Gleb Evgenyevich Kotelnikov
Gleb Kotelnikov ( Russian Глеб Евгеньевич Котельников * January 18 . Jul / thirtieth January 1872 greg. In St. Petersburg ; † 22. November 1944 in Moscow ) invented the backpack parachute .
Life
His father was a mathematician and a physicist. In 1894 he graduated from the Kiev Military Academy and was in military service until 1910. After that, he dreamed of an acting career and went back to Saint Petersburg.
After the pilot Lev Mazijewitsch crashed his plane at an air show there in September 1910, Kotelnikov was shaken and thought about a parachute. At first he tried to put it in a helmet. The parachute should have a diameter of at least 7.5 meters, but no longer fit into a helmet.
Then he had the idea of the backpack parachute and he first built a metal backpack. However, the military was skeptical. Since the tests with one model were not convincing, he built a full- size model in 1912, which he named RK-1 (Russki, Kotelnikowa, Model 1). Since the military refused to test it out of an airplane, he tried to brake a car with it, which ultimately convinced the military.
In June 1912 a test jumper in Salizi, near Gatchina , survived several jumps from a balloon from different heights. On October 9th, the first attempt was made from an airplane. In January 1913, his business partner, Wilhelm Augustowitsch Lomach, presented it at a competition in Paris . A student jumped several times from a 53 m high bridge and landed safely. Kotelnikov was absent from the competition, and Lomakh took the opportunity to sell the two test parachutes. From the middle of the year, copies of the RK-1 were widespread in Europe.
During the First World War the government decided to order a larger number of RK-1s. In 1923 Kotelnikow modernized the RK-1 to the RK-2 and patented it. The RK-3 from 1924 had an elastic backpack. This and the successor model RK-4 formed the basic equipment for the first paratrooper units deployed in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s . Later, Kotelnikow tried to construct load parachutes .
During the Second World War , Kotelnikov lived in Leningrad, where he survived the blockade. He then went to Moscow, where he died in November 1944.
Kotelnikow was awarded the Red Star Order (1924).
Web links
- http://minaev.blogspot.com/2007/11/november-9-in-russian-history.html
- Большая советская энциклопедия (russ.)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kotelnikow, Gleb Evgenyevich |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Котельников, Глеб Евгеньевич (Russian) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Russian inventor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 30, 1872 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | St. Petersburg |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 22, 1944 |
| Place of death | Moscow |