Page 36 - january

HISTORY
Russian metallurgists

Continuation. Part 5

In 1774, eleven years after the publication of Lomonosov's work,
another major event took place in the history of Russian metallurgy: the
opening of the Mining Institute, the first civil higher technical educational
institution in Russia, took place in St. Petersburg.
It is characteristic that in the training of mining engineers, Russia was
ahead of many European countries. In France, for example, a similar
institution of higher education was founded twenty years later. And in
England and the USA, institutes of mining engineers were organized
only in the 19th century.
The Mining Institute, from the walls of which excellent
specialists came out, contributed much to the development of domestic metallurgy. The leading
metallurgists-practitioners, who enriched our mining industry in the late 18th - early 19th
centuries with a large number of inventions, did not lag behind specialist scientists.
Therefore, during these years Russian technicians built the world's first mechanisms for
pouring copper and lead. They were used at the Suzunsky, Barnaulsky and other Russian
factories. A drawing of one of these machines has come down to us, which in 1798 "was composed
from the completed one by non-commissioned master of staff Andrei Bessonov". Nowadays,
mechanized bottling of ferrous and non-ferrous metals is used in hundreds of factories. At
the domain, at the copper-smelting furnaces, there are mechanisms that come to the aid of
metallurgists at the most crucial moment - at the moment the finished metal is released from
the furnace.

The building of the Mining Institute in Leningrad is one of the oldest technical educational institutions in the world

36 Stanochniy park