5 cool ideas from Russian engineers from the past that are being used now

1. Monorail

Now you can ride a monorail, a railway without two load-bearing rails, in Moscow. It is enough to take one of the stations of the 13th metro line. Similarity of such transport appeared in the village of Myachkovo near Moscow back in 1820 - even before the first steam locomotive was launched in the Russian Empire.

The idea of ​​the project belongs to the inventor Ivan Elmanov. Its design consisted of cast-iron rods mounted on stone pillars, trolleys and horses. The latter were just pulling the wagon. And so that puddles and dirt would not interfere with the movement of animals, sewers were provided on the sides of the structure.

The invention was called "Road on poles". The engineer assumed that his transport would help to carry heavy loads faster and less labor-intensive, because it “destroyed the heaviness”, that is, redistributed the weight favorably. According to his calculations, one horse pulling a monorail is capable of taking away as many at a time as 16 animals harnessed to standard carts.

Elmanov's idea, however, did not find support, so everything stopped only at the stage of a small prototype. A year later, a similar design offered Englishman Henry Palmer. And in 1825, the first full-fledged monorail for the transport of goods was launched in Great Britain.

2. Maglev

He is a train on a magnetic cushion. The first examples of such transport appeared in 1979, and simultaneously in two countries - the Federal Republic of Germany and the USSR. German inventors demonstrated maglev at an international exhibition, Soviet inventors tested their version at a special training ground in Ramenskoye. Engineers in the Union began to develop a new high-speed public transport in 1975. The first sample of the car was named TP-01, and five versions were created in total.

The main advantages of maglev are high speed and wear resistance. The train keeps afloat due to the electromagnetic field and does not touch the rails. Therefore, there is no friction, and the only limiting force is aerodynamic drag.

The maximum maglev capability depends on the strength of the magnets used. Soviet models were designed to drive at a speed of about 100 km / h. The first to test the transport were the inhabitants of the Armenian SSR. They planned to lay a route from Yerevan to Abovyan, along which TP-05 cars would travel. By the way, their speed planned develop up to 180 km / h. But it was not possible to launch the maglev - the Spitak earthquake prevented it. And in the late 80s, the project of Soviet engineers was frozen.

Now maglevs are used as public transport in Japan, South Korea and China. In Russia, such trains are planning launch by 2025.

3. electric motor

The electric motor today provides the operation of many structures - from industrial machines to passenger elevators. And at the origins of its creation was the German Moritz Herman Jacobi: he was the first model of such a device created in 1834 in Königsberg. At the same time, other engineers pored over the development of an engine that converts electrical energy into mechanical energy, but their solutions were difficult to put into practice.

Jacobi's invention quickly became famous and attracted the attention of the scientific community. As a result, the scientist was invited to work in St. Petersburg. Over time, he received Russian citizenship and took the name of Boris Semyonovich Jacobi.

After the move, the inventor did not stop working on his device and even offered try it out in practice. The idea was approved by Nicholas I: the emperor created a "Commission for the application of electromagnetism to the movement of machines according to the method of Professor Jacobi" and allocated 50 thousand rubles for the task - impressive at that time the amount. As a result, in 1838, a boat operated by an electric motor sailed along the Neva. There were 12 people on board, the transport was moving at a speed of 2 km / h and managed to swim both with the flow and against it.

Then Jacobi decided to refine the design, and a year later the ship again entered the river, and its speed increased four times. However, the power of the engine was still not suitable for tasks larger than calm walks on the water. In 1842, the Commission was closed, and engine tests were postponed until breakthrough technologies appeared - the discoveries occurred after the death of Jacobi.

4. Mobile phone

The first mobile phone counts Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. The device weighed a little over a kilogram and looked like a massive tube with a bulky keyboard and a retractable antenna. But he had a little-known predecessor. In 1957, the portable telephone LK-1 was created by the Soviet radio engineer Leonid Kupriyanovich. Then he received patent for "Device for calling and switching radiotelephone communication channels".

One charge of the LK-1 battery was enough for about a day. The device received and transmitted signals at a distance of 25–30 kilometers. And work for him helped ATP is an automatic telephone radio station: it communicated with the city station, and the conversation from the mobile phone went over the regular network.

The model was equipped with a handset familiar to landlines, a receiver base with a disk dial and two folding antennas. weighed the device is three kilograms, so it was not very convenient to carry the LK-1 with you. Kupriyanovich himself understood this, so he actively worked on improving his mobile phone.

A year later, the engineer reduced its weight to 500 grams and added the option of charging the battery in the car. And in 1961, he showed a gadget weighing only 70 grams - two times lighter than most modern smartphones. The range has increased to 80 kilometers. But in the end, the mobile never got into mass production.

5. Smart House

The idea of ​​a controlled house, in which all electronics are interconnected, came to science fiction writers and scientists of the past in different countries. And Soviet researchers were no exception. One of their solutions, the 1987 SPHINX project, is very similar to the technology we use today. Developed him at the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics.

In the SPHINX project described different devices, some of which are easy to recognize. For example, a bracelet with a video effector is a smart watch, and an electronic card with voice control is a smart speaker. As planned by scientists, all information, such as video content, was stored by a processor with disks, and with the development technologies, portable media would be replaced by internal storage with sufficient memory. The devices were connected to each other by a radio signal, and they offered to control the “smart home” through a remote control that responded to both button presses and voice commands.

The researchers assumed that the house would look like this already in 2000 - they made a mistake with the calculations for only a couple of decades. The SPHINX itself was never made a reality: the development stopped only on texts, drawings and layouts.