No. 2, 2008

Innovative heritage left by one of the most brilliant representatives of the Nobel dynasty features many bold engineering and technological solutions

April 12, 2008 marked the 120th anniversary of the death of Ludvig Nobel (1831-1888), a prominent late 19th century Russian entrepreneur and inventor who had made a weighty contribution to the progress of Russian industry, the oil sector included. He had all it takes to make a great inventor: dedication and creative genius, purposefulness and extraordinary industry, love of machinery and the right choice of the life path.

The early beginnings

In every stage of the development of our civilization, steady scientific and technological progress invariably generates new complicated problems which humankind’s best brains – scientists, inventors and innovators – are the first to tackle.

Following in the footsteps of his father, Emanuel Nobel (1801-1872), an indefatigable innovator who had applied himself fully to the cause of invention, Ludvig craved new knowledge and developed an urge to do creative work since early in life.

In 1862, he acquired from merchant Sherwood, for five thousand rubles, a small machine shop in St. Petersburg’s Vyborgskaya Storona district. It took him three years of hard and painstaking work to build up a mechanical engineering factory capable of fulfilling complicated orders amid fierce competition.

In time, Ludvig came to realize that engineering innovations are an inalienable part of the production process and can well maintain an adequate level of his company’s competitiveness even in an unfavorable market environment. Consequently, he got down to a stage-by-stage remaking of Russia’s arms industry by fitting it out with a fleet of modern metalworking equipment and updating its production processes. While fulfilling the War Ministry’s order for changing over 100,000 obsolete guns from muzzle to breech loading, he pioneered in Russia the principle of components interchangeability which provided a strong impetus for the adoption of new production processes. Notably, Nobel’s plant was the first one in Russia to use machine molding and an original technique of securing a copper belt to the artillery shell body.

Nobel’s plant was among the highlights of the Russian National Exhibition of 1870, although the catalogue contained only a terse description of it as follows: “Plant established in 1862. Annual output worth one million rubles. Equipped with three steam engines, up to 400 hand lathes, 15 crucibles. Employs up to 1,000.”

His debut at the Russian National Exhibition of 1870 was a roaring success for “top-guild merchant Ludvig Nobel of St. Petersburg.” He was awarded the supreme honor – “the right to display the State Coat of Arms on his signboards and products” – “for the excellent quality of the machines on display, for the good finishing of gun components.” Moreover, Emperor Alexander II “all-graciously conferred” on him the Order of St. Anna Third Class which had the motto “For the devotees of justice, devoutness and faith.”

In 1880, Ludvig Nobel designed and put into quantity production a seawater freshening facility with a capacity of 15,000 vedros (a vedro is an old measure of weight equal to 21 pints) a day complete with two vats holding 100,000 and 25,000 vedros for the expeditionary corps led by Lt.-Gen. Mikhail Skobelev in the period of the further conquest of Turkestan. That was one of Ludvig Nobel’s most successful projects and an important application of his inventive genius.

On December 10, 1885, the Department of Commerce and Manufactories granted Ludvig Nobel Patent No. 10753 “for new molding sand” which found numerous military uses.

On the basis of a systems approach

A characteristic feature of the Nobel Brothers’ Partnership for Oil Production was that it used exclusively oil production and refining equipment designed and manufactured at their own mechanical plant in St. Petersburg. Most items of that equipment were of Ludvig Nobel’s original design. A systems approach to innovation and invention found its tangible embodiment in his three main engineering principles: simplicity, expediency and user-friendliness.

In 1875, an original facility for obtaining shop-floor illuminating gas from oil was put into service at the St. Petersburg plant. In July 1876, Ludvig Nobel made a trip to Apsheron Peninsula and summed up his impressions in the report “A View of the Baku Oil Industry and an Outlook for its Future.”

As the program was met by most Russian oil producers with a great deal of skepticism and overly caution, Ludvig and his brothers, Alfred and Robert, decided to implement it on their own.

