candidate of physical and mathematical sciences, a professor at the University of Colombo (Sri Lanka), the author of more than 60 scientific papers and inventions.
It turned out that the "Kirlian rays" make it possible to quite clearly determine what kind of death a person died - natural or violent, whether the cause of death was suicide or improper medical care. In addition, the nature and intensity of the "glow" of the body, changing over several days, can be interpreted as the immortality of the soul. According to his research, the soul remains in the body after death for three more days. It is interesting that in different cultures there is a custom to bury the dead after three days - maybe earlier people knew something more about some moments of life and death, or this is just a coincidence.
Such unusual people lived with us in the Kuban in the village of Dinskaya. Few people know and remember these unique inventors, whose works give rise to use in many scientific esoteric studies.