The "Real" Left-handed man, as opposed to the hero of the story of the same name by Nikolai Leskov, did not call to abandon the use of bricks when cleaning rifles. On the contrary, he began to actively use abrasive, though another - innovative - materials, when polishing blades of cold weapons.
The writer brought out his character as a skilled craftsman and a man of indifferent as well as unfortunate character. At first sight the parallel between him and "the father of Russian bullion" manager of the Zlatoust weapon factory Pavel Anosov is not obvious. The first, although the first among equals, is still an ordinary Tula craftsman. The second is an engineer and a major manager.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of connecting threads. First of all, the time of action. The idea to use corundum from the Borzovsky gold-sand mine instead of expensive foreign emery cloth to polish the blades of sabers and swords came to Anosov in 1829 during a visit to the Kyshtymsky factory. The action of "Lefty" begins in 1815, when an English mechanical block was presented to Emperor Alexander I, but it was discovered and Lefty was called upon to prepare a reply to the English a few years after the coronation of Nicholas I (1825). It is quite possible that it was in 1829.
The second parallel is that Anosov's childhood was spent with his grandfather (Lev Sobakin), a mechanic at the Izhevsk factory. At the time of Leskov's story, it was this Kama enterprise, not the Tula factory, that was the main producer of rifles for the Imperial Army (about 70,000 against 59,000 units per year). This grandfather, by the way, not being a watchmaker, independently designed big tower clocks for the main factory building, which count the time even today. He was also quite like Lefty.
In terms of practical use, polishing blades with corundum is a more interesting know-how than the ones described in the story. The horseshoe for an English block has more of a competitive value than a practical one. And cleaning rifles with rubbing bricks, which Lefty protested against, was in fact only applied to the outside of the barrel, that is, it did not interfere with shooting at all.
Corundum is the hardest mineral after diamond, so its discovery in the Urals opened up new possibilities for production spheres, where abrasives are needed. In military production, the rejection of imported emery (a mixture of corundum and magnetite, mined mainly in Greece and Turkey) brought substantial economic benefits.
The first samples of the Ural corundum, called kyshtyt, were found in the dumps of the gold-sand mine in 1823. In 1826, three years before the idea of using domestic corundum in the production of weapons was born, one of the largest stones weighing about 960 kilograms was given by the merchant Zotov as a gift to the Mining Cadet Corps (now Saint-Petersburg Mining University). To this day, it is one of the largest exhibits in the mineralogical collection of the Mining Museum.