Positive results were not long in coming. In the fall of 1878, the firm Bari, Sytenko & Co. built on Apsheron Peninsula, specially for the Nobels’ company, Russia’s first oil pipeline 8.5 versts (a verst is an old measure of length equal to 0.6629 miles) long, 3 inches across and with a throughput capacity of 80,000 poods (a pood is an old measure of weight equal to 36 pounds) of oil a day. Before the end of 1878, only 841,150 poods of oil were pumped through that pipeline, but as early as in 1879 the figure amounted to 5,583,000 poods.

In those years, the Nobel refinery underwent radical retooling: steam pumps designed by Ludvig Nobel for injecting oil and fuel oil into elevated tanks feeding thermal stills were installed and a cold-agent circulation system was built for cooling hot fuel oil in the thermal still. That alone made it possible to increase the frequency of run-downs to 6-10 a day. In 1878, a large fuel oil cooler of tubular type was mounted at the plant in a 20,000-pood container dubbed by the workers “Ivan the Great.”

Massive oil and petroleum products deliveries to Russia’s domestic market via sea and river routes could not be effected in barrels. So Ludvig drew on the experience of the brothers Artemyev, Astrakhan entrepreneurs, who had converted their wooden sailing ship Alexander into a tanker to deliver oil to customers along the river Volga in bulk. In January 1878, Ludvig Nobel signed a contract with Sven Almquist (1840-1932), Director of the Motala (Sweden) ship-building yards, for the construction at the Gotaverken dockyard of the world’s first steam-powered oil tanker Zoroaster, named after the Iranian philosopher. The tanker was designed by Ludvig himself, with Engineer Almquist’s useful suggestions taken in account. The world’s first tanker, intended for sailing in the Caspian, had a tonnage of 34,000 poods of kerosene carried in eight slide-in tanks, and its engine was rated at 290 hp.

At the 1882 Russian National Exhibition in Moscow, Ludvig Nobel’s companies, the Nobel Brothers’ Partnership for Oil Production and the Engineering, Foundry and Ordnance Factory, were represented in two groups and by separate expositions. The former tastefully styled its vast oil pavilion as a khan’s palace making it No. 1 attraction for exhibition-goers. The Catalogue of the Russian National Industrial Art Exhibition of 1882 said that the company’s display featured “oil, gasoline, kerosene, residual oil, lubricants, resin distillates, hexol, toluene, naphthalene and anthracene.”

Standing out from a long line of Nobel’s technological brainchildren were, in experts’ opinion, original facilities for burning oil fuels, including the Nobel burning nozzles of several types.

Another remarkable Nobel’s invention on display at the exhibition was the “smokeless oil firebox for steam boilers and forging furnaces.” The magazine Tekhnik (No. 10, 1882) carried an article entitled “The Nobel Fire-Bars for Heating with Oil Residues” which said, in part: “The design of the above-described fire-bars is distinguished by utter simplicity, the burning of oil residues is practically complete and requires no steam under certain pressure.”

Various products of the St. Petersburg Engineering, Foundry and Ordnance Factory were highly acclaimed by the jury. Upon recommendation of the commission of experts, its owner, Ludvig Nobel, was awarded the top honor of the Russian National Exhibition – the right to display the State Coat of Arms on his products “for promoting sweeping progress of mechanical engineering practices, for the custom-manufacturing of top-tier mechanical devices and for making high-quality pumps available throughout Russia.”

A year later, on December 28, 1883, the Department of Commerce and Manufactories granted Ludvig Nobel ten-year Patent No. 10111 “for an improved oil heating system adaptable to all sorts of industrial applications.” The description enclosed with the privilege says: “This oil heating system is characterized by a clever design and arrangement of U-shaped grate bars adaptable to fireboxes of boilers and various furnaces, both ordinary and metallurgical ones. It operates on natural draught, without the benefit of air-blasting, steam or water.”

Weighty arguments in favor of the Nobel shell-still battery

In the early 1880s, amid fierce competition in the Russian kerosene market, the matters of petroleum products quality and of reducing their production costs came to the forefront. Intensification and deepening of the oil refining process were the most formidable challenges facing Russian engineers and technicians then.

