Patriotic stories. Mikhail Margolin
Noisy New Year's holidays are over. The country, tired of the turbulent events of the past year 1905, plunged into a nap. Immersed in a nap and Kiev. In the evenings, people gathered in living rooms under round lampshades, read aloud, talked and listened to how the fire burned in the furnace, and the wind was walking along the chimneys.
The Margolin family also gathered in the living room in the evening, but, unlike many other families, waited for an event from day to day. This event happened on January 29 old style - the engineer Semen Margolin and his wife Ekaterina Filippovna had a son - an excellent, strong boy, who was named Mikhail. Soon the parents took Misha to Moscow, where he lived, nothing special from their peers, no different, except that he showed his ability to draw early. He drew well - with a firm hand, with fantasy. But...
At the very beginning of his life's journey, on takeoff, Mikhail receives a heavy blow. An accidental bullet during a fight with bandits, a wound to the head and ... completely blind in both eyes, completely blind. Then for a young guy it was worse than death. He believed that life goes on, but he himself will be erased from this life. What is she now to him, devoid of meaning, bright colors and bright plans! Who needs loneliness and stagnation?
Friends try to help, collect money for treatment. Mikhail is going from Ochamchira to Sukhumi, to the republican hospital. However, doctors are powerless. It should be a trip to Moscow. At the most famous Alekseevskaya Eye Clinic at that time, experts pass a merciless sentence. Then there were the wheelchair distributor and the direction to Kiev. The commission decided “to unload Moscow” to send Margolin to the place of birth.
“In Kiev, they helped me get out of the car,” Mikhail Vladimirovich later recalled. –The train, rumbling with buffers, started off, and I was left alone on the platform, among strangers. There was nothing to think about. I remembered Kiev station well, as did the city itself, with which many memories were associated, especially in the nineteenth year. And I went, guided by memory and by ear, leading me in front of me with a light bamboo cane, which Sukhumi friends cut out for me.
In front of me was the station square. I knew her and I was sure that I would move on without dropping from the direction. He moved cautiously, feeling the way with his cane and passing before him the crowners and cars. Here's a stop, the tram rings. Someone asks a neighbor: "It seems the second?" "Yes, he goes to Khreshchatyk, to Comintern Square." I don't need anything else. I climb into the car, I go and it seems that I see familiar stops ... "
Soon he was already in the city executive committee. Mikhail was amazed at how deftly he got there, and even more admired himself when he found the invalid town (he was in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra), where he was staged. In the summer of 1925, he is offered to go to Kharkov for a course of massage and medical gymnastics under the People's Commissariat of Social Security. Mikhail agrees without hesitation, although he had no idea what this thing was - massage, medicine never attracted him. But we must get down to business, do not sit with folded arms. And now the masseur courses are over, the work ahead. A year and a half of the “new” life removes painful doubts. Faith in one's own strength comes, Michael understands that, as he is, people need him. It would seem, work calmly and live in a big city, but this turns out to be a little irrepressible soul of the future designer.
In 1926, Margolin again moved to Moscow, where his family had already settled, and plunged into community work. On his initiative and with the support of the organizing bureau of Osoaviahima, a military office was organized in the Central House of the Komsomol, and he was appointed as its head. Margolin holds classes, war games. With open, but blind eyes, teaches young people to disassemble and assemble personal protective equipment, which was in service with the Red Army weapon.
7 November 1928 of the year Mikhail Margolin heads the Komsomol battalion of Zamoskvorechye on Red Square and, being blind, leads a company, never having strayed, with a parade march. Ahead the drummer goes, the shot knocks out, and Margolin the battalion leads the drum by hearing. No one noticed that he was blind. Imagine that!
How did Margolin, a blind man, study weapons and military equipment? His vision was gone, but the touch remained, which he had, as far as possible, to compensate for the loss. He could not boast of the subtle sense of touch that people who are blind from birth possess. But he had another property that helped him quickly and thoroughly to know the weapon that fell into his hands, a strong visual imagination and visual memory.
After arriving in Zamoskvoretsky District Commissar Alexander Smirnsky, a member of the Russian shooting team at Stockholm 1912, in Stockholm, one of the first three USSR shooting champions and, later, the first designer of sports weapons in the USSR (three rifles and a sports archer), Mikhail got infected "Virus of invention".
