«Приложение к Российской Биографической Энциклопедии (РБЭ) Наблюдательный Совет РБЭ: поч. проф. Я.Я. Голко – председатель; поч. проф. В.Я. Сквирский, зам. председателя; проф. В.П. Берснев, академик РАН Ю.С. Васильев, ...»
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Серия изданий по истории Нобелевского движения
как социального феномена ХХ века
Российская Биографическая Энциклопедия
“Великая Россия”
Приложение к Российской Биографической Энциклопедии (РБЭ)
Наблюдательный Совет РБЭ: поч. проф. Я.Я. Голко – председатель; поч. проф.
В.Я. Сквирский, зам. председателя; проф. В.П. Берснев, академик РАН Ю.С. Васильев, проф. А.А. Горбунов, проф. В.Ф. Даниличев, проф. ген.-лейт. П.И. Дубок,
проф. ген.-майор В.А. Золотарев, академик РАН Н.П. Лаверов, член-корр.
РАМН Н.А. Майстренко, проф. И.А. Максимцев, проф. А.И. Мелуа, поч. проф.
В.Р. Мигуренко, академик РАН А.Д. Ноздрачев, член-корр. РАН В.В. Окрепилов, проф. А.И. Потапов, проф. Н.П. Селиванов, поч. проф. В.Л. Станкевич, проф.
А.И. Степанов, проф. Л.С. Тарасевич, проф. А.Ф. Уткин, член-корр. РАН И.Б. Ушаков, проф. А.И. Федотов, член-корр. РАМН В.Х. Хавинсон, проф. В.Н. Цыган Documents of Life and Activity of the Nobel Family 1801 – Edited by Prof. A.I. Melua Volume 5.
St. Petersburg «Humanistica»
Документы жизни и деятельности семьи Нобель 1801 – Под ред. профессора А.И. Мелуа Том 5.
Санкт-Петербург «Гуманистика»
Документы жизни и деятельности семьи Нобель. 1801 – 1932 / Под ред.
профессора А.И. Мелуа. Том 5. – Санкт-Петербург: «Гуманистика», 2013. – 480 с., илл.
В данном томе печатается оригинальная книга о заводе «Людвиг Нобель», первый тираж которой опубликован в 1912 г. Это наиболее полное прижизненное издание Нобелей, рассказывающее о всех предпринимательских программах Семьи Нобель. Ряд статей посвящен разработке и постройке подводных лодок с участием Эмануила Нобеля, а также инструкциям для командиров и машинистов судов. В статье о реквизии судов Нобеля в период первой мировой войны впервые публикуются документы Петроградского морского порта. На основе анализа расчетных книжек работников в Рыбинске рассматривается социальная политика Нобелей. Фотоочерки содержат оригинальные снимки современных видов заводских зданий и музейных экспозиций.
Documents of Life and Activity of the Nobel Family. 1801 – 1932 / Edited by Prof. A.I. Melua. Volume 5. – St. Petersburg: J.S.C. Humanistica Publishers, 2013. – 480 pp. with illustrations.
This volume contains an original book on The Machine-Building Factory Ludvig Nobel, first published in 1912. It is the most complete publication about the Nobels that came out during their lifetime and discusses all the entrepreneurship programs of the Nobel Family. A number of articles talks about the development and construction of submarines with participation of Emanuel Nobel, and lists the instructions for commanding officers and machinery engineers of the vessels. The article that discusses the temporary requisition of Nobel vessels during WWI publishes the first documents of Petrograd Seaport. The social policy of the Nobels is discussed based on the analysis of worker payment records in Rybinsk. A set of photos shows original buildings of the plant and museum expositions.
ISBN 978-5-906140-01- www.humanistica.ru www.nobel-review.com ЗАО «Гуманистика»,
INDUSTRY ACTIVITIES
OF THE NOBEL FAMILY IN RUSSIA
A.I. Melua* This volume presents the materials that mostly discuss the work of the Nobel Family in the area of machine engineering. Unlike most other Alfred Nobel projects that were mostly devoted to explosives and were made in countries other than Russia, machine engineering projects were completed by the Nobel family members exclusively for Russia. Even in the cases when the Nobels turned to suppliers in other countries (for instance, shipbuilding orders in Sweden, metal delivery orders in Germany), most of their work was done specifically for Russia.
The following machinery engineering fields were the main consumers of Nobel enterprise products: the military sector, the oil and oil processing sector, shipbuilding, transport and energy sectors. All orders were managed from St. Petersburg. Emanuil Emanuilovich Nobel (the father of the family), Ludwig Emanuilovich Nobel, Emanuil Ludwigovich Nobel, succeeded each other as top managers of Russian Nobel Companies. Placing all management responsibilities in the hands of one person contributed in many ways to the success of the entrepreneurship.
