Ivan Kulibin

Prominent Russian inventor, mechanic and optician Ivan Kulibin was born on April, 21, 1735 in Nizhny Novgorod, in the family of a small trader. He was an extremely talented inventor, so talented, in fact, that his very name became associated with inventiveness.

Since his childhood, Ivan Kulibin was interested in mechanical object and constructed small windmills and moving toys. One of his first inventions was a hydraulic device for draining stagnant water from the family pond.

Kulibin’s inventions were rather numerous, but only one has survived to the present day: it is a unique, goose-egg-sized clock with over 427 moving parts. It has a bell for striking the hours, a music box that could play several melodies, and a miniature automatic “theater” with moving figures. Today the clock is kept in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum. It was this clock which led to Kulibin’s employment at the prestigious St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. He was appointed head of its mechanical shop, which made and repaired different machines, including physical, astronomical and navigation instruments.

Kulibin was Russia’s first amateur telescope maker. In 1767 he determined the proper formula for a Gregorian mirror – a brittle alloy of copper and tin – and proceeded to build a machine for grinding and polishing mirrors and lenses. Yet, despite the talent of men like Kulibin, Russia lagged decades behind Europe and the US in the manufacture of telescopes. Well into the 20th century, Russian observatories still mainly used instruments and telescopes made by Germans and Americans.

Another of Kulibin’s inventions was a “mechanical watership.” The ship had two impellers that used the force of water flowing downstream to pull the boat upstream on a tether, toward an anchored spot. This invention promised to be very profitable for the state, replacing the slow, hard work of barge haulers along canals – Kulibin’s “mechanical watership” moved 10-20 km/hour, or twice as fast as a vessel hauled by mules and barge haulers. In 1782, Kulibin’s craft was successfully tested in St. Petersburg and in 1804 was used on the Volga river. But the ship’s usefulness was soon overtaken by steamship technology.

Kulibin worked in the Academy of Sciences for 30 years; he was also a court mechanic and accompanied Catherine II in her astronomic observations. During his three decades with the Academy of Sciences, Kulibin invented, among other things, a searchlight with a parabolic reflector and a pedal-driven mechanical carriage. But one of his most important achievements was to show that bridge construction could be modeled to scale before being constructed. In 1722, he made several plans for a 300 meter, arched bridge to span the Neva River. The model was built and tested, but the bridge was never constructed – a fact that was the subject of a Soviet era film, Yest ideya! (“I have an idea!,” 1977)

In 1801, Kulibin retired and moved back to his home town of Nizhny Novgorod, where he died in poverty in 1818. Yet his name lives on in the Russian language – a kulibin is someone who offers new and unusual technical ideas.