Fyodor Pirozki

Fyodor Pirozki

Fyodor Apollonowitsch Pirozki ( Russian Фёдор Аполлонович Пироцкий * February 17 ^jul. / March 1 ^greg. 1845 in Ujesd Lochvitsa (Ukrainian Lokhvytsia ), Poltava Governorate , † February 28 ^jul. / 12 March ^greg. 1898 in Oleschky / Олешки , Taurian Governorate ) was a Russian engineer of Ukrainian descent. He was an officer in the service of the artillery, but in his spare time he experimented with electricity, especially electric drives.

Electric drive for rail vehicles

Beach promenade and unused tram tracks in Sestrorezk around 1900

From 1874, Pirozki experimented for several years with the transmission of electrical energy over longer distances. An abandoned one-kilometer-long siding in Sestrorezk served as a test object . The rails were isolated from the ground. The electrical supply was provided by a Gramme direct current generator. During the tests, he found that this principle can be used to drive smaller electric motors, for example for lorries. In August 1876 he published his results in the Ingenieur-Journal and made them available to Siemens, among others .

From September 3, 1880, Pirozki demonstrated his system on an approximately 1 km long suburban line of the Saint Petersburg tram network near Saint Petersburg . He had built an electric motor into one of the usual double-decker horse-drawn trams and let it drive on the route with its power. He advertised his system by referring to the inexpensive retrofitting costs (no masts, no center rail). In 1881 his results were presented at the International Electricity Exhibition in Paris . Under his system, Volk's Electric Railway was opened in Brighton , Great Britain in 1883 .

Further life

Even before the railway drive experiments, he had designed electrical ventilation for ovens. In 1881 he laid the first underground power line from St. Petersburg. He published proposals for an underground central electricity supply.

In 1888 he quit his military service and moved to Oleschki in the south of Ukraine, where he lived on his state pension.

See also

• History of the electric drive of rail vehicles
• Busbar

literature

• Ретро-трамвай - петербургская классика :: Биография Фёдора Пироцкого (biography of Pirotskis in retro.tramway.ru Petro-tramwaj - peterburskaja klassika) 2006
• Sergey Chepurin, Arkady Nikolayenko Сестрорецкая и Приморская железные дороги (Sestrorezker and Primorskaya Railways) 2007, accessed on February 21, 2009
• auc.org.ua accessed on 2007
• Formally a forum post, in fact a long article on Russian tram history ( Memento from January 18, 2012 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Semjon Schuchardin et al. a .: General history of technology from 1870 to around 1920 . VEB Fachbuchverlag, Leipzig 1984, p. 49, 175 .
2. ↑ Semjon Schuchardin et al. a .: General history of technology from 1870 to around 1920 . VEB Fachbuchverlag, Leipzig 1984, p. 176 .