- We have gunsmiths, he said, and no one does guns for athletes. Need to. It is necessary just! And the designers of weapons and do not know how to shoot. Here you, Mikhail, love weapons, feel, understand.
- Alexander Alexandrovich, where am I?
- Yes, yes, of course, of course, I understand, I understand, nothing can be done, where, my eyesight ...
- Vision ... Miserable, it means. Damage, you see! I'll show you - "defective" !!!
That airship invented a new submarine ... The first time did not work out - all this was either invented, or it was not worth inventing. Small arms remained.
Understood Michael, in this case taking, that he still does not know much and very much and does not know how. I studied weapons wherever I could: in museums, in factories, in military camps, in design offices. And I had to study - on my own! - theoretical mechanics, theory of mechanisms and machines, machine parts, resistance of materials.
Margolin learned to count in his mind, but how to portray what he came up with on paper? I had to learn again - to cut out parts from wax and laundry soap, to determine the dimensions of the parts by touch. Learned He determined the dimensions with an accuracy of one hundredth of a millimeter.
But at the same time I learned how to dictate what I had invented. Not the words dictated - the drawings. With a draftsman Arkady Pokhmelkov, they even had such a game: Mikhail dictates, and Arkady makes a special mistake. Then Arkady tells in detail what he drew, and Mikhail must find a mistake.
Even the workers dictated that with his words the details were done. When this happened for the first time, an experienced milling machine operator, having finished his work, did not believe his eyes - he had never worked “by ear” before. But it turned out!
So Margolin made his first system - an automatic rifle. Vasily Degtyarev himself approved her (the gunsmith who designed the machine gun). They invited Mikhail to Tula to an armory. Assistants gave room. One drawing board was so big that you could even draw a full-size gun on it. And the work went. They made a machine gun, a carbine, three pistols - all for athletes, including the youngest ones. One gun turned out to be so good that it was decided to massively release it. We decided, but did not have time - the war prevented.
The war is over. And Margolin began again to do sports pistols. The first post-war model was rejected. At that time it was believed that sporting pistols would certainly need to be redone from combat, so that the shooters could immediately prepare for war. It was wrong. For military weapons requirements are not at all those for sports. And Margolin decided to make his design, especially, which had never happened before. Again I had to study (by touch!), Invent, make up like a mosaic - trunks, bolts, trigger hooks ... I worked for more than a year - I did. Now it's up to the athletes. They shoot pistols - and they decide which is worse and which is better.
Contemporaries of Mikhail Vladimirovich were amazed at his courage, strength of will, effectiveness of his work. And one more was admired by the blind designer: he learned to shoot - to the sound.
Let's return to the pistol created by Mikhail Margolin.
Represent this weapon is not necessary. Schoolchildren and generals fired from it. It has served many generations of athletes-shooters flawlessly.
Missing this gun is impossible. His work is accurate and flawless. From it is easy to shoot and easy to get. It's nice to hold it in your hand. He is fascinated by the geometry of blued steel and attracts with special weapon magnetism. And it seems there is no man who in secret would not have dreamed of having him.
Margolin designed an automatic pistol that fully meets the sporting requirements. He managed in one system to combine few compatible things - automatic recharging and accuracy of the battle. He increased the number of rifling and made them flat - and the bullet safer went down the barrel. The barrel was drilled on a light cone, and its accuracy sharply increased. The barrel itself is stationary, tightly pressed into the body and secured with a pin. The main universally recognized "highlight" of the design is a horizontally adjustable sight on a fixed stand, tightly seated on the body. Fly, adjustable in height, the base is pressed into the trunk. The lack of backlash and offsets between all these parts eliminates the discrepancies of the aiming line and the axis of the barrel. The designer has chosen the most optimal reloading principle for a small-caliber high-precision pistol - automatic recoil action of a free gate, not related to setting an aiming device on it and not affecting the aiming process.
Margolin tilted the handle to the optimum-balance angle for shooting, giving it perfect natural orthopedics, and the gun “sat” in the hand of the shooter, like a glove. But the main thing was not the case. The accuracy of the combat of any weapon mainly depends on its weight and mechanical balance, which is difficult to be mathematically calculated and determined by the designer’s instincts.
