Gern, Ottomar Borisovich - ( November 16 [28], 1827 [note 1] , Vitebsk province - November 9 [21], 1882 , Menton ) - military engineer, shipbuilder, one of the first creators of Russian submarines, lieutenant general ( August 30, 1879 ) [link 1]
Gern, Ottomar Borisovich | ||||||
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Gern O.B. | ||||||
Date of Birth | November 16 (28), 1827 | |||||
Place of Birth | Vitebsk province , Russian Empire | |||||
Date of death | November 9, 1882 (54 years old) | |||||
Place of death | Menton , France | |||||
Affiliation | Russian empire | |||||
Type of army | Engineer troops | |||||
Years of service | 1841 - 1882 | |||||
Rank | lieutenant general | |||||
Battles / Wars |
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Awards and prizes |
Content
Biography
Ottomar Gern was born on November 16, 1827 in the Vitebsk province of the Principality of the Polish Russian Empire , into a Polish noble family with German roots [reference 2] . Gern was an engineer who served in the maritime department for most of his life. For many years, his teacher and patron were the famous Baron Totleben and Grand Duke Constantine . [link 3]
In 1841, he entered the Chief Engineering School as a conductor and, promoted to lieutenant officer on August 10, 1844 , transferred to officer classes, and on September 23, 1845 , he was made an exam for second lieutenant .
September 3, 1846 , Mr .. released into the service in the Engineering Corps with the transfer to the guard (warrant officer in the L.- Guards Engineer Battalion) and the secondment to the Main Engineering School (later renamed the Nikolaev Engineering School) as a tutor of fortification. He was engaged in teaching activities until the 1860s. On August 25, 1847 , he was appointed teacher of fortification at the same school. On July 15, 1848 , he was promoted to second lieutenant and on December 6, 1850 , he was promoted to lieutenant .
In the summer of 1851 he surveyed construction and practical engineering work in the fortresses of Dinaburg , Warsaw , Ivangorod , Brest , Kiev and Bobruisk , and in the summer of 1853 he was sent to the fortress Bobruisk, Kiev, Brest, Ivangorod, Warsaw and Novogeorgievsk to assist the head of the Nikolaev Engineering School in the execution of the assignment entrusted to him.
From June 9 to November 9, 1854 he was on a business trip in the Revel fortress, put in a defensive position, and on December 6 of the same year he was promoted to headquarters captain . With the rank of captain (from April 17, 1855 ), he was approved as an associate professor of fortification on November 14, 1858 . April 3, 1860 promoted to colonel with the transfer to military engineers. In addition to the Engineering School and Academy, he taught fortification at the Nikolaev Academy of the General Staff (from August 25, 1856 to October 17, 1860 ).
Until 1869 , Mr .. consisted of a consultative member of the artillery committee, established to find technical means to prepare new needs for armament and navy weapons.
In production on January 1, 1869 , he was promoted to major general as a member of the Technical Committee of the Main Engineering Directorate, soon renamed the Engineering Committee, and was in this position until his death.
In 1870 , during the Franco-Prussian war, he was sent to the theater of operations, after which he presented an extensive report on all the fortifications of the warring parties. The King of Prussia awarded him the Order of the Red Eagle , 2nd art. with a star and swords.
On February 19, 1871 , Gern was enrolled in His Majesty's retinue . In 1878 , for participating in the Russian-Turkish war he was awarded the Order of St. Vladimir , 2nd art. with swords. On August 30, 1879 , he was promoted to lieutenant general .
In addition to the above-mentioned orders, he was awarded the Russian highest orders: St. Stanislav 1st Art. ( 1873 ), St. Anne 1st Art. ( 1876 ) and St. Vladimir 3rd art. ( 1871 ) and several foreign.
He died on November 9, 1882 in Menton . After the funeral in St. Petersburg in the Lutheran Church of St. Peter and Paul buried in Moscow in the Novodevichy Convent . [link 1]
Submarine Design
In mid-March 1854, an English squadron, entering the Gulf of Finland , declared a blockade of the Russian coast and adjacent waters. In mid-June, a combined Anglo-French fleet appeared in front of Kronstadt . In the Baltic, with superior power, the Allies attacked the islands and coastal villages. This tactic did not bring them much success, but kept the Russians in constant tension, forcing them to strengthen their defenses in anticipation of enemy landings.
