Despite the fact that our first blast furnaces appeared in the 17th century near Tula, and the rapid production of pig iron began under Peter the Great, a century later Europe and the United States rapidly overtook Russia in the production of iron-carbon alloys. While from 1800 to 1860 iron production in our country increased twice, in England it increased by ten times and in France it increased by eight times. Introduction of technological innovations was very late and with an eye on the Western world. The situation changed only by the end of the XIX century, and to a large extent due to the arrival of the British. The state needed domestic scientists capable of providing a rise in ferrous metallurgy by their own efforts.
In 1884, the founder of the largest metallurgical plant in Russia at that time and the city of Donetsk (Yuzovka at that time), an Englishman John Hughes, who introduced himself in Russian as Ivan Ivanovich, in the shops of his company came across a student of the Mining University, who was passing his production practice.
"- Why do you always go to the blast furnace shop? Do you really like blast furnace work?
- Yes, I do.
- Why?
- Because others don't understand it and don't like it. You said yourself that nobody, not a single engineer, not a single foreman, not a single professor, understands what's going on in a blast furnace. But it has to be controlled!
- But you won't be the one to do it, will you?
- Why not?
He looked at me and smiled. But he answered politely.
- It's a rather difficult job.
- Yes, that's exactly why" (ed. - from "Memories of a Metallurgist" by Mikhail Pavlov).
The legendary industrialist had no idea that this dialogue and an internship at his plant, built with funds and technology of the British, would be decisive in the choice of specialization for the young man. Nor could Hughes have known that he was conversing with the future Academician Mikhail Pavlov, who would become the founder of the Russian school of blast furnace operators and a participant in the design of all of the country's major steel mills, blast furnaces, and steelmaking facilities in the 1920s and 1930s.
The young man was born in 1863 in a place with the eloquent name of God's Providence (now within the city limits of Lenkoran, Azerbaijan). He was early orphaned and raised in the family of his grandfather, a Cossack uriadnik, who dreamed of sending his grandson to a cadet school, taught him horseback riding, shooting and handling of edged weapons. In his opinion, a military career would help get the boy out of the wilderness on the outskirts of the country, and to begin with he sent him to study at the Baku Secondary School. But it was there that Mikhail realized he wanted to tie his life to mining.
There is little surprise here. Baku was experiencing a real oil rush in the 1870s, and people meeting each other did not say hello but asked "burgun atir" ("is the well flowing?"). Literally all of the scientist's classmates dreamed of entering the St. Petersburg Mining Institute.
A telling example for Pavlov was his acquaintance with Alexei Doroshenko, whose younger brother was his buddy. The mining engineer, who came from a very poor family, graduated from the aforementioned university, began his career as a modest chemical engineer, quickly gained a solid reputation and became the head of a large oil enterprise.
"Listening to the conversations of the mining engineers gathered at Doroshenko's place, I thought that the whole oil business, to which a thousand interests were directed, which seemed in Baku to be the most important thing in human life, was moved by them. How could one not want to become a mining engineer?" - Mikhail Alexandrovich recalled.
He was guided not only by ambition and a desire for financial freedom, but also by a genuine interest in chemistry. Even then, he spent his time in the school's laboratory, buying salts of various metals from the drugstore, turning them into other compounds of the same metal, producing a variety of reactions that were mentioned in the theoretical course in chemistry.
From the age of 15, the young man was forced to work part-time as a tutor to continue his education, to pay for a modest room and dinners in squalid taverns. Incredible persistence helped him not only to get an excellent diploma, but also to save up the necessary amount for a trip to the capital. Pavlov set out to conquer the city on the Neva and successfully enrolled at the Mining Institute.
In his first year at the university, where in addition to mathematics, physics and chemistry students studied a wide range of specialized disciplines, the student was drawn to metallurgy. After his first year at the Putilov plant, where he studied foundry production and metal processing in the forge, and the following year he found himself in Yuzovka, met John Hughes, and decided to become a domain engineer.
At the end of his studies Pavlov was noticed by the legendary professor Alexander Karpinsky, who lectured on historical geology and ore deposits. The future president of the Academy of Sciences, seeing the potential of the newly minted graduate, offered him a position as an engineer at the Omutninsk plant of the Vyatka Mining District, whose manager was a close relative of his. The metallurgical plant was the first among a succession of plants where the young specialist was engaged in the improvement of blast furnaces and puddling furnaces.
In the Urals region, ore was mined, coal was burned, pig iron was smelted, it was processed into steel, rolling mills were used to produce long products. But production, like in many other areas of the country, continued to be based on the most primitive machinery. At that time the Mining University produced 22 mining engineers annually. This number of engineers and technicians was desperately insufficient for the rapid development of the metallurgical industry on the scale of Russia with its enormous reserves of minerals. That is why each of them was worth his weight in gold.
The proactive specialist's knowledge and ability to apply it to solve practical problems were appreciated. After just a couple of years, Pavlov was invited to other enterprises not as an ordinary engineer, but as the head of blast furnace production. He made the necessary calculations, broke the old technical traditions, implemented and adapted English norms to the domestic conditions, selected the appropriate fuel. As a result, the productivity of furnaces and rolling mills increased, fuel consumption decreased, and most importantly, the quality of metal improved.
