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1 Popoff, Andrei Alexandrovitch
SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping[br]b. 21 September 1821 Russiad. 6 March 1898 Russia[br]Russian admiral and naval constructor involved in the building of unusual warships.[br]After graduating from the Naval School Popoff served in the Russian Navy, ultimately commanding the cruiser Meteor. During the Crimean War he was Captain of a steamship and was later Manager of Artillery Supplies at Sevastopol. At the conclusion of the war he was appointed to supervise the construction of all steamships and so started his real career in naval procurement. For the best part of thirty years he oversaw the Russian naval building programme, producing many new ships at St Petersburg. Probably the finest was the battleship Petr Veliki (Peter the Great), of 9,000 tons displacement, built at Galernii Island in 1869. With some major refits the ship remained in the fleet until 1922. Two remarkable ships were produced at St Petersburg, the Novgorod and the Vice Admiral Popoff in 1874 and 1876, respectively. Their hull form was almost circular in the hope of creating stable and steady gun platforms and to lessen the required depth of water for their duties as defence ships in the shallow waters of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Despite support for the idea from Sir Edward Reed of the Royal Navy, the designs failed owing to unpleasant oscillations and poor manoeuvring qualities. One further attempt was made to find a successful outcome to this good idea in the construction of the Russian Imperial Yacht Livadia at Elder's Glasgow shipyard in 1880: for many reasons the Livadia never fulfilled her purpose. Despite their great advantages, the age of the Popoffkas was over. Popoff had a remarkable effect on Russian shipbuilding and warship design. He had authority, and used it wisely at a time when the Russian shipbuilding industry was developing quickly.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsHonorary Associate of the Institution of Naval Architects, London.Further ReadingFred T.Jane, 1899, The Imperial Russian Navy, London.AK / FMWBiographical history of technology > Popoff, Andrei Alexandrovitch
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2 Poniatoff, Alexander Mathew
[br]b. 25 March 1892 Kazan District, Russiad. 24 October 1980[br]Russian (naturalized American in 1932) electrical engineer responsible for the development of the professional tape recorder and the first commercially-successful video tape recorder (VTR).[br]Poniatoff was educated at the University of Kazan, the Imperial College in Moscow, and the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, gaining degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering. He was in Germany when the First World War broke out, but he managed to escape back to Russia, where he served as an Air Force pilot with the Imperial Russian Navy. During the Russian Revolution he was a pilot with the White Russian Forces, and escaped into China in 1920; there he found work as an assistant engineer in the Shanghai Power Company. In 1927 he immigrated to the USA, becoming a US citizen in 1932. He obtained a post in the research and development department of the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York, and later at Dalmo Victor, San Carlos, California. During the Second World War he was involved in the development of airborne radar for the US Navy.In 1944, taking his initials to form the title, Poniatoff founded the AMPEX Corporation to manufacture components for the airborne radar developed at General Electric, but in 1946 he turned to the production of audio tape recorders developed from the German wartime Telefunken Magnetophon machine (the first tape recorder in the truest sense). In this he was supported by the entertainer Bing Crosby, who needed high-quality replay facilities for broadcasting purposes, and in 1947 he was able to offer a professional-quality product and the business prospered.With the rapid post-war boom in television broadcasting in the USA, a need soon arose for a video recorder to provide "time-shifting" of live TV programmes between the different US time zones. Many companies therefore endeavoured to produce a video tape recorder (VTR) using the same single-track, fixed-head, longitudinal-scan system used for audio, but the very much higher bandwidth required involved an unacceptably high tape-speed. AMPEX attempted to solve the problem by using twelve parallel tracks and a machine was demonstrated in 1952, but it proved unsatisfactory.The development team, which included Charles Ginsburg and Ray Dolby, then devised a four-head transverse-scan system in which a quadruplex head rotating at 14,400 rpm was made to scan across the width of a 2 in. (5 cm) tape with a tape-to-head speed of the order of 160 ft/sec (about 110 mph; 49 m/sec or 176 km/h) but with a longitudinal tape speed of only 15 in./sec (0.38 m/sec). In this way, acceptable picture quality was obtained with an acceptable tape consumption. Following a public demonstration on 14 April 1956, commercial produc-tion of studio-quality machines began to revolutionize the production and distribution of TV programmes, and the perfecting of time-base correctors which could stabilize the signal timing to a few nanoseconds made colour VTRs a practical proposition. However, AMPEX did not rest on its laurels and in the face of emerging competition from helical scan machines, where the tracks are laid diagonally on the tape, the company was able to demonstrate its own helical machine in 1957. Another development was the Videofile system, in which 250,000 pages of facsimile could be recorded on a single tape, offering a new means of archiving information. By 1986, quadruplex VTRs were obsolete, but Poniatoff's role in making television recording possible deserves a place in history.Poniatoff was President of AMPEX Corporation until 1955 and then became Chairman of the Board, a position he held until 1970.