Balance can only be felt. And to create a perfectly balanced weapon, such as the Margolin pistol, could only be a blind man, with a heightened and unmistakable sense of balance characteristic of the blind, a man who, by cruel necessity, developed an almost supernatural ability to feel the resistance of metal, the power of gunpowder.
Feel the momentum of the mass of each part, the weapon biased when firing. Margolin was able to abstractly “see” the interaction of these impulses and “match” them so that they mutually absorb each other when the parts move at the moment of the shot.
Only a blind designer with a heightened sense of balance could fit the steel structure to the living flesh of a human hand, perfectly adapting the subsystem "technician" to the subsystem "man", creating the conditions for creating the system "gunner-weapon". And then everything depended only on the shooter himself.
The pistol designed by him had an amazing accuracy of combat, a soft and easy descent without “failure”, was pleasantly comfortable in hand, easy to handle, simple to assemble and disassemble. In the course of the shooting, corrections were easily and simply introduced. The possibility of automatic fire in the trouble-free operation of the mechanism made the firing of these weapons extremely interesting and opened up new prospects for the development of shooting sports practice. The advantages of this system over other weapons of this class and purpose were obvious and indisputable.
What happened next, now very few people know. Move the gun did not give. The verdict of officials in uniform and without epaulets (the eternal disaster of Russia) was categorical: "The design of the blind cannot be taken seriously." "That which never was, can never be."
Envious little men framed Margolin tripping. Further events developed as they were supposed to develop in those difficult times. Someone put on the table of the almighty Beria a prototype of a pistol with a complete certificate of his fighting qualities. Lavrenty loved to shoot, although because of the impulsiveness of his character, this turned out to be rather nasty. Having personally tested the pistol in the shooting range, the head of the terrible department noted with surprise that he immediately got to where he was shooting. He liked it so much that he spent the rest of the day in the dash, wringing out a bunch of cartridges.
Stalin was reported on exposing a group of pests sabotaging the introduction of advanced weapons. The gun was put into mass production. Its design was so successful, complete and perfect, that from 1949 year to our time it is produced almost unchanged. From 1954 to 1974, the year has been applied at international competitions. For shooting training applied to the present.
Particularly good quality pistols were the release of the end of the 50-x beginning of the 60-s. They had better steel and cleaner bore processing. The scatter they had "a dozen" sports target at a distance of 25 meters. Athletes of older generations remember this weapon, which was supplied in beautiful wooden cases, with a set of spare parts, tools, accessories for cleaning and lubrication. In our time, Margolin pistol is produced under the marking of the MTsM. There is also a gas gun “Margo” and an experimental short version of a small-caliber pistol - also “Margo”. Both designs are based on the Margolin pistol.
Automatic small-caliber pistols appeared in the West - they had a beautiful and formidable appearance, but they were not suitable as a sports weapon. Small caliber revolvers also appeared - their fight was more accurate than that of pistols, but they could not stand the competition with Margolin. They don’t like to praise Russian weapons, because they are Russian, but Margolin’s pistol is in every sporting dash, there are a lot of them in private use. By the way, the sight of Margolin almost without changes quietly and silently migrated to the German "Walter", the Italian "Beretta", to a number of sports models of the Belgian, French, Spanish production.
“Remembering Mikhail Vladimirovich Margolin,” noted Mikhail Kalashnikov, an outstanding designer of the twentieth century, “I think what kind of strength of will, passion and dedication one must have in order to cross“ I can’t ”and be engaged in work a burden of responsibility, which not every sighted person can shoulder! Margolin almost never talked about how many failures he had to endure on the thorny path of design, how much offensive distrust he had to endure from bureaucrats who rejected the very possibility of a blind inventor to create and create. ”
Mikhail Vladimirovich Margolin was a weapons consultant at the State Historical Museum and at the Police Research Institute. He wrote books: “Designer Notes”, “Sports Gun and its Repair” and “I am a Soldier Still Alive”. Along with government awards, Margolin was awarded the Big Silver Medal of the Exhibition of Economic Achievements (1960), he was awarded the title "Honored Inventor of the RSFSR" (1965).
