Russian Diesel Engines. The Nobel Dynasty

…Now that the approximately isothermal combustion specified in the patent actually occurs with a threefold increase in temperature and with some, admittedly comparatively small, increase in pressure, the only idea protected by the patent remaining is the attainment of the temperature necessary for ignition by means of compression; but whether this idea in itself is entitled to patent protection is still rather doubtful, if one takes into account the previous work of Hargreaves, Capetaine, and others…

Hugo Güldner, engineer, director of the Güldner Motor Society in Munich.

In the mid-1830s, the military department invited Swedish technician Emanuel Nobel to St. Petersburg to demonstrate his naval mine. The mine was well received, the Russian government purchased the patent, and the Swede decided to move to Russia, bringing his family to St. Petersburg and establishing his own business there. In 1846, he founded the Mechanical Wheel Plant near the Sampsonievsky Bridge. Its operations immediately focused on lucrative military contracts, which were greatly facilitated by the outbreak of the Crimean War.

The founder of the Nobel dynasty, E.E. Nobel (1801-1872)

But Nobel was unlucky: the war ended in defeat for Russia, orders dried up, the company went bankrupt, and production went under the hammer.

In 1859, the miner, disheartened by his failure, returned to Sweden with his sons Alfred and Emil. There, business unexpectedly took off: his son Alfred invented dynamite, which brought the Nobel family fabulous wealth and enormous grief—his brother Emil died in a factory explosion. The tragedy devastated Alfred, but he continued his business. In memory of the sad event, he bequeathed the interest on the capital earned by the dynamite to a special savings fund, from which annual awards—the Nobel Prizes—were paid to outstanding figures in science and art.

The two other sons of the mine technician, Ludwig and Robert, who remained in Russia, founded a small workshop in St. Petersburg in 1862, which eventually turned into the world-famous “Cast Iron, Copper, Steel Foundry and Boiler Plant of the Ludwig Nobel Joint-Stock Company.”

They also co-owned an arms factory in Izhevsk. Ludwig Nobel was highly respected in Russia and was awarded three Russian orders for his work, which greatly benefited the development of Russian industry.

According to legend, in 1873, Robert, in order to free himself from foreign dependence, which consisted of purchasing valuable tree species needed for the production of gun stocks abroad, went to the Caucasus to select durable walnut wood suitable for production.

There, he noticed the sluggish development of the oil industry in the region, a new and little-understood industry at the time. He immediately realized that this business, while unprofitable at the time, could, if properly managed, yield even greater profits than dynamite. Soon, the brothers founded the Nobel Brothers Oil Production Partnership (abbreviated as the Nobel Bros. Partnership), acquired several oil fields, acquired an oil refinery in Baku, and began to consider how to optimize expenses and reduce the cost of transporting raw materials.

In those years, oil and the kerosene derived from it were transported in barrels on ordinary carts, which significantly increased transportation costs. The technically savvy and resourceful Nobels came up with the idea of ​​transporting oil by rail in special, previously unused tank cars. They approached the railway management with this proposal, but officials ridiculed their project. So the Nobels commissioned the manufacture of tank cars at their own expense, and then began transporting crude from the extraction site to refineries via oil and kerosene pipelines. Over time, the Nobels became wealthy and became one of Russia's leading oil producers. Their growing business expanded, and the Nobels devised the idea of ​​transporting crude across the Caspian Sea and the Volga River in enormous oil barges, or, as they are now called, oil tankers. The business was so successful that the Nobels completely covered the Russian market's demand for petroleum products. To increase oil sales, the Ludwig Nobel plant began producing low-compression kerosene engines in 1892.

The plant's diverse operations required a qualified engineering staff. The Nobels were generous, inviting the very best specialists from Sweden and other countries, alongside whom young Russian engineers and technicians collaborated and learned from. Little by little, the plant developed a robust international design bureau capable of solving the most complex technical problems, of which there was no shortage.