The continuous-action shell-still battery was one of Ludvig Nobel’s most important inventions in the sphere of oil refining and his technological answer to the challenge of the time. A thorough analysis of the practice of using periodic-action shell stills concentrated on separate sites, as a rule, led Ludvig Nobel to the idea of joining several stills together into an integrated ladder-shaped bank so as to have oil flow from one still to another continuously, as its temperature rises. The continuous-action shell-still battery permitted a deeper selective refinement of oil distillates and their division into separate fractions. “The introduction into practice of the much-disputed continuous process has become an epoch-making event,” Ludvig wrote to his brother Alfred. “Fortunately, I have succeeded in securing a privilege for it.” On December 17, 1882, the Department of Commerce and Manufactories granted him Patent No. 9206 “for a continuous-action multi-still oil refining battery.” Notably, continuous-action shell-still batteries were also promptly enough introduced into industrial practice at refineries of other leading oil companies in and outside Russia.

All that encouraged Ludvig to seek ways of further improving the refining process. On December 28, 1886, the Department of Commerce and Manufactories granted the Nobel Brothers’ Partnership for Oil Production ten-year Patent No. 11236 for “a still of an improved fractional and continuous oil distillation system.” In that effort, Ludvig Nobel had every cooperation from his engineers – Arthur Lesner (1867-1946), Jalmar Krusell (1856-1919) and Karl Hagelin (1860-1954).

At the National Russian Exhibition of Lighting Fixtures and Heating Appliances held in St. Petersburg in 1888, the Nobel Brothers’ Partnership for Oil Production was represented by a vast exposition featuring 64 exhibits: a collection of mountain rocks, numerous photographs of oil fields and kerosene factories, industrial landscapes of Apsheron Peninsula, skillfully made models of a drilling derrick and a tank car. The Oil-Burning Space Heaters section displayed three more inventions by Ludvig Nobel: an improved nozzle for marine steam boilers, a furnace bar burner and a “kerosene kitchen.”

The Exhibition’s Commission of Experts adjudged a personal diploma of honor to Ludvig Nobel “for an extensive promotion of the oil industry in Russia, specifically for developing efficient ways of oil production and refining, for organizing oil transportation and for a useful contribution toward the solution of the technical problems involved in the oil-fired heating of steam boilers, metallurgical furnaces, etc.”

As the 1888 Russian National Exhibition was drawing to a close, the Learned Council of the Practical Technological Institute communicated to the management board of the Nobel Brothers’ Partnership, by special delivery, a message saying that it had conferred on Ludvig Nobel, on February 25, 1888, the honorary title of the Production Engineer established in Russia “for the Russian state’s most prominent engineers, manufacturing process planners and industry organizers.”

In those days, however, Ludvig Nobel was gravely ill and undergoing treatment in Cannes, France. His personal presence at the ceremony of honoring the award-winners of the Lighting Fixtures and Heating Appliances Exhibition was out of the question. His days were numbered, and on April 12, 1888, Ludvig Nobel passed away.

On July 30, 1888, the ninth general meeting of the shareholders of the Nobel Brothers’ Partnership for Oil Production adopted a resolution to found, in memory of the prominent Russian entrepreneur and inventor, the Ludvig Nobel scholarships for students of the Mining and Technological institutes, the Crown Prince Nicholas vocational school, the St. Petersburg business college and first nonclassical secondary school, the Baku nonclassical secondary school.

At their general meeting held on March 31, 1889 on the occasion of the first anniversary of Ludvig Nobel’s death, the members of the Imperial Russian Technological Society vowed to make every effort “so that his honest, clever and active life, which was of great benefit to our Motherland, should be a good precept.” To that end, the Ludvig Nobel Prize was instituted “for the best works on, or the most productive general- or special-purpose scientific research into, the metallurgical or oil industry, or for any outstanding inventions or technical improvements in these spheres with consideration for their practical applications and development prospects in Russia.” Right up to the year 1917 that was one of the most prestigious awards in the Russian engineering community.