As for the unprecedented heights ... March 28 1983 in the name of Mikhail Margolin called the small planet №2561.
The Margolin family also gathered in the living room in the evening, but, unlike many other families, waited for an event from day to day. This event happened on January 29 old style - the engineer Semen Margolin and his wife Ekaterina Filippovna had a son - an excellent, strong boy, who was named Mikhail. Soon the parents took Misha to Moscow, where he lived, nothing special from their peers, no different, except that he showed his ability to draw early. He drew well - with a firm hand, with fantasy. But...
At the very beginning of his life's journey, on takeoff, Mikhail receives a heavy blow. An accidental bullet during a fight with bandits, a wound to the head and ... completely blind in both eyes, completely blind. Then for a young guy it was worse than death. He believed that life goes on, but he himself will be erased from this life. What is she now to him, devoid of meaning, bright colors and bright plans! Who needs loneliness and stagnation?
Friends try to help, collect money for treatment. Mikhail is going from Ochamchira to Sukhumi, to the republican hospital. However, doctors are powerless. It should be a trip to Moscow. At the most famous Alekseevskaya Eye Clinic at that time, experts pass a merciless sentence. Then there were the wheelchair distributor and the direction to Kiev. The commission decided “to unload Moscow” to send Margolin to the place of birth.
“In Kiev, they helped me get out of the car,” Mikhail Vladimirovich later recalled. –The train, rumbling with buffers, started off, and I was left alone on the platform, among strangers. There was nothing to think about. I remembered Kiev station well, as did the city itself, with which many memories were associated, especially in the nineteenth year. And I went, guided by memory and by ear, leading me in front of me with a light bamboo cane, which Sukhumi friends cut out for me.
In front of me was the station square. I knew her and I was sure that I would move on without dropping from the direction. He moved cautiously, feeling the way with his cane and passing before him the crowners and cars. Here's a stop, the tram rings. Someone asks a neighbor: "It seems the second?" "Yes, he goes to Khreshchatyk, to Comintern Square." I don't need anything else. I climb into the car, I go and it seems that I see familiar stops ... "
Soon he was already in the city executive committee. Mikhail was amazed at how deftly he got there, and even more admired himself when he found the invalid town (he was in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra), where he was staged. In the summer of 1925, he is offered to go to Kharkov for a course of massage and medical gymnastics under the People's Commissariat of Social Security. Mikhail agrees without hesitation, although he had no idea what this thing was - massage, medicine never attracted him. But we must get down to business, do not sit with folded arms. And now the masseur courses are over, the work ahead. A year and a half of the “new” life removes painful doubts. Faith in one's own strength comes, Michael understands that, as he is, people need him. It would seem, work calmly and live in a big city, but this turns out to be a little irrepressible soul of the future designer.
In 1926, Margolin again moved to Moscow, where his family had already settled, and plunged into community work. On his initiative and with the support of the organizing bureau of Osoaviahima, a military office was organized in the Central House of the Komsomol, and he was appointed as its head. Margolin holds classes, war games. With open, but blind eyes, teaches young people to disassemble and assemble personal protective equipment, which was in service with the Red Army weapon.
7 November 1928 of the year Mikhail Margolin heads the Komsomol battalion of Zamoskvorechye on Red Square and, being blind, leads a company, never having strayed, with a parade march. Ahead the drummer goes, the shot knocks out, and Margolin the battalion leads the drum by hearing. No one noticed that he was blind. Imagine that!
How did Margolin, a blind man, study weapons and military equipment? His vision was gone, but the touch remained, which he had, as far as possible, to compensate for the loss. He could not boast of the subtle sense of touch that people who are blind from birth possess. But he had another property that helped him quickly and thoroughly to know the weapon that fell into his hands, a strong visual imagination and visual memory.
After arriving in Zamoskvoretsky District Commissar Alexander Smirnsky, a member of the Russian shooting team at Stockholm 1912, in Stockholm, one of the first three USSR shooting champions and, later, the first designer of sports weapons in the USSR (three rifles and a sports archer), Mikhail got infected "Virus of invention".