During these months, Lieutenant Gern was sent to Revel to assist in the construction of defensive structures.
The tactics of the blockade of Russian coastal fortresses, which were used by the Allied fleet, had weaknesses. Blocking ships, concentrated in areas of coastal fortifications, were relatively inactive and were quite close to the coast. Therefore, they themselves could be the target of an attack. All that was needed was for the attacker to imperceptibly approach the squadron. This condition was met by a small submarine, from which neither high speed nor long range of scuba diving was required. [link 4]
Submarine No. 1
Already in July, Gern submitted a design for his own fire submarine. For the lack of sufficient time and money, the submarine was conceived of wood, in the size of 4.2x1.35x1.35 meters. Its hull consisted of two unequal parts - in the small, bow part, there was a “mine”, that is, a powder charge, which had to be somehow attached to the bottom of the enemy ship. In the rest, most of the submarine, the crew, the flywheel of rotation of the propeller, and surveillance and navigation equipment were located.
In August, the highest permission was received by Emperor Nicholas I and 1000 rubles in silver for the construction of this submarine. Ottomar Gern and his assistants immediately set to work. Already in the autumn of 1854, trial dives were carried out in the port - under water it moved at a speed of 1.5 km / h and there were no accidents during the tests.
The selection committee was satisfied and reported to the Minister of War that the submarine was in line with the assignment and the project could be significantly improved if the submarine was built from metal, and the commission of the Marine Department, led by Admiral Fullon, recognized the submarine of Ottomar Gern as "very mediocre" and into the mass production is not recommended. In general, it was decided that the military engineer Ottomar Gern should build submarines in the future, but from iron. [link 4]
Submarine No. 2
The development of the second submarine project Ottomar (Konstantin) Borisovich Gern ( 1827 - 1882 ) was completed on June 2, 1855. The military engineering department issued an order for the construction of a new submarine to the Frikke Brothers Mechanical Plant, located in St. Petersburg , on Vasilyevsky Island. Already on September 5, 1855 , she was ready for testing.
The displacement of the boat was 8 tons, its length was 5 meters, width 1.1 meters, height 2.5 meters. The case was riveted from 3 mm iron sheets, without a set, by joining sheets in grooves and joints. Structurally, it consisted of two parts (upper and lower), similar to two boats, interconnected by their internal volumes. At the same time, the lower part had sharp contours in the extremities, and the upper part (“boat” turned upside down) was, as it were, “flat-bottomed”.
At the level of the connection line of the upper and lower parts, two wooden platforms were arranged to accommodate a crew of 4 people. In the upper part of the boat were the main mechanisms (a flywheel with a propeller shaft gearbox, a ventilation pump, a binnacle of a magnetic compass). Two sailors using a flywheel rotated a two-blade propeller. The course control was carried out by means of a vertical rudder, the steering wheels from the tiller of which went to the helm in the center of the boat.
In the middle of the upper part of the case there was a cutout closed by a glass inspection cap. The cap was protected by an iron grate. The cutout was also used as an entrance hatch. In the lower part of the hull between the two transverse bulkheads there was a lock chamber. In its bottom, a hatch was arranged for the diver to exit, there were also viewing windows and a niche for the underwater anchor. When diving, water ballast was taken directly into the hold of the boat (that is, into its lower part) through an overboard valve.
The armament was a powder mine, which had the shape of a cone, attached to the bow of the submarine. Its buoyancy slightly exceeded zero. According to the idea of O. B. Gerna, the diver was to use a hand drill to attach a mine to the underwater part of the enemy ship. Then the firewall should retreat to a safe distance and detonate the mine with an electrical impulse from a galvanic battery.
The intake of fresh air into the housing was ensured by a piston pump connected mechanically to a flywheel that rotated the propeller shaft. Rubber ventilation pipes were held to the surface using all the same floats. The immersion depth was changed by additional intake or pumping of water from the hold.
In September 1855 , the boat underwent two-week sea trials on the Malaya Neva, which were carried out by a crew led by captain-lieutenant P.P. Kruzenshtern, grandson of the famous admiral I.F. Kruzenshtern . Tests have shown that seawater penetrates the inside of the hull through riveted seams.