This was important because after E.E. Nobel left St. Petersburg, Nobel companies engaged in a variety of activities in many sectors.
Each year the companies gained new territories and branched off into other sectors. By 1917, over 55 years of the Company’s history, the Nobels created a total of more than 200 representative offices and companies across Russia, from Western borders to the Far East. Over these years they companies employed a total of some 100,000 workers.
The largest manufacturing enterprises of the Nobel family and their partners were in Central Russia. The Nobels also prospected oil in Baku, Chechnya and Kazakhstan. This grand scale of operations determined the role and significance of the Nobels in Russian economy.
Members of the Nobel Family and engineers of their enterprises were not employed as state officials in any bodies of authority.
However, exerting influence on public organizations and using the privileges granted to large companies, the Nobels directly affected the development of Russian economy.
The Russian Technical Society, created in 1866 (in addition to the Free Economic Society created in 1765), played an important role in public life and development of Russia. L.E. Nobel and D.I. Mendeleev Arkady I. Melua, professor, the General Director and Editor-In-Chief of the Scientific Publishing House «Humanistica».
managed the Commission of the Transcaucasian Oil Pipeline in these Societies. In 1884 L.E. Nobel was elected honorary member of the Standing Commission on Technical Education of the Russian Technical Society. Regular meetings and congresses of the Society were held in St. Petersburg and discussed important issues in Russian economy.
Offices of the Society in other cities cooperated with the offices of the Nobel Brothers’ Partnership in those cities.
During the first several years of their active work (1850s – 1860s) the Nobels focused on developing a single plant, which established productive partnerships with suppliers of materials and small parts.
This was how they founded their first plant in St. Petersburg, and this was how they managed their new plant in the beginning of their operations.
Ludwig Nobel Plant was created on October 1, 1862 – 150 years later. The book, published by the Nobels in 1912 about this plant, is represented in this volume. It is not only the anniversary, however, that attracted our attention to this book that has not been republished after its initial publication (see Syasko’s article in this volume). It was in that single publication during the Nobels’ lifetime that the directions and results of the family’s activities in Russia were most scrupulously documented (as compared to other publications by the Nobels). This book was written at the time when on the one hand the works of the Nobels had proven the effectiveness of their policy to the public, and on the other hand it was already the second decade of the Nobel Foundation activities in the country.
In the introduction the authors describe in detail not only the circumstances of how the plant was created but the biographies of the Nobel Family as well. Although the title mentions the St. Petersburg Plant, the book also covers the activities of the Nobels in other European countries, and on other enterprises, including the work on explosive substances. The book names several Russian experts who cooperated with the Nobels on these projects; however, according to archives, by 1912 the Nobels cooperated closely with hundreds of leading Russian scholars and engineers. Most of them represented chemical and oil industries, mining, shipbuilding, the military sector, the transport sector and banking.
The book gives no information on the Nobels’ work with explosives.
Some indirect data show that the dynamite made by Alfred Nobel was used in mining activities on the Caucasus. However, as much as Russian archives tell us, Russia had never used the dynamite produced by the Nobels. Most likely this can be explained by the fact that all explosives is Russia were manufactured in accordance with a national program with good results, and the Russian government immediately classified the information.
The first Nobel Plant in Russia, founded by the father of the family Emanuil Emanuilovich Nobel, was opened immediately after the Nobels moved to St. Petersburg in 1838. It mostly catered to government orders. From the early years on, main St. Petersburg plants had cooperated with the Nobel Plant. Putilov Plant, for instance, worked with the Nobel Plant on manufacturing screw starters. Mines and cannon armaments were manufactured on the first Nobel plant.
The equipment of the plant, its machinery, and the expertise of its foremen were all geared toward serving the orders of the Sea Department. E.E. Nobel’s mines were complemented by analogous products developed since the late 19th century by Russian experts (including Boris Semenovich Yakobi).
In 1859 Emanuil Nobel and his three sons (Robert, Alfred and Emil) returned to Stockholm; Ludwig remained in St. Petersburg. All later activities of the Nobels outside Russia were centered around inventing and manufacturing explosives; their achievements in this area spread across many countries. Even in the present-day Czech Republic this year we found the old constructions in the mountainous area of the country where Alfred Nobel had experimented with dynamite.
Meanwhile in Russia Ludwig continued his father’s business, working to gradually turn the Nobel Family business in Russia into a state-wide program of significance not only for Russia but for a number of European countries as well. Reports by Nobel companies contain information on purchases of shares of foreign enterprises, with which the Nobels had had common production plans.