[br]Further ReadingA.Abrahamson, 1953, "A short history of television recording", Part I, JSMPTE 64:73; 1973, Part II, Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, 82:188 (provides a fuller background).Audio Biographies, 1961, ed. G.A.Briggs, Wharfedale Wireless Works, pp. 255–61 (contains a few personal details about Poniatoff's escape from Germany to join the Russian Navy).E.Larsen, 1971, A History of Invention.Charles Ginsburg, 1981, "The horse or the cowboy. Getting television on tape", Journal of the Royal Television Society 18:11 (a brief account of the AMPEX VTR story).KF / GB-NBiographical history of technology > Poniatoff, Alexander Mathew
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3 Krylov, Alexei Nicolaevitch
SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping[br]b. 15 August 1863 Visyoger, Siberiad. 26 October 1945 Leningrad (now St Petersburg), Russia[br]Russian academician and naval architect) exponent of a rigorous mathematical approach to the study of ship motions.[br]After schooling in France and Germany, Krylov returned to St Petersburg (as it then was) and in 1878 entered the Naval College. Upon graduating, he started work with the Naval Hydrographic Department; the combination of his genius and breadth of interest became apparent, and from 1888 until 1890 he undertook simultaneously a two-year university course in mathematics and a naval architecture course at his old college. On completion of his formal studies, Krylov commenced fifty years of service to the academic bodies of St Petersburg, including eight years as Superintendent of the Russian Admiralty Ship Model Experiment Tank. For many years he was Professor of Naval Architecture in the city, reorganizing the methods of teaching of his profession in Russia. It was during this period that he laid the foundations of his remarkable research and published the first of his many books destined to become internationally accepted in the fields of waves, rolling, ship motion and vibration. Practical work was not overlooked: he was responsible for the design of many vessels for the Imperial Russian Navy, including the battleships Sevastopol and Petropavlovsk, and went on, as Director of Naval Construction, to test anti-rolling tanks aboard military vessels in the North Atlantic in 1913. Following the Revolution, Krylov was employed by the Soviet Union to re-establish scientific links with other European countries, and on several occasions he acted as Superintendent in the procurement of important technical material from overseas. In 1919 he was appointed Head of the Marine Academy, and from then on participated in many scientific conferences and commissions, mainly in the shipbuilding field, and served on the Editorial Board of the well-respected Russian periodical Sudostroenie (Shipbuilding). The breadth of his personal research was demonstrated by the notable contributions he made to the Russian development of the gyro compass.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsMember, Russian Academy of Science 1814. Royal Institution of Naval Architects Gold Medal 1898. State Prize of the Soviet Union (first degree). Stalin Premium for work on compass deviation.BibliographyKrylov published more than 500 books, papers and articles; these have been collected and published in twelve volumes by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. 1942, My Memories (autobiography).AK / FMWBiographical history of technology > Krylov, Alexei Nicolaevitch
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4 Marcus, Siegfried
[br]b. 18 September 1831 Malchin, Mecklenburgd. 30 June 1898 Vienna, Austria[br]German inventor, builder of the world's first self-propelled vehicle driven by an internal combustion engine.[br]Marcus was apprenticed as a mechanic and was employed in the newly founded enterprise of Siemens \& Halske in Berlin. He then went to Vienna and, from 1853, was employed in the workshop of the Imperial Court Mechanic, Kraft, and in the same year he was a mechanic in the Royal and Imperial Institute of Physics of the University of Vienna. In 1860 he became independent of the Imperial Court, but he installed an electrical bell system for the Empress Elizabeth and instructed the Crown Prince Rudolf in natural science.Marcus was granted thirty-eight patents in Austria, as well as many foreign patents. The magnetic electric ignition engine, for which he was granted a patent in 1864, brought him the biggest financial reward; it was introduced as the "Viennese Ignition" engine by the Austrian Navy and the pioneers of the Prussian and Russian armies. The engine was exhibited at the World Fair in Paris in 1867 together with the "Thermoscale" which was also constructed by Marcus; this was a magnetic/electric rotative engine for electric lighting and field telegraphy.Marcus's reputation is due mainly to his attempts to build a new internal combustion engine. By 1870 he had assembled a simple, direct-working internal combustion engine on a primitive chassis. This was, in fact, the first petrol-engined vehicle with electric ignition, and tradition records that when Marcus drove the vehicle in the streets of Vienna it made so much noise that the police asked him to remove it; this he did and did not persist with his experiments. Thus ended the trials of the world's first petrol-engined vehicle; it was running in 1875, ten years before Daimler and Benz were carrying out their early trials in Stuttgart.[br]Further ReadingAustrian Dictionary of National Biography.IMcN
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