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Ivan Kulibin was born in 1735 into the family of a petty flour merchant
in Nizhny Novgorod. His father taught him to read and write, but was not
really eager to give his son a more sound education. Wishing the boy to  follow
in his footsteps, father used Ivan as a salesman, but the boy used his
every spare moment to distract himself from all that drag by making all
kinds of things with his pencil knife. Once he even cut out something like
a tiny wooden mill whose every part was for real. Ivan showed the
mill to his father. Father said it was all kid stuff and good for nothing
and, worked up, smashed the thing against the floor. It would take a lot
more pressure, however, to nip in the bud Ivan’s insatiable lust for all
things new and his early penchant for inventions.
Ivan Kulibin loved all things mechanical, especially clocks and watches. Once he saw at his friend’s place a wall clock with a secret. At a designated time of day, its tiny doors swung open and a wooden cuckoo sprung out cuckooing exactly as many times as the figure on the face indicated. Ivan implored the merchant to lend him the clock which he wanted to open up and see how it worked. He then took the thing apart and made an all-wood replica. The thing didn’t go of course simply because it’s maker lacked the right tools to make it work. Shortly after, during a chance visit to Moscow, Kulibin dropped by a local watchmaker and asked him to reveal the secret of making clocks that worked. The man proved a real chum, made a clean breast of his trade’s secrets and even gave Ivan a set of used tools. Back home, Ivan got down to the business of making his own clocks and, before very long, he even opened a clock-making workshop, the first in the city. Learning that Empress Catherine the Second was coming to town, Kulibin fancied to make a musical clock to amuse Her Majesty. Catherine enjoyed the gift immensely and immediately made the author the head of the Academy of Sciences mechanical workshops. Working at the Academy, Kulibin asserted himself as a highly versatile master churning out a slew of innovative acoustic and optical instruments, an electricity generator, a barometer, thermometers, microscopes, the list goes forever. The Empress kept showering him with orders to think up all kinds of fancy lighting and fireworks to keep her fun-loving courtiers happy. Kulibin wanted more, however. He always thought big, dreaming about larger-than-life projects to benefit the whole country. He designed a vault-supported bridge, which looked far into the future, a muscle-driven vehicle and a current-driven ship which made the foreigners salivate. Enjoying as she was their undisguised admiration, however, the Empress never really implemented a single such project, only showering their author with money and gifts. Realizing the tragedy of the whole situation, Kulibin kept working on devising things that could be successfully used both in the economic and military fields. One such invention was the famous Kulibin Lantern, the prototype of the modern-day searchlight. The Lantern created a havoc in St.Petersburg. Seeing an unusually bright lamp lighting up the Neva embankment one dark autumn night, the citizens panicked and started praying fervently only to find out that the light was actually coming from a lantern shining through Kulibin’s apartment window. Ivan Kulibin came up with other types of lanterns for ships, to light up corridors and even horse-drawn carriages, but he proved a poor businessman. Indeed, he could have made a fortune on his lanterns alone, but he never did, always thinking about new inventions. Others were less romantic though and were busily stealing the fruits of his restless mind. Kulibin was the first to invent the prosthesis he called “mechanical legs”. He sent the model to the Medical Academy in St.Petersburg. Just as the academy’s highbrow experts were taking their time deciding when and where to test out Kulibin’s invention, some smart Frenchman stole the whole idea during Russia’s 1812 war with Napoleon and sold with profit. Which means that the subsequent mass production of artificial limbs in the West was based on a stolen Russian idea. After Catherine’s death, the new Emperor, failing to fully appreciate Kulibin’s unique talent, sent him back to his native Nizhny Novgorod, but even there, the inventor was bubbling with new ideas, one being a longtime dream to build a perpetuum mobile – an engine that would never stop. No matter how hard Kulibin worked, however, he never managed to build one and eventually died in poverty. Ivan Kulibin tragedy was that he was born too early and his daring and futuristic projects by far exceeded the economic limitations of his time… ________________ Illustration: N.Kochin, “Kulibin”, “The Life of Famous People”, Molodaya Gvardiya, Moscow, 1957 |