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BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Tsiolkovsky Konstantin Eduardovich. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
In our time, the flight of a spacecraft is considered commonplace. And sometimes it even seems strange that a hundred years ago people could not even dream of such flights. The first who tried to present the practical side of space exploration was a modest teacher from Kaluga Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky. Tsiolkovsky was born on September 5 (17), 1857 in the village of Izhevsk, Ryazan province, in the family of a forester. The temperament of the father moderated the natural ardor and frivolity of the mother ... At the age of ten, Kostya fell ill with scarlet fever and lost his hearing. The boy could not go to school and had to study on his own. Here is how the scientist himself recalled the years of his youth: “Glimpses of a serious mental consciousness appeared when reading. At the age of 14, I decided to read arithmetic, and everything seemed to me completely clear and understandable. From that time on, I realized that books are a simple thing and quite accessible to me. father's books on natural and mathematical sciences (for some time my father was a teacher of these sciences in land surveying and taxation classes). And now I am fascinated by the astrolabe, measuring the distance to inaccessible objects, taking plans, determining heights. I arrange an altimeter. With the help of an astrolabe, without leaving from home, I determine the distance to the fire tower. I find 400 arshins. I go and check. It turns out - right. So I believed the theoretical knowledge ... My father imagined that I had technical abilities, and they sent me to Moscow. But what could I do with my deafness there! What connections to make? Without the knowledge of life, I was blind to my career and earnings. I received 10-15 rubles a month from home. He ate only black bread, did not even have potatoes and tea. But he bought books, pipes, mercury, sulfuric acid and so on. So, when Konstantin was sixteen years old, his father sent him to Moscow to his friend N. Fedorov, who worked as a librarian at the Rumyantsev Museum. Under his leadership, Tsiolkovsky studied a lot and in the fall of 1879 he passed the exam for the title of teacher of public schools. “Finally, after Christmas (1880), writes Tsiolkovsky in his book of memoirs, “I received news of my appointment as a teacher of arithmetic and geometry at the Borovsk district school… At the direction of the inhabitants, he got bread to a widower with his daughter, who lived on the outskirts of the city, near the river. They gave me two rooms and a table of soup and porridge. I was happy and lived here for a long time. The owner, a fine man, but drank heavily. Often talked over tea, lunch or dinner with his daughter. I was amazed at her understanding of the gospel. It was time to get married, and I married her without love, hoping that such a wife would not turn me around, would work and would not prevent me from doing the same. This hope was fully justified. We went to get married four miles away, on foot, we didn’t dress up, we didn’t let anyone into the church. We returned, and no one knew anything about our marriage. Before marriage and after it, I did not know a single woman, except for my wife. I'm ashamed to be intimate, but I can't lie. I'm talking about the bad and the good. Marriage I attached only practical significance for a long time, almost from the age of sixteen, I broke off theoretically with all the absurdities of religions. On the day of the wedding, I bought a lathe from a neighbor and cut glass for electric machines. Nevertheless, the musicians somehow got wind of the wedding. They were forced out. Only the crowning priest got drunk. And then it was not me who treated him, but the owner ... I never treated, did not celebrate, I did not go anywhere myself, and my salary was enough for me. We simply dressed, in fact, very poorly, but we did not go in patches and never went hungry ... There were small family scenes and quarrels, but I always felt guilty and asked for forgiveness. Thus the world was restored. All the same, work prevailed: I wrote, calculated, soldered, planed, melted, and so on. He made good piston air pumps, steam engines and various experiments. A guest came and asked to see the steam engine. I agreed, but only offered the guest to prick the splinter for heating the steam engine. Tsiolkovsky worked in Borovsk for several years and in 1892 was transferred to Kaluga. It was in this city that he spent his entire life. Here he taught physics and mathematics at the gymnasium and the diocesan school, and devoted all his free time to scientific work. Having no funds to buy instruments and materials, he made all the models and devices for experiments with his own hands. The range of Tsiolkovsky's interests was very wide. However, due to the lack of systematic education, he often came to the results already known in science. For example, this happened with his first scientific work on the problems of gas dynamics. But for his second published work, "The Mechanics of the Animal Organism," Tsiolkovsky was elected a full member of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society. This work earned positive reviews from the leading scientists of that time D. Mendeleev and A. Stoletov. Stoletov introduced Tsiolkovsky to his student Nikolai Zhukovsky, after which Tsiolkovsky began to study the mechanics of controlled flight. The scientist built a primitive wind tunnel in the attic of his house, on which he made experiments with wooden models. The material he accumulated was used as the basis for the project of a controlled balloon. So Tsiolkovsky called the airship, since the word itself had not yet been invented at that time. Tsiolkovsky was not only the first to propose the idea of an all-metal airship, but also built a working model of it. At the same time, the scientist created an original device for automatic flight control of the airship, as well as an original scheme for regulating its lift. However, officials from the Russian Technical Society rejected Tsiolkovsky's project due to the fact that the Austrian inventor Schwartz made a similar proposal at the same time. Nevertheless, Tsiolkovsky managed to publish a description of his project in the journal "Scientific Review" and thus secure priority for this invention. After the