Troitsky, Dmitry Semenovich

Born October 21, 1857 in Krasnoyarsk in the family of a priest .

After graduating from the Krasnoyarsk classical gymnasium, he entered the Irkutsk infantry cadet school . Since August 22, 1878 in military service. September 13, 1878 he graduated from college in the first category, promoted to ensign and enlisted in the Krasnoyarsk local battalion ^[1] .

In the early 1880s he served in the Kiev engineer battalion, then in the railway battalion in the city of Baranavichy, Minsk province . January 1, 1885 promoted to lieutenant . He was sent to St. Petersburg to study electrical courses, after which he was appointed head of the serf telegraph of Kronstadt , located at the headquarters of the fortress on Posadskaya Street. In 1893 he was promoted to headquarters captain , on August 1, 1897 - to captains ^[1] .

Since the fall of 1898, he participated in experiments on wireless communications between Fort Konstantin and the Kronstadt Naval Telegraph. In May 1899, according to the program agreed with A. S. Popov (who was on a business trip in Switzerland ), D. S. Troitsky and engineer P. N. Rybkin tested the antenna according to the A. Slaby scheme, but it was not possible to establish a connection between forts “Milyutin” and “Konstantin”. On May 20, on the advice of Troitsky, Rybkin began to check the serviceability of the elements of the receiving device at Fort Milyutin using his head phone . When you turn on the phone with the coherer in parallel, Rybkin suddenly heard signals from Fort Konstantin. After that (May 29, 1899), Troitsky, by the same scheme, received hearing signals from a ship located at a distance of 26 km ^[2] . So the “coherer detection effect” was discovered - the possibility of receiving Morse code by ear. For the first time in Russia, telegraph signals were heard through a headphone at a considerable distance from the spark transmitter. In the summer of 1899, Popov used the “parallel scheme” of Rybkin-Troitsky to file a patent application and received patents in the UK, France and then in Russia ^{[3] [4]} .

In June 1899, Troitsky, together with Rybkin and Popov, took part in experiments on radio communications in the territory of the St. Petersburg Aeronautical Park . Rybkin in a balloon gondola rose into the air with a telephone receiver and received “by ear” radio signals transmitted from the ground by Popov and Troitsky. In the fall of 1899, Captain Troitsky equipped a telegraph team with a telegraph station in Oranienbaum , making it possible to continue the experiments between the Kronstadt maritime telegraph and the Oranienbaum coast ^[5] .

From November 1899 to April 1900, Troitsky, along with Popov, Rybkin, and A. A. Remmert , participated in the world's first practical radio link at 44 km Gogland — Kutsalo to rescue the battleship General Admiral Apraksin stranded. During the operation to rescue the battleship, 440 radiograms were sent, one of which was addressed to the icebreaker Ermak: “... an ice floe with fishermen was torn off Lavensaari . Help me. ” The icebreaker went to sea, the fishermen were rescued ^[5] .

After the successful operation to rescue the battleship, A. S. Popov submitted a report to the chief commander of the Kronstadt port with a request to reward Captain Troitsky: “... The success of the first practical telegraphing experiments was achieved largely thanks to the disinterested participation of Captain Troitsky in our work ... All participation of the captain Trinity is determined only by his personal interest in a business that promises to meet the application in his field of activity. All the services of Captain Troitsky are still without any reward ... " . However, the awarding of Trinity did not follow. He was transferred to the position of senior officer of a mine company. In 1900, he introduced radio communications in the Russian army and conducted experiments in the 148th Caspian Regiment , deployed in the St. Petersburg province. In November of the same year, an application from Troitsky and Rybkin for the manufacture of two exemplary portable receiving and sending stations was received in the Electrotechnical part of the Russian army. On August 1, 1901, Troitsky was promoted to lieutenant colonel ^{[1] [5]} .

In 1903, Troitsky was appointed commander of a mine company in the fortress of Ust-Dvinsk ^[1] .

At the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, on the instructions of the military department, Troitsky formed “spark companies” —the radio telegraph units of the Siberian battalion for operations in the Port Arthur area . Having formed a company, in the spring of 1905 he went to Manchuria . Arriving there seriously ill ( bowel cancer ). He was undergoing treatment in Berlin , after which he returned to Petersburg. In 1907 he was promoted to colonel ^[1] . He became a member of the Society of Apartment Owners of St. Petersburg, took part in the construction of house number 13 on Kavalergardskaya Street , in which he lived with his family from 1910 to 1916 ^[5] .

At the beginning of World War I, Troitsky was the organizer of mobile workshops for the repair of airplane engines and other engines. At the beginning of 1918 he commanded a workshop train near the city of Lutsk , where under his leadership the Lutsk branch of the Polesie Railway was built . The advancing German troops began to approach this area, the train and its crew almost got captured. Troitsky managed to break out of the encirclement, took the train out of the front, and overtook him first to Moscow and then to Omsk . On the basis of a mobile train-workshop, in the summer of 1918, the Omsk Mechanical and Foundry began to unfold.

He died on July 5, 1918, was buried in Omsk.

He was married to Elsa Karlovna Singer.

From the last letter of D. S. Troitsky, a few days before his death ^[6] :

Our mobile train-factory managed to safely escape the capture of the Germans in a few days. First we made our way to Moscow and from there we got to Omsk. Here we grow into a large mechanical foundry, occupied the barracks of the 27th Siberian Regiment. I handed over the plant to the College and myself remained to serve in this native plant ... This will give me the opportunity not to chop ice and not to chop wood at a time when my back is not so easily bent. All around is good. It is not good that everything is expensive, except for happiness, joy ...

• Order of St. Stanislav 2 degrees (1897);
• Order of St. Anne 2 degrees (1905);
• Order of St. Vladimir 4 degrees (1905);

In Kronshtadt, on Kommunisticheskaya Street (d. 3a litA), a memorial plaque was installed for the officers of the Mine officer class with the inscription “In the former mine officer class worked: Major General Tveritinov Evgeny Pavlovich (1850-1920) - teacher, honorary electrical engineer; associates of the inventor of radio A. S. Popov Rybkin Pyotr Nikolaevich (1865-1948) - head of the physical office; Colonel Troitsky Dmitry Semenovich (1857-1918) - head of the serf telegraph ” ^[7] .

• Radovsky M.I. Alexander Stepanovich Popov . Biographical sketch. Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, M.-L., 1956
• Shapkin V.I. Radio: discovery and invention. / The science. Equipment. Society - Moscow: DMK Press, 2005 .-- 190 p.
• Obituary D.S. Troitsky (1857-1918). The newspaper "Free Siberia", July 1918, Krasnoyarsk.