- We have gunsmiths, he said, and no one does guns for athletes. Need to. It is necessary just! And the designers of weapons and do not know how to shoot. Here you, Mikhail, love weapons, feel, understand.
- Alexander Alexandrovich, where am I?
- Yes, yes, of course, of course, I understand, I understand, nothing can be done, where, my eyesight ...
- Vision ... Miserable, it means. Damage, you see! I'll show you - "defective" !!!
That airship invented a new submarine ... The first time did not work out - all this was either invented, or it was not worth inventing. Small arms remained.
Understood Michael, in this case taking, that he still does not know much and very much and does not know how. I studied weapons wherever I could: in museums, in factories, in military camps, in design offices. And I had to study - on my own! - theoretical mechanics, theory of mechanisms and machines, machine parts, resistance of materials.
Margolin learned to count in his mind, but how to portray what he came up with on paper? I had to learn again - to cut out parts from wax and laundry soap, to determine the dimensions of the parts by touch. Learned He determined the dimensions with an accuracy of one hundredth of a millimeter.
But at the same time I learned how to dictate what I had invented. Not the words dictated - the drawings. With a draftsman Arkady Pokhmelkov, they even had such a game: Mikhail dictates, and Arkady makes a special mistake. Then Arkady tells in detail what he drew, and Mikhail must find a mistake.
Even the workers dictated that with his words the details were done. When this happened for the first time, an experienced milling machine operator, having finished his work, did not believe his eyes - he had never worked “by ear” before. But it turned out!
So Margolin made his first system - an automatic rifle. Vasily Degtyarev himself approved her (the gunsmith who designed the machine gun). They invited Mikhail to Tula to an armory. Assistants gave room. One drawing board was so big that you could even draw a full-size gun on it. And the work went. They made a machine gun, a carbine, three pistols - all for athletes, including the youngest ones. One gun turned out to be so good that it was decided to massively release it. We decided, but did not have time - the war prevented.
The war is over. And Margolin began again to do sports pistols. The first post-war model was rejected. At that time it was believed that sporting pistols would certainly need to be redone from combat, so that the shooters could immediately prepare for war. It was wrong. For military weapons requirements are not at all those for sports. And Margolin decided to make his design, especially, which had never happened before. Again I had to study (by touch!), Invent, make up like a mosaic - trunks, bolts, trigger hooks ... I worked for more than a year - I did. Now it's up to the athletes. They shoot pistols - and they decide which is worse and which is better.
Contemporaries of Mikhail Vladimirovich were amazed at his courage, strength of will, effectiveness of his work. And one more was admired by the blind designer: he learned to shoot - to the sound.
Let's return to the pistol created by Mikhail Margolin.
Represent this weapon is not necessary. Schoolchildren and generals fired from it. It has served many generations of athletes-shooters flawlessly.
Missing this gun is impossible. His work is accurate and flawless. From it is easy to shoot and easy to get. It's nice to hold it in your hand. He is fascinated by the geometry of blued steel and attracts with special weapon magnetism. And it seems there is no man who in secret would not have dreamed of having him.
Margolin designed an automatic pistol that fully meets the sporting requirements. He managed in one system to combine few compatible things - automatic recharging and accuracy of the battle. He increased the number of rifling and made them flat - and the bullet safer went down the barrel. The barrel was drilled on a light cone, and its accuracy sharply increased. The barrel itself is stationary, tightly pressed into the body and secured with a pin. The main universally recognized "highlight" of the design is a horizontally adjustable sight on a fixed stand, tightly seated on the body. Fly, adjustable in height, the base is pressed into the trunk. The lack of backlash and offsets between all these parts eliminates the discrepancies of the aiming line and the axis of the barrel. The designer has chosen the most optimal reloading principle for a small-caliber high-precision pistol - automatic recoil action of a free gate, not related to setting an aiming device on it and not affecting the aiming process.
Margolin tilted the handle to the optimum-balance angle for shooting, giving it perfect natural orthopedics, and the gun “sat” in the hand of the shooter, like a glove. But the main thing was not the case. The accuracy of the combat of any weapon mainly depends on its weight and mechanical balance, which is difficult to be mathematically calculated and determined by the designer’s instincts.