L.E. Nobel's son, the restless Emmanuel Ludvigovich, who became the director of the plant in 1888, was constantly "inspired" by various technical ideas and demanded that they be brought to life.

He was born in St. Petersburg in 1859, attended a private school in the capital, and began his working career at the age of 16 as an apprentice at his father's factory. He then continued his education at the Polytechnic School in Berlin and completed his studies at the Stockholm Institute of Technology.

E.L. Nobel

The diverse design creativity of the company's engineers, coupled with a robust production base featuring cutting-edge machine tools, made it possible to solve technical problems of any complexity. And one such problem, which had long occupied the world's best engineering minds during those years, was soon posed and successfully solved.

After historical After meeting with R. Diesel, G.F. Depp informed industrialists and engineers about the new achievement of German engine building in Russian technical journals, hoping to spark their interest in the innovation. The only one who showed serious interest in the invention was Emanuel Ludwigovich Nobel, a truly extraordinary man: a qualified engineer, a successful entrepreneur, a tough leader, and also a prominent statesman and philanthropist.

He immediately realized that the production of engines of this type promised a double benefit: income from the sale of engines and income from the sale of the fuel that these engines would consume.

In 1897, Nobel entered into negotiations with Rudolf Diesel and ultimately purchased the inventor's patent in February 1898 for £50,000 (approximately half a million gold rubles). Moreover, in accordance with the capricious Diesel's demands, the entrepreneur was forced to establish the Russian Diesel Society in Germany, whose purpose was to establish production links with German engineering plants, which were struggling at the time to develop the diesel engine, as Diesel believed that the backward Russian industry could not build the engine alone. It should be noted right away that this society brought no benefit to the cause.

The patent included drawings of a prototype engine from the Augsburg plant, which engineers around the world were trying to make operational at the time. In fact, E.L. Nobel paid Diesel, a sum enormous at the time, for the drawings of this unviable engine.

The above indicates that Rudolf Diesel actually deceived Nobel, since Russian privilege No. 261 of 1897 (as well as German patents) protected his rights to an engine of a completely different design, and Nobel's plant had a legal basis, without in any way violating Diesel's copyright, to undertake the development of high-compression engines without acquiring a patent.

But in those years this truth had not yet occurred to anyone, so Nobel returned to Russia inspired, since he considered the deal to be very profitable.

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Comments

[Soldatov V.]

When the Nobels entered the oil business, they received a great deal of help from the talented Russian engineer Shukhov. He invented oil tanks, pipelines, and tankers for petroleum products. I'd like to emphasize the Nobel family's strengths: they were creators; they enjoyed engineering and chemistry, and they had an entrepreneurial spirit. And they didn't neglect science and education when they established the Nobel Prize. Are there such people in Russia today, for example? Unfortunately, no. They're mostly destroyers at various levels. The USSR destroyed such a country, ruining its industry, education, healthcare, the military, aviation, and space exploration.

[Popandos]

Are there such people in Russia nowadays, for example?

In our time, our people even treat the memory of those great people with disdain. In May of this year, I was in St. Petersburg. The house in which the Nobel family lived and worked was a sad sight.

[dragon772]

As we can see, the Nobel family thrived in Tsarist Russia. Did they meet Russia's demand for petroleum products? Not bad, considering the current fuel crisis.

[balabol]

