Alexander Nikolayevich Lodygin

Background

Alexander Nikolayevich Lodygin was born on 18 October 1847 in the village of Stenshino in Tambov Governorate, a province of central Russia. That date is given in the Gregorian calendar; under the Julian calendar then used in Russia it corresponds to 6 October. His family belonged to an old noble lineage that traced its descent from Andrei Kobyla, the ancestor from whom the Romanov dynasty also descended, but its means were modest.

He grew up in the decade after the 1861 emancipation of Russian serfs, a period of wide social change in the Russian Empire. Between 1875 and 1878 he took part in the populist movement, the Narodniks, whose supporters sought to bring ideas of social reform to the peasantry.

After the February Revolution of 1917 he emigrated to the United States. He died in Brooklyn, New York, on 16 March 1923.

Education

Lodygin attended the Tambov Cadet School from 1859 to 1865. Cadet corps were military boarding schools in Imperial Russia, and completing a gymnasium or cadet corps course was required for entry into the junker schools that prepared men for commissions.

After the cadet school he served in the 71st Belev Regiment, an infantry unit of the Russian army. From 1866 to 1868 he studied at the Moscow Infantry School. Junker schools had been introduced in Russia in 1864 to train low-ranking military men for officer rank, and their graduates were regarded as forming a core of the army's command staff.

His educational records also list the Moscow Junker Infantry School beginning in 1867, which overlaps with his period at the Moscow Infantry School.

Career

After leaving the army, Lodygin worked as a mechanic at the Arms Factory in Tula. The works had been founded in 1712 by Peter the Great as the Tula Arsenal to supply weapons to the expanding Russian army, and by the eighteenth century it was regarded as a standard for Russian arms production. He held this post from 1869 to 1870.

In 1872 he applied for a Russian patent for his filament lamp, and the patent, No. 1619, was granted on 11 July 1874. In 1874 he founded the Electric Lighting Company, A.N. Lodygin and Co. His lamps entered a market contested by the arc lamps of Pavel Yablochkov and, later, by the incandescent lamps of Thomas Edison, and his invention did not prove commercially profitable.

From 1907 he worked as a teacher at the Electrotechnical Institute of Emperor Alexander III in Saint Petersburg. The institute had begun in 1886 as a technical school of the Post and Telegraph Department, was reorganized in 1891 as the first higher institution in Europe devoted to electrical engineering, and took the name of Emperor Alexander III in 1898. In the same year, 1907, he returned to Russia from the United States, where he had not found steady employment suited to his abilities.

During his years abroad he received several patents for incandescent bulbs and worked on aeronautics and other inventions. According to a relative's recollections, he met George Westinghouse at the 1889 Paris Exposition, and Westinghouse offered him consulting work for his company in the United States. He lived in Pittsburgh in the early 1890s, and in 1895 he married Alma Schmidt in Paris.

Because of health problems he declined a Soviet offer to work on the State Plan for Electrification of Russia in 1918.

Achievements

• Lodygin applied for a Russian patent for his filament lamp and also patented the invention in Austria, Britain, France, and Belgium. He used a very thin carbon rod placed under a bell-glass as the filament. He developed an incandescent lamp before Thomas Edison, although his lamp was not commercially profitable. Tungsten-filament lamps are the only design still in use, but in 1906 they were too expensive for general adoption.

• In 1871 Lodygin proposed an autonomous diving apparatus consisting of a steel mask, a natural rubber suit, an accumulator battery, and a device for the electrolysis of water. The diver was to breathe the oxygen-hydrogen mixture produced by electrolysis, and the design was very similar to modern scuba equipment. Several of his ideas were implemented long after his death.

• Lodygin's ideas for an electrical helicopter were used many years later by Igor Sikorsky, the Russian-born aviation pioneer. Lodygin had begun this work in 1872 by developing a source of electric light for an electrically powered aircraft.

Connections

In 1895 Lodygin married Alma Schmidt in Paris, after meeting her family in Pittsburgh. She was a German reporter and the daughter of an engineer, and during the family's years in the United States she worked as an accredited correspondent for a New York newspaper.

The couple had two daughters, Margarita, known as Rita, who was born in 1901, and Vera, born in 1902. Vera died in 1946 and Margarita in 1975.

Wife:

Alma Schmidt

German reporter and daughter of an engineer, born 1871 and died 1925.

Daughter:

Margarita Faust

Known as Rita; born in 1901 and died in 1975.

Daughter:

Vera McNally

Born in 1902 and died in 1946.

References

• Wikipedia English-language encyclopedia article covering his education, lamp patents, the Electric Lighting Company, and his later years in the United States.
• Lamptech: Alexander Nikolayevich Lodygin Biographical sketch by a lamp-industry historian covering his incandescent lamp patents from 1874 onward and his residence in Pittsburgh in the 1890s.
• Find a Grave Memorial record giving his birth and death dates, his spouse and children, and reference to his 1923 estate record in Kings County.
• Wikipedia (German): Alexander Nikolajewitsch Lodygin German-language article with family details, including his 1895 marriage to Alma Schmidt, the birth of his daughters, and his 1907 return to Russia.