After the successful startup of their father’s military business, the Nobels built another plant in the district of Peterburgskaya Storona (now Vyborgskaya Naberezhnaya). Initially, L.E. Nobel had rented the facilities of Merchants I. and T. Sherwoods, then the Nobels built their first plant there. In its size the new plant was much larger than the previous plant. Later it was called Ludwig Nobel. In the Soviet times it was known as Russian Diesel Plant**.
The appearance of the new plant in 1862 signified the success of Ludwig Nobel’s business after his father’s forced departure from Russia. The talent of the Nobel family father as engineer and inventor was required in Russia at the verge of the Crimean War. However, after Russia lost the war, the number of government orders went down, and the first Nobel enterprise became financially insolvable. The bankruptcy had a lot to do with the fact that the first Nobel plant was mostly oriented toward the needs of the sea. The experience suggested that the plant would have benefited from at least one facility working Unfortunately, Russian Diesel Plant stopped production in the 1990s. To this day, however, many of its buildings and production facilities are still in use. The Nobel House at 19 Vyborgskaya Naberezhnaya has been left vacant and unattended. In the Soviet times the mansion had housed the Club of Russian Diesel Plant.
on orders from different industry sectors. Creditors went to Ludwig (obviously recognizing his expertise in the area) asking him to proceed with all the necessary measures to terminate the activities of the enterprise and then determine the future direction of work. Ludwig was appointed the caretaker of the bankrupt business.
Having inherited his father’s entrepreneurial skills, Ludwig settled the bankruptcy case and developed and implemented a new program of development for the Nobel Family business in Russia. This development rested on good knowledge of Russian realities and the continuing authority of the Nobel Family as business partners.
Since the very beginning the Ludwig Nobel Plant was formed as a major machine-building enterprise that could produce all kinds of machinery, mechanisms and devices. This was the second stage in development of the Nobel system of machinery production management.
In 1870 L.E. Nobel purchased the plant from the lessors. The book shows some convincing data on the growth of the plant, the expansion of its facilities and the increasing number of products manufactured by the plant.
Meanwhile Robert Nobel moved from Sweden to Finland, where he continued, among other things, to research explosives. After the Senate of Finland prohibited him from doing this research, he returned to Sweden***.
In 1870 Robert was invited by Ludwig to come to St. Petersburg to work on the Nobel enterprise. One of his tasks was to find enough chestnut wood for guns. With this purpose he went to Azerbaijan.
However, suddenly, oil extraction attracted his attention. After his visit to Baku, since 1876, the oil business became the most important direction in the work of the Nobels in Russia. (In 1876 Ludwig and his elder son Emanuil had visited Baku for the first time.) Until his return to Stockholm in 1880, Robert had actively participated in the work planned by the Nobel Family in Russia.
Oil extraction in Baku was carried out by the Nobels in considerable competition with other Russian entrepreneurs. Selling oil products in Russia required that the Nobels put forth an effort to counteract the dominance of Rockefeller oil products delivered to Russia mostly from the US. The Nobels gradually squeezed out Rockefeller suppliers from Russia.
In the late 19th and early 20th century oil products determined the development of significant industries and, later, transport. To this end, the Nobels built new plants in Baku and other Russian cities.
About the same time, some secondary sources suggest, the Nobels had attempted to create in Russia the dynamite production facility using the patents of Alfred Nobel.
However, this proposal was not supported by the Russian authorities. Considering that the Princedom of Finland was a part of Russia at the time, there must have been some connection between the prohibition of Robert’s activities and the refusal to set up the plant.
New mechanical shops, transport and other facilities were created in Baku, Batumi and in some other locations of the Russian South, so as to accommodate partial refinement of oil and transporting oil products.
The main industrial base of the Nobels continued developing in other cities where Nobel plants or plants of their partner companies were represented, including St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kolomna, Izhevsk and Tula. Oil product terminals and warehouses scattered across Russia were often more capacious than the terminals and warehouses on the Caucasus. The largest of those were located in Astrakhan, Rybinsk and Tsaritsyn. The Nobels had had extensive facilities in some 40 Russian cities; in the archives there are many dozens of thousands of pages of various documents on this topic. Researchers have just started their work on these documents. These archives are many times more extensive than Nobel archives in other countries, where the only documents pertained to the dynamite project of Alfred Nobel and some episodic partner orders of the Nobel Family from Russia****.
Studying in detail the experience of Russian and European entrepreneurship of the Nobel Family, we find not only the common financial resources (Alfred had owned some 13% of the family’s Russian company’s shares). They also shared the approaches and the principles of organizing production. In Europe and in Russia the Nobels had set up laboratories (most of them chemical labs), and worked to arrange all the necessary equipment. The Nobels had also contributed to introducing the meter system in Russia.