There is some stretch/incorrectness in the statements below.
In 1846, near the Sampsonievsky Bridge, the Mechanical Wheel Plant opened its doors, its activities immediately focusing on profitable military orders, which was greatly facilitated by the outbreak of the Crimean War. - the plant opened long before the Crimean War, so it was impossible to dream of those urgent wartime orders.
But Nobel was unlucky: the war ended in defeat for Russia, orders dried up, the company went bankrupt, and production went under the hammer. - Can formulate cause-and-effect relationships differently.
Despite the defeat in the Crimean War (or perhaps because of it), the army began to reform and rearm. Ample funds were allocated, but Nobile found no place at this celebration of life. His main product, mines, had not performed well.
Nobel's mine looked like a metal cone, with its wide end facing upward. The charge consisted of only 3–4 kg of gunpowder—the inventor believed this amount of explosive was enough to damage an enemy ship. Two pins were screwed into the screw holes in the cylinder cap.
During the 1854 campaign, there were no recorded instances of ships of the Anglo-French squadron being blown up by Russian mines. The first instance occurred on June 9 (20), 1855 – a steam corvette and a steamship were blown up. Apparently, the mines, which had a small charge, were the ones that triggered them. The damage was minor – the ships not only remained afloat, but did not even leak.
The British lifted one mine from the water to show it to Admiral Michael Seymour. The Russian "wonder weapon," neglecting safety precautions, was being examined on the deck of the flagship battleship Exmouth. Suddenly, the fuse detonated, causing an explosion. The admiral paid for his curiosity with burns, and a nearby officer suffered a crushed leg. The sailor holding the mine, however, was unharmed.

[Lewww]

Is there no way to read the source you use to the end?

The most amazing thing is that the sailor holding the mine did not suffer the slightest injury." The mines obviously had little destructive power. Unfortunately, The article does not say whose design these mines were.

In total, the Russian fleet deployed approximately 3 mines during the war. In addition to the Nobel mines, the aforementioned mines designed by B.S. Jacobi were also widely used. Some historians believe that Jacobi mines were more effective during combat than Nobel mines, but Nobel mines were clearly more numerous, and it was these that caused the enemy to panic.

[balabol]

Come on, I need to justify the thesis that everything that doesn’t need to be dragged into the comments.
It seems that before the war, the authorities realized they needed to defend St. Petersburg. Jacobi proposed a powerful, but difficult-to-manufacture, controlled mine. Only a limited number were produced. Nobel produced many at his factory, but they were simple and weak devices. The arrangements were as follows: Jacobi's mine would be in the most critical area—the southern fairway and forts; Nobel's, in the shallow north.
After the war, they simply deemed this model ineffective and stopped funding it.
We'll leave the writer's conscience to discuss the Englishman's panic fear of Nobel's mines.

[Trapperxnumx]

capricious Diesel

what a beautiful double meaning

[cpls22]

The Nobels commissioned the production of tanks at their own expense.

considering that they owned such an asset as

"Iron-Copper-Steel Foundry and Boiler Plant of the Joint-Stock Company Ludwig Nobel"

, it is logical to assume that they made these tanks themselves, since they knew how to produce boilers.

[Lewww]

The manufacture of products for use on railways requires specialized knowledge of the norms and rules adopted there, as well as the operating features.
Because it’s one thing to make a stationary fuel tank, and quite another to make a railway tank car.
It is possible that the engineers of JSC Ludwig Nobel developed the first such carriages together with engineers from some carriage-building plant.
And the early version looked something like this:

[deddem]

Unfortunately, by the beginning of WWI, Nobel had already begun to be crowded out on the market by the well-known Shell.
And the reason for this was our traditional reluctance to "mess around with small things," i.e., focusing on the wholesale market at the expense of small retail.
To the point where Shell stupidly poured Nobel kerosene and gasoline into small containers and even with its margin tore the market to shreds, because the small consumer is not interested in going to the wholesale warehouse on Kudykina Gora and pouring from a five-ton barrel into his own container (or trusting resellers...), he is interested in going to the brand store on the block, buying a five-liter tin can there (canisters do not yet exist...) and not having problems.

[Lewww]

Another interesting fragment that was not included in the publication.

From 1885 to 1898, engineer Gustav Sorge worked at the Nobel Brothers Oil Production Partnership. On October 4, 1895, in his marriage to his Russian wife, Nina Semyonovna Kobeleva, in the village of Sabunchi, Baku district, Baku province, a boy was born who was named Richard.
The boy later grew up and became a world-famous Soviet intelligence officer.

Well, and in Soviet journalism there was information that in ancient times the workers of the Baku plant Nobilei were raised to strike by a young and extremely brave revolutionary Soso Dzhugashvili