Balance can only be felt. And to create a perfectly balanced weapon, such as the Margolin pistol, could only be a blind man, with a heightened and unmistakable sense of balance characteristic of the blind, a man who, by cruel necessity, developed an almost supernatural ability to feel the resistance of metal, the power of gunpowder.
Feel the momentum of the mass of each part, the weapon biased when firing. Margolin was able to abstractly “see” the interaction of these impulses and “match” them so that they mutually absorb each other when the parts move at the moment of the shot.
Only a blind designer with a heightened sense of balance could fit the steel structure to the living flesh of a human hand, perfectly adapting the subsystem "technician" to the subsystem "man", creating the conditions for creating the system "gunner-weapon". And then everything depended only on the shooter himself.
The pistol designed by him had an amazing accuracy of combat, a soft and easy descent without “failure”, was pleasantly comfortable in hand, easy to handle, simple to assemble and disassemble. In the course of the shooting, corrections were easily and simply introduced. The possibility of automatic fire in the trouble-free operation of the mechanism made the firing of these weapons extremely interesting and opened up new prospects for the development of shooting sports practice. The advantages of this system over other weapons of this class and purpose were obvious and indisputable.
What happened next, now very few people know. Move the gun did not give. The verdict of officials in uniform and without epaulets (the eternal disaster of Russia) was categorical: "The design of the blind cannot be taken seriously." "That which never was, can never be."
Envious little men framed Margolin tripping. Further events developed as they were supposed to develop in those difficult times. Someone put on the table of the almighty Beria a prototype of a pistol with a complete certificate of his fighting qualities. Lavrenty loved to shoot, although because of the impulsiveness of his character, this turned out to be rather nasty. Having personally tested the pistol in the shooting range, the head of the terrible department noted with surprise that he immediately got to where he was shooting. He liked it so much that he spent the rest of the day in the dash, wringing out a bunch of cartridges.
Stalin was reported on exposing a group of pests sabotaging the introduction of advanced weapons. The gun was put into mass production. Its design was so successful, complete and perfect, that from 1949 year to our time it is produced almost unchanged. From 1954 to 1974, the year has been applied at international competitions. For shooting training applied to the present.
Particularly good quality pistols were the release of the end of the 50-x beginning of the 60-s. They had better steel and cleaner bore processing. The scatter they had "a dozen" sports target at a distance of 25 meters. Athletes of older generations remember this weapon, which was supplied in beautiful wooden cases, with a set of spare parts, tools, accessories for cleaning and lubrication. In our time, Margolin pistol is produced under the marking of the MTsM. There is also a gas gun “Margo” and an experimental short version of a small-caliber pistol - also “Margo”. Both designs are based on the Margolin pistol.
Automatic small-caliber pistols appeared in the West - they had a beautiful and formidable appearance, but they were not suitable as a sports weapon. Small caliber revolvers also appeared - their fight was more accurate than that of pistols, but they could not stand the competition with Margolin. They don’t like to praise Russian weapons, because they are Russian, but Margolin’s pistol is in every sporting dash, there are a lot of them in private use. By the way, the sight of Margolin almost without changes quietly and silently migrated to the German "Walter", the Italian "Beretta", to a number of sports models of the Belgian, French, Spanish production.
“Remembering Mikhail Vladimirovich Margolin,” noted Mikhail Kalashnikov, an outstanding designer of the twentieth century, “I think what kind of strength of will, passion and dedication one must have in order to cross“ I can’t ”and be engaged in work a burden of responsibility, which not every sighted person can shoulder! Margolin almost never talked about how many failures he had to endure on the thorny path of design, how much offensive distrust he had to endure from bureaucrats who rejected the very possibility of a blind inventor to create and create. ”
Mikhail Vladimirovich Margolin was a weapons consultant at the State Historical Museum and at the Police Research Institute. He wrote books: “Designer Notes”, “Sports Gun and its Repair” and “I am a Soldier Still Alive”. Along with government awards, Margolin was awarded the Big Silver Medal of the Exhibition of Economic Achievements (1960), he was awarded the title "Honored Inventor of the RSFSR" (1965).As for the unprecedented heights ... March 28 1983 in the name of Mikhail Margolin called the small planet №2561.
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