For example, the furnaces at the Klimkovo plant, when Mikhail Alexandrovich entered the service there, produced a maximum of less than 10 tons of iron per day.
He persuaded the management to make adjustments to their design: to increase the diameter of the furnace and reduce the size of the ladle, and a year later they were already producing 1,200 pounds of iron per day... But that was not even the main point. Studies on the composition of gases produced in pudding furnaces allowed the young engineer to publish the first original scientific paper in Russia on the generator process in the Mining journal in 1891. In 1894 there was published the article "Study of smelting process of blast furnaces" which was the first theoretical study in Russian on heat balance of charcoal-fired blast furnaces. Metallurgy gained a growing scientist, able to solve many of its key problems.
In Pavlov's biography one after another glimpses the oldest Russian factories - Seversky, Ufaleisky, Yuryuzansky, the famous Verkh-Isetsky in Yekaterinburg, Kushvinsky, Tagilsky, Saldinsky and the Southern Urals combines with the then best blast furnaces. Having studied domestic experience, he turned to foreign experience. Mikhail Aleksandrovich was awarded 1000 rubles in 1891 for the successful design of the fundamentally new furnace. With this sum, he visited the specialized enterprises of Germany, France, Italy and Sweden. In Europe, the mining engineer encountered the same conservatism, fear of the new, reluctance to force blast furnaces and increase blast temperature. Therefore the next target was America, which had the most advanced blast furnace technology. However, impressive funds were required to carry out this trip.
In 1896 a letter arrived from Dmitry Pastukhov, the owner of the famous Sulinsky plant, who was credited with a significant role in the rise of Russian metallurgy along with Hughes. He was looking for "an experienced and knowledgeable blast furnace engineer to set up a state-of-the-art iron smelting process on anthracite" and offered Pavlov the position of blast furnace production manager, in fact, technical director. The entrepreneur's desire to conduct smelting not using coke was explained by the fact that the plant was located near Rostov-on-Don, near the anthracite deposits. But the only place where such technology was used at that time was Eastern Pennsylvania. The scientist said that he was ready to start a new task, but only on condition of a preliminary trip to the USA to get acquainted with the new process. And he received consent.
In four months Pavlov visited absolutely all American blast furnaces and enterprises with individual furnaces, studied in detail the structure and operation of installations that produce pig iron on anthracite. Having returned home, he remodeled blast furnaces of Sulinsky plant, improved their fittings, and increased the capacity of blowers. For the first time in the domestic practice Pavlov applied the methods of fast reconstruction and repair of furnaces, preparing in advance the spare parts and units. As a result production was stopped for several days instead of weeks and months as it had been before. In addition, the engineer built an anthracite blast furnace of a completely new design and became a convinced supporter of smelting on anthracite as an opportunity to expand the fuel base of metallurgy.
At the same time, the scientist was concerned about training qualified personnel, not inferior in their level to the British, Americans, or Swedes. He headed the department of metallurgy in the established in 1900 Ekaterinoslav higher mining college, in 1904-1941 he was a professor of LPI named after Kalinin (now Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University); and in 1921-1930, a professor of the Moscow Mining Academy. During the first five-year plan with active participation of the scientist a new large institution of higher education MISIS was created, where in 1930-1941 he headed the department of ferrous metallurgy.
Having devoted himself entirely to scientific and pedagogical activities, Pavlov became the author of a significant list of works devoted to the theory and practice of blast furnace production. The complex chemical processes hidden behind the refractory walls of the furnaces, thanks to his works, were becoming more and more clear and unambiguous and accessible to regulation.
He developed original ways of determining the optimum ratios of elements of the main metallurgical units, proposed methods of calculating blast furnace charge (i.e. determining the optimum ratios in the mixture of raw materials - ore, fuel and flux), mastered the melting of cast iron from Ural titanomagnetite and on the so-called fluxed agglomerate, and conducted experimental research on the introduction of oxygen in metallurgy.
At the end of the 20s, the question of creating plants in the Urals and Siberia was raised. Within the framework of the largest specialized design institute Lengipromez, Pavlov consulted on the designs of new plants and carefully studied the performance of newly built large blast furnaces in Magnitogorsk, Kuznetsk, and Makeevka.
Mikhail Alexandrovich's work at the very beginning of his career began at the furnaces, producing just a few tens of pounds of iron, and ended in the heyday of Soviet metallurgy, when blast furnaces were already melting thousands of tons of metal a day.
In 1932 the mining engineer became an academician and head of the special commission of the USSR Academy of Sciences on the expansion of raw materials of coke industry. The experiments, conducted in Donbass and other coal regions, allowed mastering the production of coke from a number of new types of coals, such as heavy, lean, gaseous coal, which had previously been considered unsuitable.
The scientist's achievements were highly appreciated by the government: he was awarded two Stalin Prizes of the first degree and five Orders of Lenin for his scientific works (including "Metallurgy of Cast Iron," "Thermal Balances of Metallurgical Processes," and "Determination of Blast Furnace Dimensions") and he was also awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor.
Mikhail Pavlov died shortly before his 95th birthday in 1958, having devoted his life to the study and improvement of the processes of turning shapeless, stone-like pieces of iron ore into ringing, silvery steel: the metal of progress.
