Vladimir Shukhov: A Life in Five Chapters

Chapter 1 · Working Under Somebody Else's Name

The Imperial Technical School, and a firm that took the credit

1853 – 1880 · Graivoron · Moscow · Philadelphia · Baku

Vladimir Grigoryevich Shukhov was born at Graivoron in August 1853, the son of a minor official. He trained at the Imperial Technical School in Moscow, one of the best engineering schools in Europe, graduating with distinction in 1876.

He was sent as part of a Russian delegation to the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, where he met *Alexander Bari*, a Russian-born engineer who had emigrated to America. Bari returned to Russia and founded a construction and engineering firm, and hired Shukhov in 1880 as chief engineer.

He stayed with the firm for the rest of his working life, and this is the central fact about his reputation.

Bari's company took the contracts, put its name on the designs, and marketed the products. Shukhov designed them. In the Russian and Soviet records a great deal of what he produced appears under the firm's name or with no attribution at all.

He seems not to have minded much, or at least not to have fought it. He was paid well by the standards of the time, given a free hand technically, and had access to the firm's fabrication shops.

His range is difficult to match by any engineer of the period. Oil pipelines, storage tanks, tankers, refinery plant, boilers, pumps, cranes, bridges, water towers, radio masts, railway station roofs, department store roofs, and the structural system he invented.

He also designed the rotating floor of the Moscow Art Theatre and worked on raising the leaning minaret at Samarkand.

And, in 1891, he and Sergei Gavrilov patented the process that concerns chemistry students.

“You do not distil out what is not there. You make it.”

— Attributed to Vladimir Shukhov, on the principle of cracking

Why this matters

Shukhov spent his career as chief engineer to a firm that put its own name on his designs, which is why one of the most productive engineers of the period is little known.

You have the firm and the name on the drawings. What would you ask him?

Ask Shukhov

• “Did it bother you that Bari's name was on your designs?”
• “What did the firm give you in return?”
• “What did you see at the Philadelphia exposition?”
• “How do you keep such a wide range of work going?”
• “What was the Imperial Technical School like?”

Chapter 2 · Building the Russian Oil Industry

Pipelines, tanks and tankers

1878 – 1890s · Baku · The Caspian · The Volga

Baku on the Caspian was the largest oil field in the world in the 1880s and 1890s, producing at one point around half the world's oil.

And the infrastructure barely existed. Oil was carried from the wells to the refineries in barrels on carts, spilled and stolen along the way. It was stored in open earthen pits. It was shipped in barrels in the holds of ordinary ships.

Shukhov built the infrastructure.

In 1878 he designed and built the *first oil pipeline in Russia*, from the Balakhani field to the Baku refineries, and went on to design most of the others. He worked out the mathematics of pumping viscous oil through a pipe, published on it, and designed the pumping stations.

He designed the *riveted cylindrical storage tank* with a thin flat bottom resting on a sand bed — the arrangement that became standard worldwide and is still what an oil tank looks like. He calculated the optimum proportions to minimise steel for a given capacity.

He designed the *first Russian oil tankers*, carrying oil in the ship's own hull rather than in barrels, and the barges that took it up the Volga.

He designed the plant of the Baku refineries, and the steam boilers that carry his name, manufactured in thousands.

And he thought about what came out. Russian crude is *heavy*: rich in long-chain hydrocarbons and correspondingly poor in the light fractions.

In the 1890s what the market wanted was *kerosene* — paraffin, for lamps. The world lit itself with oil lamps, and kerosene was the product that mattered.

Distillation can only separate what is already in the barrel. If the crude does not contain much kerosene, distillation cannot produce it. And there was never enough.

Why this matters

Distillation can only separate what is already present, so a heavy crude simply cannot yield the light fraction a market wants.

You have the pipelines, the tanks and the shortage of kerosene. What is your question?

Ask Shukhov

• “What did Baku look like before the pipelines?”
• “Why is an oil tank shaped the way it is?”
• “Why can distillation not make more kerosene?”
• “What makes Russian crude heavy?”
• “How do you pump viscous oil a long way?”

Chapter 3 · Breaking the Long Molecules

The 1891 patent

1891 · Moscow · Baku

The patent Shukhov took out with *Sergei Gavrilov* in 1891 is the first statement of industrial *cracking*.

The idea: if the crude does not contain enough of the light fraction, *make* it. Take the heavy residue left after distillation — the long-chain molecules nobody wants — and break them into shorter ones.

The method: put the residue under *pressure*, and heat it in a tube well past its ordinary boiling point.

The pressure is essential and it is the clever part. Heat oil at atmospheric pressure and it simply boils away before it gets hot enough to decompose. Under pressure it stays liquid at temperatures far above its normal boiling point, and at those temperatures the long carbon chains *break*, more or less at random, into shorter fragments — which are exactly the light hydrocarbons the market wants.

So the process does not separate. It *converts*.

That is a different kind of operation from anything in refining before it, and it is why cracking matters. A barrel of crude has a fixed composition; cracking lets a refinery *change* that composition to match demand.

Shukhov had no idea *why* a molecule breaks where it does. Free radicals were not understood until the 1930s, and the chain mechanism of thermal cracking was worked out later still. He had a process that worked and no mechanism.

He also had no market. Russia in the 1890s had neither the capital nor the industrial base to exploit it, and the country was consumed by war and revolution in the decades that followed. The patent sat.

Why this matters

Cracking converts rather than separates: it lets a refinery change the composition of a barrel of oil to match what people actually want.