airship, Tsiolkovsky turned to the study of aircraft aerodynamics. He studied in detail the influence of the shape of the wing on the amount of lift and derived the relationship between air resistance and the required engine power of the aircraft. These works were used by Zhukovsky in creating the theory of wing calculation. Subsequently, Tsiolkovsky's interests switched to space exploration. In 1903, he published the book "Investigations of the World Spaces by Jet Instruments", where he proved for the first time that the only apparatus capable of making a space flight is a rocket. True, Tsiolkovsky lacked mathematical knowledge, and he could not give detailed calculations of its design. However, the scientist put forward a number of important and interesting ideas. Those first works of the scientist went almost unnoticed. The doctrine of a jet starship was only noticed when it began to be printed a second time, in 1911-1912, in the well-known widespread and richly published metropolitan magazine Vestnik Aeronautics. Then many scientists and engineers abroad declared their priority. But thanks to the early work of Tsiolkovsky, his priority was proved. In this article and its subsequent continuations (1911 and 1914), he laid the foundations for the theory of rockets and a liquid rocket engine. He was the first to solve the problem of landing a spacecraft on the surface of planets devoid of an atmosphere. The discoveries of the scientist for a long time remained unknown to most experts. His activities did not meet with the necessary support. He had a large family (seven children) and a small salary. For all his work before the October events of 1917, he received 470 rubles from the Imperial Academy of Sciences. And life was difficult, sometimes simply hungry, and there was a lot of grief and tears in it, only two daughters survived their father, his fate did not surround him with a bitter cup of trials ... He was a convinced homebody. It took a lot of work to persuade him even to go to Moscow, when his seventy-fifth birthday was solemnly celebrated. The revolution improved the position of the scientist. “Under the Soviet government, provided with a pension, I could devote myself more freely to my work, and, almost unnoticed before, I now aroused attention to my work. My airship is recognized as a particularly reliable invention. GIRDs and an institute were formed to study jet propulsion ... My seventieth birthday was celebrated by the press Five years later, my anniversary was even solemnly celebrated in Moscow and Kaluga. I was awarded an order ... and an activist badge from Osoaviakhim. The pension was increased ... " In 1926-1929, Tsiolkovsky solves a practical question: how much fuel should be taken into a rocket in order to obtain a liftoff speed and leave the Earth. Konstantin Eduardovich managed to derive a formula called the Tsiolkovsky formula. It turned out that the final speed of the rocket depends on the speed of the gases flowing out of it and on how many times the weight of the fuel exceeds the weight of the empty rocket. In practice, one must also take into account the attraction of celestial bodies and air resistance, where it is. The calculation shows that in order for a liquid-propellant rocket with people to develop a lift-off speed and go on an interplanetary flight, you need to take fuel a hundred times more than the weight of the rocket body, engine, mechanisms, instruments and passengers combined. And this again creates a very serious obstacle. The scientist found an original way out - a rocket train, a multi-stage interplanetary ship. It consists of many missiles interconnected. In the front rocket, in addition to fuel, there are passengers and equipment. Rockets work in turn, dispersing the entire train. When the fuel in one rocket burns out, it is dumped, while the empty tanks are removed and the whole train becomes lighter. Then the second rocket begins to work, and so on. The front rocket, as if in a relay race, receives the speed gained by all previous rockets. It is curious that, having practically no instruments, Tsiolkovsky calculated the optimal height for a flight around the Earth - this is an interval from three hundred to eight hundred kilometers above the Earth. It is at these altitudes that modern space flights take place. Having learned about the works of Tsiolkovsky, the German scientist Hermann Oberth wrote to him: "Knowing your excellent work, I could do without many vain labors and today I would have advanced much further." Space flights and airship building were the main problems to which he devoted his life. But to speak of Tsiolkovsky only as the father of astronautics means to impoverish his contribution to modern science and technology. Astrobotany had not yet been born, decades would have to wait for experiments on the synthesis of complex organic molecules in the conditions of the interstellar medium, and Tsiolkovsky defended with conviction the idea of a variety of life forms in the Universe. With a crash, before the eyes of the hippodrome crowd, light, whatnot-like airplanes broke apart, and Tsiolkovsky wrote in 1911: "Airplane will be the safest way to travel." By the way, long before that, he was the first to propose "wheels retractable at the bottom of the body", ahead of the creation of the first wheeled chassis in the plane of the Wright brothers. As if guessing about the future discovery of the laser, he set the engineering task of today: space communication using "a parallel beam of electromagnetic rays with a short wavelength, electrical or even light ...". There was not a single computing machine, and the needs of life did not yet appeal to the saving power of numerical abstractions, and Tsiolkovsky predicted: "... mathematics will penetrate into all areas of knowledge." He owns the development of the principle of movement on an air cushion, implemented only many years later. Tsiolkovsky died on September 19, 1935. "Rocket for me is only a way, only a method of penetrating into the depths of space, but by no means an end in itself ... There will be another way to travel in space - I will accept it too ... The whole point is in resettlement from the Earth and in the settlement of space." An important conclusion follows from this statement by K. E. Tsiolkovsky - the future of mankind is connected with the conquest of the expanses of the Universe: "The Universe belongs to man!" Author: Samin D.K.
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