“220 years ago, on September 27, 1801, the coronation of the Russian emperor took place Alexandra I. During the celebrations, the emperor was presented with the world’s first bicycle-the invention of Efim Artamonov, a serf artisan from Nizhny Tagil. The tsar was so delighted with the unit that he personally bought out the inventor, paying 500 rubles to the Nizhny Tagil plant-a huge amount at that time.
One way or another, in the next attack, “Russia” is the birthplace of elephants”, Internet portals will tell about this event. Perhaps someone will emphasize that the Russians have overtaken Europe in the invention of the bicycle by 12 years, that Yefim Artamonov, in addition to the bicycle, also invented pumps for pumping water from barges, or that later the masters will be sent away for an unreasonable waste of wood and iron.
A Russian serf from the Urals, Yefim Mikheevich Artamonov, built the world’s first bicycle in 1801 pic.twitter.com/FxJccC2GzX
& mdash; My Web(@mywebssu) April 6, 2015
In general, falsification of history is a punishable matter. And therefore, you need to be more careful with Artamonov’s bike. The fact is that no “inventor Efim Mikheevich Artamonov” most likely did not exist in nature. In any case, its existence is not documented in any way. Nothing confirms the fact of his arrival in Moscow on a bicycle. In the descriptionsThere is not a single word about the coronation of Alexander I about this event at all. And the two-wheeled all-metal bicycle itself, which was still on display in the Nizhny Tagil Museum, was removed from the exposition. Out of harm’s way, metallographic analysis showed that this unit was made of open-hearth metal no earlier than the 1870s. And according to the English scheme “spider-bike”.
There is nothing wrong or shameful in claiming the domestic priority and showing that the sharp mind of the Russian people is able to overtake its time in terms of inventions. It is ok. But is it worth resorting to such low methods as direct falsification or forgery for this? Probably not & ndash; so you can only compromise a good idea.
And it would not be bad to direct the exuberant energy of those who are going to defend the honor of the inventor Efim Artamonov into the channel of real research of the Russian priority. For example, many people are still sure that the first solid chocolate in the form of a tile was created at the English factory of J. S. Fry & Sons in 1847, when chocolate was still brewed and drunk in the backward Russian Empire. This is written by an authoritative online encyclopedia, which we usually refer to as the main arbiter in resolving controversial historical issues.Meanwhile, it is enough to refer to the Easter issue of the magazine “Northern Bee”, which is dated April 1838: “In every confectionery there are a lot of sugar, marzipan and chocolate products and figures” whole armies of chocolate!”That is, it turns out that almost 10 years before the banal English tile, Russian confectioners already knew how to make hard chocolate and even make figures out of it. And this is a documented fact, not idle speculation.
There are enough such facts. And it is a pity that Ural economist Vasily Belov who launched the legend of Artamonov’s bicycle in 1896, did not pay any attention to what was happening right here and now, literally under his nose.
Here, for example, is the same year 1896. It was then, on May 16, that the first film show took place in Russia. In the St. Petersburg garden “Aquarium”, during the intermission of the theatrical performance, a ten-minute selection of films by the Lumiere brothers was shown which, as everyone knows for sure, opened the era of cinema in 1895. A sensation! A furor! The trick, however, is that the first film show actually took place in Russia on January 9, 1894 at the Sixth Meeting of the Physics Section of the IX Congress of Russian Natural Scientists and Doctors in Moscow, about which the protocol was drawn up. The films were called “The Galloping Horsemen” and “The Javelin Thrower”. The author of them was a native of Kharkov, the inventor of Iosif Timchenko. He developed a jump device that allows you to intermittently change frames in a strobe light. And simply & ndash; invented a movie camera. And two years earlier than Auguste and Louis Lumiere. And he shot his first paintings back in 1893 at the Odessa Hippodrome. Doctors and natural scientists thanked Timchenko, but he did not bother with the patent. And quite in vain – the owners of the international network of Lumiere photo stores very soon crushed the entire planet with their authority and their products.
The same year is 1896. In Nizhny Novgorod, the second electric tram in Russia is being opened with great fanfare. The first one was launched back in 1892, in Kiev. It was built by Siemens. Everything is fine, but again past. The first electric tram in Russia began running back in 1880. The movement was opened on September 3, which was mentioned in theto the press: “At 12 o’clock in the afternoon, on the Sands, at the corner of Bolotnaya Street and Degtyarny Lane, a car will be moved for the first time by the electric force of a current running along the rails on which the wheels of the car roll. The dynamo-electric machine is suspended from the bottom of the car. The inventor of the electric tram was a Russian engineer, gunner Fyodor Pirotsky. Karl Siemens, who met with the Russian inventor and had a long conversation with him, became interested in his experiment. The Siemens brothers will launch the first Berlin electric tram in 1881, a year after the Russian one.
You will laugh, but it’s 1896 again in the arena. A scientific article by the Russian polygraphist Ivan Orlov appears “A new way of multicolored printing from a single cliche”. Speaking humanly, Ivan Ivanovich invented a technology for protecting money and securities that almost excluded their forgery. His invention was announced in a scientific article in 1896. A year later, his patent was bought in Germany, France, England and the USA. And 30 years later, the Germans tried to assign priority. But then the Bolsheviks were already guarding the domestic interests. Here is a fragment of an article from the newspaper “Pravda” dated May 28, 1925, ordered by the manager of Goznak By Trifon Yenukidze We hope that the scientific and technical department will explain to whom it should be in the German official press that we also do not slurp soup and have learned to distinguish fraud from invention.
Let us repeat all these events, significant for the real history of Russian inventive thought, occurred in the very year 1896, when, for some mysterious reasons, the bike about Artamonov’s bicycle was launched.
