Vasily Ivanovich Kalashnikov (1849 — 1908) — mechanic, engineer, shipbuilder, and thermal engineer. One of the founders of production at Termal.
Biography
The outstanding Russian mechanic, engineer, shipbuilder, and thermal engineer — and a self-taught man in all of this — Vasily Kalashnikov was born in the ancient city of Uglich. There he completed three grades of the district school, and at the age of eleven left for the Nikolo-Abakumovsky shipbuilding plant, where he managed to find work as an office boy.
The young Kalashnikov's extraordinary inquisitiveness and his passion for all kinds of mechanisms were noticed at once. Word reached the owner of the shipyard. After speaking with this new-found Ivan Kulibin, he discovered in the boy an extraordinary thirst for knowledge and decided to place the sharp-witted lad as an apprentice to the mechanics.
During the 1869 navigation season, the now-grown Vasily Kalashnikov sailed as an engineer on the tow steamer Vostok. At the end of the season he proposed to the vessel's owner a plan for a complete overhaul of the steam-power plant, but was refused. In the spring of 1870 Kalashnikov made his way to Nizhny Novgorod, where he began working at the Kolchin plant, which stood on the bank of the Volga River below the Otkos in the Fabrichnaya Sloboda.
As early as 1872, a steamboat named Istobenyets was built there to his design and under his supervision; on it he installed highly efficient compound steam engines with double steam expansion that he had developed independently. A year later, Vasily Ivanovich created a full set of equipment for an oil-refining plant for the well-known Nizhny Novgorod residents entrepreneur Ragozin.
In the autumn of 1875, the world's first plant for producing petroleum lubricating oils — first not only in Russia but anywhere in the world — opened adjacent to the Kolchin enterprise and, using equipment of Kalashnikov's design, produced its first output… At the age of thirty, Kalashnikov married Alexandra Alexandrovna, born Smirnova, the daughter of a manufacturer. She came from an old family to which the noted local historian Dmitry Nikolaevich Smirnov also belonged. The young couple were ideally suited to one another. Alexandra Alexandrovna, a conservatory graduate, played the piano well and sang, while Vasily Ivanovich would join in.
He himself often performed the old song "Vot na puti selo bolshoye…" ("There on the road lies a great village…") to his own guitar accompaniment. He loved the theatre, where he heard the great Shalyapin… He became acquainted with Vladimir Korolenko. Everything around him interested him; there was much he wished to understand, and in much he succeeded.
When a water tower was installed in the Upper Town of the city, to which water was to be pumped through pipes from the Oka by pumps purchased in England, Vasily Ivanovich flatly declared that the pumps "would not lift the water uphill." The water, indeed, did not flow. The city administration was forced to commission Kurbatov's plant to build water-supply installations to Kalashnikov's design. These installations operated for decades without alteration or major repair.
In 1887 the first educational institution for river navigators in Russia was opened in the city — the Nizhny Novgorod River School — in the creation of which Kalashnikov took an active part, subsequently becoming a teacher of mechanics and geometry, both of which he had mastered on his own.
One of his most important inventions was the "Kalashnikov nozzle" for atomizing petroleum in a steam-boiler furnace, which came into widespread use on steamboats throughout the Volga River. For many years Vasily Ivanovich headed the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the Imperial Technical Society. In 1894 he became editor of the journal Nizhegorodsky Vestnik Parokhodstva i Promyshlennosti (Nizhny Novgorod Herald of Steamship Navigation and Industry). The editorial office was located on Ilyinka. When Maxim Gorky settled on that street, he became Kalashnikov's neighbor.
For a time their portraits were displayed side by side in the window of Maxim Petrovich Dmitriev's photographic studio.
In 1896, during the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition held in Nizhny Novgorod, Kalashnikov was awarded a first-class diploma and a certificate of honorary hereditary citizenship for his inventions and his book Zapiski Konstruktora (Notes of an Engineer). The exhibition featured a steam engine built to his design for the steamboat Oryol.
For a time Vasily Ivanovich worked as chief mechanic at the Sormovo District plant, where several steamboats built with his active participation were launched. He then founded his own shipbuilding yard on Mochalnyy Island, which was unfortunately sold not long afterward.
Kalashnikov, alas, never made it as a businessman.
The sale of the shipyard and the arrest of his sons, who had become revolutionaries, broke his health, and he fell gravely ill.
Kalashnikov died of heart failure and was buried at the The Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross. In 1971 his remains were transferred to the old city cemetery. The city has several memorial plaques, including one on the building at Ilyinskaya Street, 58. This was the location of the editorial office of the world's first journal devoted to river navigation, Nizhegorodsky Vestnik Parokhodstva i Promyshlennosti.
Interesting Facts
- After the dissolution of the State Duma, Kalashnikov wrote to Count Ignatyev in St. Petersburg: "Your Excellency, you have closed the safety valve yet continue stoking the fire — the steam pressure may well exceed the tensile strength of the material." Master Kalashnikov expressed, in vivid but precise terms, what might happen in Russia.
- It is said that Kalashnikov, upon stepping aboard a steamboat, could tell from the character of the vibration of the chandeliers in the passenger cabins which unit or mechanism needed to be repaired.