Background
Nikolai Timofeevich Beliaev was born on June 26, 1878, in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was the son of General T. M. Beliaev and Maria Nikolayevna Septjurina.
Никола́й Тимофе́евич Беля́ев
historian metallurgist military scientist author
Nikolai Timofeevich Beliaev was born on June 26, 1878, in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was the son of General T. M. Beliaev and Maria Nikolayevna Septjurina.
From 1902 to 1905 Nikolai Beliaev studied at the Mikhailovskaya Artilleriiskaya Academy, a graduate school of military engineering in St. Petersburg.
Beliaev remained at the Mikhailovskaya Artilleriiskaya Academy until 1914, first as a tutor and later (from 1909) as professor of metallurgical chemistry. Wounded early in World War I, in 1915 Belaiew was sent to England in connection with munitions supply; he remained there after the Revolution, working as an industrial consultant. In 1934 he moved to Paris.
Belaiew’s papers have a strong historical bent. He claimed inspiration from his famed teacher, D. K. Chernoff, and from P. P. Anosov, who had established the manufacture of Damascus steel swords in Russia in 1841. Beliaev himself wrote a classic paper on the history and metallurgy of Damascus steel (1918).
In 1944 he studied, in engineering steels, the coalescence of iron carbide that the Oriental swordmakers had unknowingly achieved through their methods of forging.
He showed that the geometric Widmanstatten structure, which had been discovered in 1804 in meteorites, could also be produced in steel under certain conditions of cooling. He achieved the right structure by accident, because a foreman, anxious to get on with production, disregarded instructions and removed the steel ingot from the furnace before it was fully transformed.
Beliaev's major achievement in the field of metallurgy was in his detailed analysis of the Widmanstätten structure which strongly influenced an important decade of metallurgical thinking. His scientific contributions are mainly in his first book, Kristallizatsia, struktura i svoystva stali pri medlennom okhlazhdenii (1909), which provided the basis for several later papers in French, German, and English as well as for a small book in English (1922).
His remarkable input in the field of metallurgical research was greatly recognized, and at the ceremonial meeting of the British Institute of Steel and Iron in London, he was awarded the golden Bessemer medal. In 1933 he was awarded a Gold medal for his research in metallurgy issued by the Corporation of Russian artillery scientists abroad.
(Volumes 19-21)
1939(Volume 97)
1918In his religious affiliation, Nikolai Beliaev was a Russian Orthodox. He remained fully dedicated to his religious belief even after his emigration abroad and was a member of the parish council of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris. In 1948, he participated in the establishment of the Russian Orthodox Association in Paris (Association cultuelle orthodoxe russe à Paris).
Nikolai Beliaev was an Honorable member of the Association technique de Fonderie and Societe des Ingenieurs-Docteurs de France. He was also a member of the Russian Economic Society in London, England. In 1934 he was a member of the Russian Academic Group in Paris. He was an honorary member of the Association of Russian Certified Engineers and a member of the Society of Russian Artillery Officers in France.
Nikolai Beliaev was married twice. His first wife's name was Helena Vladimirovna Treyman. His second wife's name was Ljudmila Alexandrovna Durova. He had a daughter Anastasija who was born in 1908.
Dmitry Konstantinovich Chernov (November 1, 1839 Saint-Petersburg - January 2, 1921 Yalta) was a Russian metallurgist. He is known by his discovery of polymorphous transformations in steel and the iron-carbon phase diagram. This discovery is the beginning of scientific metallography.
