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Fyodor Apollonovich Pirotsky (Template:Lang-ru; February 17 [O.S. March 1] 1845- February 28 [O.S. March 12] 1898) was a Russian engineer and inventor. According to some sources (e.g. , ,) he was the inventor of first in the world electrical tram, other sources only claim that his invention was only the first in Russian Empire (, ), while the first electrical tram designed by Siemens worked for the Berlin Straßenbahn.
Fyodor was born to a family of a military physician in Lokhvytsia Uezd of Poltava Gubernia (currently, Ukraine). His family was of a Ukrainian Cossacks ancestry.
Fyodor graduated from the Konstantin Cadet Corps (Konstantinovskiy Kadetskiy Korpus) and Mikhail Artillery School (both in Saint Petersburg) in 1866 and served in Kiev with the Fortress Artillery. There he became a friend of a famous electrical engineer Pavel Yablochkov and an enthusiast of applications of electrical energy.
In 1871 Pirotsky moved back to Saint Petersburg, where among other things proposed a new type of the blast furnace. In 1874 he started experiments on Volkov Field in Saint Petersburg and in 1875 he put electrical-powered railway cars on the Sestroretsk railway. The electricity was transferred over a distance of approximately one kilometers. In his design rails were connected to a Gramme generator. Both rails were isolated from the ground, one rail served as a direct conductor and one as a reverse conductor.
In 1880 he modified a city two-decker Horse tramway to be powered by electricity instead of horses, and on September 3 [O.S. August 22] 1880 the unusual public transport started to serve residents of Saint Petersburg amid the vocal protests of the owners of the horse-cars. The experiments continued until the end of September 1880. Some historians claim that this was the first electrical tram in the world. Pirotsky did not have money to continue his experiments, but his works stirred interest to the electrical trams around the world. Among people who met Pirotsky was Carl Heinrich von Siemens who was very interested and asked many questions. In 1881 brothers Siemens started to produce their own design of electrical trams commercially. The first permanent electrical tram line using Siemens tram cars was open in Berlin in 1881 and the first permanent tram line in Russian Empire was opened in Kiev in 1892.
Pirotsky continued to served as an artillery officer. Among other things he built a first underground electrical cable in Saint Petersburg to transfer electricity from a cannon foundry to the Artillery School (1881). He also was the author of the project for the centralizing city electrical production using underground cables, proposed new constructions of blast furnaces and bakery ovens. In 1888 he retired with the range of colonel, lived on his military pension in the town of Aleshki (now Tsyurupyns'k, Crimea, Ukraine) and died in 1898. Since there were found no money with him the burial payed by a credit secured by the colonel's furniture.
References
- Korney Komonov, Where the tram came from (Откуда есть пошёл трамвай), Zerkalo Nedeli, 379 Template:Ru icon
- Белькинд Л. Д., Конфедератов И. Я., Шнейберг Я. А., История техники, М.— Л., 1956.Template:Ru icon