After that, the boat was raised to the wall of Galerny Island, where it stood the whole next year. Only in the winter of 1857 the submarine was taken on a sleigh to the Izhora plant. There, three-millimeter iron sheets of the case were replaced with thicker ones and connected to each other not by one but by two rows of rivets (they made an almost new case). The total cost of the boat was (with the replacement of the skin on a thicker) 4380 rubles.
However, repeated tests took place in St. Petersburg only in the autumn of 1861. This time, the submarine was well-controlled, there was no leaking hull. But its speed was too low, and the attachment of a mine to the bottom of the target vessel was practically impossible. Later, they unsuccessfully tried to convert the boat into a diving bell.
The leadership of the military engineering department suggested that O.B. Gern revise the project again in order to provide the submarine with a single-stroke mechanical engine.
Until 1872, the submarine was stored in the St. Petersburg New Admiralty, after which it was scrapped. [link 5]
Submarine No. 3
Although submarine No. 2 turned out to be “in its present form unusable for any use,” as Minister of War D. A. Milyutin estimated, O. B. Gern designed a new boat in the winter of 1862/1863. Emperor Alexander II authorized the construction of a new boat according to the design of Colonel Gern at the Admiralty Izhora factories.
Although neither drawings nor a detailed description of the boat were found, its structure can be judged by indirect data. The boat had a sealed hull. Aft of the middle compartment of the boat was intended to install the engine. The bow of the vertical steering wheel was located. Portholes were cut into the sides and deck of the boat. The mass of the hull was approximately 5t. The main innovation of the boat was to be a gas (ammonia) machine, designed by V.F. Petrushevsky . However, bench tests of the motor failed.
The new unit was completed by the fall, but with a manual drive to the propeller shaft. Its construction cost the military department 7,000 rubles. The experiments took place in the autumn of that year in Kolpino , in the water area of a large factory pond. The experiments were quite successful. The main drawback was considered a small move. [link 4]
Submarine No. 4
Gern was looking for an efficient mechanical engine to move under water. He drew attention to the prospects of electric cars, but the lack of compact batteries at that time made the use of such machines impossible. When it became known that in France captain Bourgeois was testing a Plongeur air-engineered submarine designed by him, O.B. Gern went there, taking a direct part in its trials.
Having carefully studied the design of the air engine, he used his stay in France to order a number of Parisian companies to order several experimental engines, including those operating on compressed air. Enriched with the ideas of French inventors, Gern, on his own initiative, developed the project of PL No. 4, which took into account both his own experience and the experience of foreign designers.
The new project interested the Ministry of the Sea. The construction of a submarine ordered by the Alexandrovsky Plant (later the Proletarsky Zavod) in St. Petersburg , which, according to the tactical and technical data, exceeded all its earlier projects, was completed in 1867. In a constructive sense, it was a significant step forward in the development of Russian submarine shipbuilding. The hull of the submarine, made of metal, was a spindle-shaped body 12 m long and 2 m in diameter. The total displacement is 25 tons, the working depth is 2 m. The boat was a single hull with one flat and two spherical waterproof bulkheads and internal ballast tanks. The basis of the power plant, designed with the calculation of the possibility of working as a steam engine and a pneumatic engine, was a combined two-cylinder machine with a capacity of 6 hp [link 5]
The construction of the submarine ended in 1867 , the tests were carried out in the Italian pond of the port of Kronstadt for 9 years. During this time, the designer made a number of improvements. So, for example, the Shpakovsky nozzle had to be replaced with a more efficient one, and the steering device was improved. O. B. Gern himself designed and built a large torpedo (weight 5 tons, length 7 m, diameter 1 m) at the Byrd plant in St. Petersburg, although it was a very slow-moving torpedo, and also suggested the idea of mounting it outside under the hull of the submarine.
