Anatoly Georgievich Ufimtsev
An inventor in Kursk? Sounds rather unusual. But little does the young citizen, imagine a foreign student or traveler, knows in whose honor one of the streets in the center of Kursk is named Ufimtsev street and why is there a forty-meter mast with a windmill on top, visible from many points of the regional center.
The little Da Vinci of its time in Kursk who was called Anatoly Ufimtsev born on November 24, 1880, in Kursk in the family of a surveyor. Since childhood, he had an interest for making various crafts. At the age of 12, he built a Dynamo Motor on his own. At the same time, the spirit of freedom appeared in him. The realist Ufimtsev became an active participant in the underground revolutionary circle. His parents decided to send him to school. Ufimtsev, in is youth with his revolutionary-minded high school friends, produced an electric pen for multiple copying and a rapid-printing machine for printing proclamations.
The monks of the church spreaded tales about healing powers of the “Icon of the Sign of the Virgin Mary”. Ufimtsev didn’t believe in it and tried to prove those tales are fake. So, he constructed an explosive device with a timer. On March 8, 1898, he placed the eplosive device under this icon in the Znamenskiy Cathedral. As calculated by Ufimtsev, the explosion occurred exactly at midnight.
But to his disappointment, he did not guess that the monks had a spare list of the Worship Icons. Only 3 years later, the owner of the explosive device and the merciless act was accidentally discovered, arrested and had a trial in court.
Many famous people in Russia, including Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky, came to his defense when they heard of the mischievious act of the young inventor. But according to the court’s verdict, Ufimtsev was exiled for five years to Akmolinsk (now Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan). Maxim Gorky even sent a friendly letter and financial assistance to Ufimtstev in Akmolinsk. From this time onwards, a close friendship was formed between them.
With some financial help from Maxim Gorky, Ufimtsev equipped a small workshop for repairing household appliances in Akmolinsk. In the same workshop, Anatoly began to manufacture and sell kerosene lamps and oil lamps with his own original design: in the flame of the kerosene wick, he introduced a metal cap, which, when heated, began to glow, and increasing the brightness of the ordinary flame by many times.
Returning to Kursk in 1906, Ufimtsev set up a workshop for repairing sewing machines and bicycles at his estate on Semyonovskaya street, opposite to his grandfather who was the brilliant astronomer of Kursk “Fyodor Semenov”, and continued to manufacture kerosene lanterns. The lights of the Ufimtsev design were installed and worked on the streets of Kursk, Sevastopol and other Russian cities!
Ufimtsev was also an aviation pioneer. In 1909, he became interested in building an aircraft but he built an unusual design with a wing in the form of a sphere — calling it a “spheroplane”. It had a device for catapult takeoff. The tricycle landing gear of the spheroplane with a nose wheel was made by Anatoly Georgievich for the first time in Russia and simultaneously with the American aircraft designer Curtis. In the same year, he created two-stroke rotary aircraft engines.
In 1910–1911, the inventor has already built two new birotational engines four and six-cylinder. In 1912, at the International Aeronautics exhibition held in Moscow, Ufimtsev was awarded a silver medal for the four-cylinder birotative engine. However, his spheroplane did not have time to take off as a storm destroyed the prototype machine and the inventor had no money to create a new model.
In 1910, Ufimtsev improved his internal combustion engines and received a patent for a two-stroke oil engine. Until the beginning of the First World War, he produced engines for installation on farming combine harvesters. According to the opinion of consumers, its engines were the best among similar devices of that time in terms of reliability.
During the war Ufimtsev returned to the production birotating engines for the needs of military aviation. The genius modernized them, by making the shaft of an aircraft engine hollow, so that machine gun barrels could be installed.
But the most significant contribution to the development of technology he made was after the end of the war. He created the first reliable windmill in the world. In 1918, he invented an inertial battery-flywheel and with the help of the theoretical scientist Professor Vetchinkin, they proposed a windmill with rotating blades at an angle to capture maximum efficiency of the wind to generate energy. Their discovery is applied in modern day helicopters!
Both of them had statistical calculations for certain regions of the country, which confirmed that all Russian energy can be based on the use of wind energy. If and only if the government had listened to the opinion of Ufimtsev at that time, how many hectares of land would have been saved from flooding due to the construction of hydroelectric power stations and how much money would have been saved by not building nuclear power plants in Kurchatov that has the same plan model as the one exploded in Chernobyl.
In April 1923, the Russian government allocated 5,000 rubles for the construction of a wind turbine. It was built in the courtyard of the Ufimtsev estate and successfully harvested the power on February 4, 1931. The wind turbine illuminated Ufimtsev’s two-story house, as well as part of Semyonovskaya street, and powered all the machines in his workshop, which was located in the basement. Thanks to an inertial flywheel weighing 360 kilograms, placed in a vacuum chamber (to eliminate friction with the air!), the wind turbine for several hours gave current even when it isn’t a windy weather! The design of the Ufimtsev station with the Vetchinkin wheel was a hundred years ahead. Modern scientists are only now trying to reproduce what Ufimtsev did back in then.
As the saying goes, nothing ever lasts. So as our inventor, On July 10, 1936, at the age of 56 at his prime, he died due to poor health thanks to the medical experiments he conducted on himself.
After his death, his manor and workshop was simply taken away. The library and postal archive of the inventor disappeared among “collectors”. The library was small, but consisted rare technical literature, and many of it were donated. The wind turbine was also stopped. Despite repeated attempts by modern specialists to relaunch it, so far it is impossible. Apparently, Ufimtsev had some other unpublished knowledge that remained in secrecy. Many of his ideas were popularized by his friend Professor Vetchinkin, publishing articles about him in scientific and popular scientific journals.
So how can such an amazing person which such discoveries is unknown today? What course of history swallowed his existence? On July 10, 1938, a museum named after him was opened in the house where he lived and worked on Semenovskaya street, but it ceased to exist in 1941 due to the German occupation in the World War.
In the early 1950s, the names of all Russian scientists and inventors were demanded on the Patriotic campaign and the fight against cosmopolitanism. An essay about his life and work was included. On December 1, 1950, a street in the center of the city of Kursk is named after Ufimtsev which is located near current day TSUM.
His name came up again in the nineties when a copy of the “Icon of the Sign of the Virgin Mary” was carried in a procession along the street named after the “terrorist” who blew up its original. The members of the church persistently ask the government to rename the street on the grounds that Ufimtsev did not repent of what he had done to the Orthodox Church that took place 90 years ago! But no actions were taken and the name of the street still remains.
Back in 1918, when drawing up the plan of scientific and technical works of the Academy of Sciences, Lenin indicated that they should include the development of wind engines. Even Lenin supported the inventor. In 1922, the Council allocated special funds for its work.
All his life, Anatoly Georgievich worked with inspiration, never complaining about difficulties. During the years of Soviet power, he received dozens of patents and copyright certificates for a variety of inventions and discoveries. Maxim Gorky the Soviet writer and Ufimtsev’s friend called him “a poet in the field of scientific technology”. He definitely deserves it. What do you think?
