I first read about this extraordinary project more than half a century ago in "Entertaining Physics" by Ya. I. Perelman. The drawing to the text depicted a huge pipe, inside which a pointed wagon with a passenger lying inside was flying. “A wagon rushing without friction,” it was written under the drawing. - The road designed by Professor B. P. Weinberg ".
Later, in old magazines I came across several notes about this miracle road. But the most important thing happened even later, and quite by accident.
Talented family
Then the author of these lines went to the hospital. One day at the X-ray room, I heard a nurse call an elderly man sitting next to me: "Weinberg!"
I thought: "Isn't it a relative of that same professor Weinberg?" Imagine my surprise when it turned out that my neighbor, Adrian Kirillovich Veinberg, is indeed a relative, grandson, of the inventor of the bullet train, Boris Petrovich Weinberg.
And the chain was pulled. I learned that the granddaughter of Professor Galya Vsevolodovna Ostrovskaya, a physicist, like her grandfather, and another grandson, Viktor Vsevolodovich, a shipbuilding engineer, live in St. Petersburg. Galia Vsevolodovna has a grandfather's archive. Viktor Vsevolodovich kept old albums with photographs of Weinbergs of several generations.
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The Weinberg family turned out to be extraordinarily talented and extremely prolific in ideas, inventions, and scientific works. Boris Petrovich's father, Peter Isaevich Veinberg, was known as a poet, translator, literary historian and critic. It was he who wrote the well-known at one time poem "He was a titular councilor, she is a general's daughter …", set to music by the composer A. S. Dargomyzhsky.
Boris Petrovich chose a different path in life. In 1893 he graduated from the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of St. Petersburg University. His rapid ascent in science began. At the age of 38, he received an offer to take up the physics department at the Tomsk Technological Institute and left for Siberia for a long time.
Wheelless train
The simplest and familiar experience with a solenoid pulling an iron core inside a coil prompted the Tomsk scientist to think about an ideal airless electric path, completely different from the usual communication methods.
At that time, in 1910, he did not yet know that a similar idea came to mind and another inventor, who worked far from Tomsk, in the USA, engineer Emile Bachelet, a Frenchman by origin. Only four years later, when Bachelet arrived in London and demonstrated a model of his "flying carriage" to British scientists, engineers and even members of parliament, the press all over the world started talking about a sensational invention.
What was the peculiarity of Emile Bachelet's carriage? The inventor decided to raise the wheelless car above the road using the phenomenon of the so-called electrodynamic repulsion.
For this, coils of alternating current electromagnets should be installed along the entire path under the roadbed. Then the car, which has a bottom made of non-magnetic material, such as aluminum, will soar, rise into the air, albeit at a very insignificant height. But it is also enough to get rid of contact with the road.
For the translational movement of the carriage, Bachelet proposed using either a pulling propeller or solenoids in the form of a set of rings mounted along the track, into which the car would be drawn like an iron core. The inventor hoped to get a speed of up to 500 kilometers per hour, enormous for that time.
Magnetic suspension
On the road that Boris Veinberg proposed, the cars also did not need rails. As in the Bachelet project, they flew, supported in suspension by magnetic forces. Moreover, the Russian physicist decided to eliminate the resistance of the medium and thereby further increase the speed. The movement of the cars, according to the project, took place in a pipe, from which special pumps continuously pumped out air.
On the outside of the pipe, powerful electromagnets were installed at a certain distance from each other. Their purpose is to attract the wagons without letting them fall. But as soon as the car approached the magnet, the latter turned off. By the force of the weight, the car began to lower, but it was immediately picked up by the next electromagnet. As a result, the cars would move along a slightly wavy trajectory without touching the walls of the pipe, all the while remaining between the top and bottom of the tunnel.
Weinberg conceived the carriages as single-seater (to make them lighter), in the form of cigar-shaped hermetically sealed capsules 2.5 meters long. The passenger had to lie in such a capsule. The car was equipped with devices that absorb carbon dioxide, a supply of oxygen for breathing and electric lighting.
Just in case, for safety, the cars were equipped with wheels protruding slightly above and below from the car body. They are not needed during normal movement. But in emergency cases, when the force of attraction of the electromagnets changes, the cars can touch the pipe walls. And then, having wheels, they will simply roll on the “ceiling” or “floor” of the pipe, without causing disaster.
Capsule by capsule
The speed of movement was planned to be colossal - 800, or even 1000 kilometers per hour! At such a speed, the inventor reasoned, it would be possible to cross all of Russia from the western border to Vladivostok in 10-11 hours, and it would take only 45-50 minutes to travel from St. Petersburg to Moscow.
To launch the cars into the pipe, it was planned to use solenoid devices, a kind of electromagnetic weapons - giant coils about 3 kilometers long (to reduce overloads during acceleration).
The carriages with passengers were piled up in a special, tightly closed chamber. Then a whole clip of them was brought to the launching device and one by one "fired" into the tunnel-pipe. Up to 12 capsule cars per minute with an interval of 5 seconds. Thus, more than 17 thousand wagons will be able to travel in a day.
The receiving device was also conceived in the form of a long solenoid, however, not accelerating, but braking, which is harmless to the health of passengers, slowing down the rapid flight of cars.
In 1911, in the physics laboratory of the Tomsk Technological Institute, Weinberg built a large ring-shaped model of his electromagnetic path and began experiments.
Believing in the feasibility of his idea, Boris Petrovich tried to propagandize it as widely as possible. In the spring of 1914 he arrived in St. Petersburg. Soon there was an announcement that in the large auditorium of the Salt Town on Panteleymonovskaya Street, Professor Weinberg would give a lecture "Movement without friction."
Faster than sound
The speech of the Tomsk professor aroused unprecedented interest among the Petersburgers. In the hall, as they say, the apple had nowhere to fall. In early May of the same year, 1914, Professor Weinberg gave a lecture on his project in Achinsk. Two days later, he was already performing in Kansk. A couple of days later - in Irkutsk, then - in Semipalatinsk, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk. And everywhere they listened to him with unflagging interest and attention.
At the height of the First World War, Boris Petrovich was sent to the United States as a "senior artillery receiver". He returned to Russia after the February Revolution. He was well known as an outstanding physicist, and especially a geophysicist. It is no coincidence that in 1924 he was offered the post of director of the Main Geophysical Observatory in Leningrad. And Weinberg left Tomsk forever, having lived and worked in this city for 15 years. He took up the problems of using the energy of the Sun, solar technology and achieved great success here.
Boris Petrovich died of starvation in besieged Leningrad on April 18, 1942.
Only many years later, experiments with trains began in different countries, in which the projects of Emile Bachelet and Boris Weinberg found an echo. For example, the American engineer Robert Salter has developed a project for the Planetron magnetic levitation train, which will rush in an airless tunnel at a speed of over 9000 kilometers per hour! In comparison with such a super-fast express train, the magnetic road of the Russian scientist no longer seems like a fantasy.
Gennady CHERNENKO