As a result of the improvements, the submarine No. 4 was well controlled during testing by the mid-1870s, but in the underwater position it could only swim under the air motor - it was not possible to seal the firebox reliably, therefore during the dive to the depth at which the ends of the ventilation pipes were hidden under water , gases burst into compartments. Meanwhile, having not received practical results from the experiments and studies of O. B. Gern, the Military Engineering Department began to lose interest in diving altogether. In 1876 , an order was given to stop all work on the grounds that
"... from the results of experiments conducted over many years, scuba diving is very difficult, and even if the question regarding the design of all complex mechanisms is successfully resolved, this swimming is always dangerous for people, depending on many unforeseen accidents."
The sudden death of captain-lieutenant P.P. Kruzenshtern, who was a scuba diving enthusiast and more than 20 years commander of the boats of O. B. Gern, also influenced the cessation of further tests to some extent. Having lost such an active assistant and having lost support from the manager of the Military Engineering Department, Lieutenant General E.I. Totleben, Ottomar Borisovich Gern, by then himself promoted to general, ceased to engage in submarines. [link 6]
Inventory Results
- He designed and built the world's first submarine, which was a spindle-shaped body.
- The first to use transverse spherical bulkheads, dividing the hull into waterproof compartments.
- The first in Russia to install a propeller on a submarine as a propeller.
- For the first time in the practice of underwater shipbuilding, he used a pneumatic power plant capable of operating in a combined cycle to move a submarine.
- Designed a propeller with rotary blades.
- For the first time in the practice of Russian underwater shipbuilding, he tried to carry out comprehensive air regeneration.
- He designed and built a torpedo of his own design.
- His submarine number 2 was the first equipped with a magnetic compass with a special deflector. [link 6]
Notes
- Comments
- ↑ according to the form in 1824
- Sources
- ↑ 1 2 Chulkov N.P. Gern, Ottomar Borisovich // Russian Biographical Dictionary : in 25 volumes. - SPb. - M. , 1896-1918.
- ↑ WHO WAS OTTOMAR GERN? lennusadam.eu.
- ↑ Oleg Izmailov. The owners of John Hughes . donjetsk.com.
- ↑ 1 2 3 Brine I.R. Underwater firewalls of O.B.Gern // Gangut: Sat. - SPb. : Gangut, 2008. - No. 47 . - S. 46-66 .
- ↑ 1 2 Submarines O.B. Gerna . www.deepstorm.ru.
- ↑ 1 2 I.A. Bykhovsky. Submarine O.B. Gerna . book.uraic.ru.
Links
- Chulkov N.P. Gern, Ottomar Borisovich // Russian Biographical Dictionary : in 25 volumes. - SPb. - M. , 1896-1918.
- WHO WAS OTTOMAR GERN? lennusadam.eu.
- Oleg Izmailov. The owners of John Hughes . donjetsk.com.
- Formal list of the Nikolaev Engineering School for 1860 No. 3480. - department. Arch. Ch. Headquarters, 1861.
- War Department. 1864. List of colonels by seniority. Fixed on June 3rd. . - St. Petersburg: Military Printing House, 1864. - P. 558. - ISBN 1864009261233. Archived June 20, 2012 on the Wayback Machine
- War Department. 1865. List of colonels by seniority. Fixed on May 3rd. . - St. Petersburg: Military Printing House, 1865. - S. 636. - ISBN 1865009611012. Archived June 20, 2012 on the Wayback Machine
- War Department. 1869. List of senior generals, amended on February 1. . - St. Petersburg: Military Printing House, 1869. - S. 958. - ISBN 1869009271233.
- War Department. 1873. List of generals by seniority, amended on November 1. . - St. Petersburg: Military Printing House, 1873. - S. 915. - ISBN 18730092712365.
- War Department. 1881. List of generals by seniority. Fixed on March 1st. . - St. Petersburg: Military Printing House, 1881. - S. 915. - ISBN 188100927120221.
- VK Nikolay Mikhailovich. 1 // Moscow Necropolis. - St. Petersburg: type. M.M.Stasyulevich you. Ostr., 5l., 28, 1907. - S. 1001.
- Obituary // Suvorin A. S. New Time: Newspaper. - St. Petersburg, 1882. - No. 246 .
- Glinotsky N.P. Historical outline of the Nikolaev Academy of the General Staff . - St. Petersburg: type. The headquarters of the troops of the Guard and St. Petersburg. military man. okr., 1882 .-- S. 793.