Over the first several years the Ludwig Nobel plant manufactured products that could not have been designed and developed without the necessary equipment or laboratories: gun carriages, rifles, bombs, machine guns, mounts, etc. Russia, as other European countries, had learned its war lessons. In the 1870s all armies were re-equipped.
For that purpose many plants were rebuilt, and their sets of equipment were upgraded. The Ludwig Nobel plant not only modernizes its equipment but produces new equipment for other plants in Tula, Sestroretsk and Izhevsk. Some of the new mechanisms were designed in the design bureau at the Nobel Plant in St. Petersburg, as Nobel Family patents show (see the first volume of the Nobel Family Documents Series). Ludwig was a renowned expert in arms, and P.A. Bilderling, appointed manager of the Izhevsky Plant, sought his assistance in technological matters. Over two years (1871–1872) the Ludwig Nobel Plant made and delivered more than 1,000 pieces of machinery of Izhevsky Plant.
It is essentially important to introduce the most valuable documents from Russian and foreign Nobel archives into the scientific and cultural discourse. This collection of publications has been created for the same purpose. Concurrently we have been working on digitizing the archives. Today our database has dozens of terabytes of information on this topic.
The St. Petersburg plant of the Nobel Family assisted in verifying the quality of goods delivered to Russia. Each product underwent testing for effectiveness of all indicators that established the effectiveness of the future product. Some of the foreign novelties required reprocessing.
For instance, the American rapid-fire Gatling gun was considered too complex in production and too unreliable in application. After remodeling on the Nobel Plant, the Ministry of War authorized manufacturing of this gun for the needs of the Russian Army (a total of 80 guns were delivered in 1873–1875).
Changes in Russian foreign policy had had an influence on production. After the signing of the Treaty of San Stefano between Russia and Turkey on February 19, 1878, and the subsequent military tension between Russia on the one side and England and Austria on the other, the Nobel Plant in St. Petersburg received a large order from the Russian government to produce armament and ammunition.
Large military plants had had general purpose divisions in their structure as well. Their modernization and reproduction was yet another goal of the Ludwig Nobel Plant. The plant designed and produced hydraulic presses, furnaces, steam hammers, rope gearing, chaser factories, etc. A similar civilian objective was also being implemented:
in the course of the military operations of Russia near Ashgabat, the General Headquarters had ordered water desalinators to provide the army with fresh water on the territories with only salty lakes and salt marshes. The first water desalinators were immediately delivered to the shore of the Caspian Sea and turned over to the troops commanded by General Mikhail Dmitrievich Skobelev.
To carry out the contracts and assignments of the Russian government the Nobels and their engineers traveled to various remote locations away from St. Petersburg. A more solid foundation had to be laid for a base in the heartland. The Nobels solved this problem by acquiring shares of new companies and creating permanent working groups of their experts. This was the third stage of development of the enterprise management system of the Nobel Family. The Russian network of the Nobel Family business was gradually formed around the Ludwig Nobel Plant.
After oil industry orders first appeared, and oil refineries were built, the need arose to set up hundreds of oil terminals and sales outlets.
As a result, specialized laboratories and measuring facilities appeared, and measuring and analysis equipment was developed or acquired. Since the activities of the Nobel Family involved many thousands of experts in Russia and abroad, in order to provide methodological assistance and ensure unity of procedures, the Nobels began printing methodological documents and books (the total number of books exceeded 100 titles).
Most of these books have been digitized and became a part of the digital collection of Gumanistika Science Publishers. The thoroughness and quality of this work has been recorded, for example, in the fact that Nobel cannons participated in Turkestan campaigns of General Konstantin Petrovich Kaufman: in conditions of rough terrain and poor climate the wheel naves remained well-greased, and the cannons were always ready for action.
Oil business was quite new for Russia. The engineering intuition told the Nobels that oil and oil processing products had great future.
The Nobels were quick to seize on this opportunity, using their experience in machine-building. The oil business prompted the Nobels to improve their approach to enterprise management. The fourth stage began with appearance of new Nobel factories and plants, which used oil to produce lubricants, kerosene, etc. Meanwhile, Ludwig Nobel Plant remained the top machine-building enterprise of the Nobel Family.
In addition to machinery, Nobel enterprises in Russia began producing very specific materials: refined oil products. These products were in demand all over the country by a large number of customers, representing enterprises of different scale. The Nobels had to solve the problem of delivering oil products to the end consumer. This started the fifth stage of improving the management process at Nobel enterprises. Ludwig, followed by his son Emanuil initiated and created a developed state-wide system of supplying oil products to Russia.
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