You have the pressure, the heat and the breaking chains. What would you ask?

Ask Shukhov

• “Why does the oil have to be under pressure?”
• “What is the difference between separating and converting?”
• “Where does a long molecule break?”
• “What was Gavrilov's contribution?”
• “Did you expect anyone to build it?”

Chapter 4 · Twenty-Two Years Later, and the Wrong Product

Burton, Standard Oil, and the arrival of the motor car

1913 – 1920s · Whiting, Indiana · Moscow

In 1913 *William Burton*, working for Standard Oil of Indiana, patented a thermal cracking process operating on broadly similar principles — heavy oil, heat, pressure — and Standard Oil built plants and made an enormous amount of money from it.

The difference between 1891 and 1913 is not the chemistry. It is the *market*.

In 1891 the fraction in demand was kerosene, for lamps. By 1913 the world had motor cars, and what it wanted was *petrol* — a fraction that had previously been something close to a waste product, too volatile for lamps and often burned off or dumped.

Demand for petrol was rising faster than any amount of crude could supply from distillation alone. Cracking was suddenly worth a fortune, because it could turn the heavy fractions nobody wanted into the light fraction everybody did.

Shukhov's patent was twenty-two years early — for a market that did not yet exist and a country that could not build it.

It was cited during the subsequent American litigation over the Burton patents. Whether it constituted prior art sufficient to invalidate them was argued; Standard Oil kept its position.

The general point is worth taking. An invention's value depends on *when* it arrives relative to a demand, and being early is a form of being wrong, commercially. Shukhov solved the problem correctly and solved it for lamp oil at the moment the world was about to want something else.

Cracking is now the central operation of a refinery. Catalytic cracking, developed in the 1930s and 1940s, uses a catalyst to run at lower temperatures with better control of the products, and it is what a modern refinery mostly does.

Every barrel of petrol in the world exists because somebody breaks long molecules into short ones.

Why this matters

Shukhov's patent was correct and twenty-two years early, which commercially is indistinguishable from being wrong.

You have the American patent and the fortune it made. What is your question?

Ask Shukhov

• “What changed between 1891 and 1913?”
• “Was petrol really a waste product before cars?”
• “Is being early the same as being wrong?”
• “What happened when your patent was cited in the American courts?”
• “What does catalytic cracking add?”

Chapter 5 · A Curve Made of Straight Rods

The hyperboloid, and staying after 1917

1896 – 1939 · Nizhny Novgorod · Moscow · Shabolovka

Shukhov's other invention is visible rather than chemical, and it is beautiful.

A *hyperboloid of one sheet* is a curved surface with a remarkable property: although it curves, it can be generated entirely by *straight lines*. Take a circle of straight rods, tilt them all at the same angle, anchor the top to a smaller circle rotated relative to the bottom, and the rods sweep out a curved waisted surface without a single rod being bent.

Shukhov saw the engineering consequence. Straight rods are cheap, easy to make and easy to transport. A curved lattice built from them is far stronger and lighter than a solid tower or a conventional frame, and it presents little resistance to wind.

He patented it and built the first at the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition of 1896 — a water tower, still standing today at Polibino.

He built around two hundred of them: water towers, lighthouses, ship masts, power line pylons.

The famous one is the *Shukhov radio tower* on the Shabolovka in Moscow, finished in 1922. It was designed at 350 metres, which would have exceeded the Eiffel Tower using a third of the steel; a severe steel shortage forced a reduction to 160 metres in six stacked sections. During construction a section collapsed while being raised; Shukhov was convicted and given a suspended death sentence, the execution deferred until the tower was completed. He finished it. The sentence was then annulled.

He also roofed the great Moscow railway stations — Kiyevsky, Kazansky — and the *GUM* department store on Red Square, with steel and glass shells that are still standing.

He stayed in Russia after 1917, when he could have left, and went on building for the Soviet state. He died in Moscow in February 1939, aged eighty-five, after an accident at home in which his clothing caught fire.

Why this matters

A hyperboloid curves while being made entirely of straight rods, which is why Shukhov's towers are stronger, lighter and cheaper than the alternatives.

You have the straight rods, the curve and the suspended sentence. What would you ask?

Ask Shukhov

• “How can a curved tower be made of straight rods?”
• “Why is that shape stronger and lighter?”
• “What was it like building under a suspended death sentence?”
• “Why stay in Russia after 1917?”
• “Which do you want to be remembered for — the tower or the patent?”

What Shukhov changed

Every barrel of petrol in the world exists because somebody breaks long molecules into short ones, and the first industrial statement of how to do it is Shukhov's 1891 patent with Sergei Gavrilov. He also built the first Russian oil pipeline, designed the cylindrical storage tank that became standard worldwide, and invented the hyperboloid lattice structure — a curved tower made entirely of straight rods — of which he built around two hundred.

A debate that continues

Whether Shukhov's 1891 patent constituted prior art invalidating William Burton's 1913 American cracking patents was argued in litigation and never resolved in his favour; and a great deal of his work appears in the record under his employer's name.

Keep exploring — ask Shukhov

• “What else would you have built with more steel?”
• “Does an invention have a right time?”
• “How much of what you designed carries your name?”

Related lives

• Wallace Carothers — Who Built The Giant Molecule
• Dmitri Mendeleev — Author of the Periodic Table
• James Watt — Who Found Where the Steam Was Wasted
• Marcellin Berthelot — Who Named the Heat Both Ways

Related themes

Crude oil and cracking · Fractional distillation · Structures and materials