Timchenko Joseph Andreevich General data:
26.11.1952 - 20.05.1924
Place of birth: Okop village, Kharkiv province, Kharkiv province, Russian empire
Key interests: instruments and devices, meteorology
Biography:
He was born on November 26, 1852 in the Okop village of Udyansky volost of Kharkiv district of Kharkiv province of the Russian Empire (now the Okip village of Zolochiv district of Kharkiv region of Ukraine) in a large family of serf shoemaker Andriy Ilyich Tymchenko. The boy was the first child in a family with seven children.
Since an early age, the boy demonstrated some abilities and his father sent him to study at a church school located in the neighboring Uda village. He also, according to some reports, graduated from a three-grade school. In 1867, on the recommendation of his brother, his father sent him for further training as an assistant locksmith in the workshop of the well-known mechanic of the Imperial Kharkiv University, O. M. Edelberg. Here the young man gained various skills in the manufacture of various physical, optical, geodetic instruments and medical surgical instruments. Here he began to study mechanics and optics in depth, made the first astronomical instruments to order of the Maritime Department. Among the thirteen ordered astrolabes, only five were accepted, as it turned out that they were all made by Timchenko. At this time, Timchenko became close to a student group that was engaged in acquaintance with the ideas of French socialist utopianism. Influenced by these ideas, he and several other freethinkers decided to go to Oceania (according to the manuscript of YA Tymchenko, a group of 9 people traveled to America) and establish a new country with a republican system of government. To do this, they raised funds for a while, and then decided to go to the nearest port to reach the extinct islands. But the "pink" dream failed to come true: when the utopians reached the city of Odessa, one of the leaders disappeared with all the money of the expedition. Tymchenko and his young wife found themselves in a difficult situation, but decided not to return to Kharkiv and stayed in Odessa, as it turned out. At first, Joseph worked in the port as a regular loader, but there was a catastrophic lack of funds and he decided to look for a more qualified job as a mechanic. About a year later he got a job at the shipyard of the Russian Society of Steamship and Trade (ROPiT-Russian) where he worked for almost six years. At this time he made his first measuring device for checking manometers after their repair, more precisely in 1975 he designed an oil manometric special press.
He invented the electric clock. This watch was presented by the master to the Emperor Alexander II during his visit to Odessa in the autumn of 1875, then this watch was installed in the Livadia Palace. As a reward, the mechanic received a gold pocket watch from the emperor. Among the inventions made by the mechanic are electrical signals for telegraph wires of the railway, indicating the bell exit of the train from the station, which had a special purpose to warn workers correcting the path of approaching the train, and an electric device for train locomotives, indicating damage to the track or missing rail. Around this time, Timchenko made Russia's first reflector with a silver-plated glass mirror.
In 1880, after the death of Mikhail Kulikov, a mechanic at the Imperial Novorossian University in Odessa, a competition was announced to fill this position. Four candidates took part in the competition, but as a result of a secret ballot, Yosyp Timchenko was elected by a majority of votes. On May 1, he began his fruitful cooperation with the university. It lasted more than forty years, despite the fact that due to his origin and social status, he could not officially hold this position. Over the years, he manufactured a variety of devices not only for the Imperial University of Novorossian University, but also for Kharkov, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin Universities. In particular, by 1908 he and N. N. Donich had built the first spectroheliograph in the Russian Empire. Since then, on behalf of the university, he began to take part in many international exhibitions with meteorological and physical measuring instruments of his own production. During all this time he received three silver and four gold medals for his devices, which in all cases had a new, original design and impeccable workmanship.
He put a lot of effort into the creation of the Meteorological Observatory of the Imperial Novorossian University in Odessa city.
In five years, the university workshop has grown and could hardly accommodate all the equipment and machines, many of which the master bought at his own expense. In 1885, he addressed the university administration with a proposal to build a new room for the workshop. He concludes an agreement with the university on the construction of a mechanical workshop at his own expense. This construction required large sums of money and he was forced to take large loans at high interest rates in the bank, as well as loans from individuals. in particular in Count MM Tolstoy.
But despite all his personal efforts to build, and the equipment of the master, he still remained on the "bird's rights" at the university. Only on August 11, 1888, by the highest decree, he was officially enlisted in the staff of the university as an optician-mechanic. This appointment was supported by almost the entire faculty council of the university.
The master continued his fruitful work in the workshop during the years of boulevardry. He made a model of the world's first automatic telephone exchange, which was recently invented by M. Freidenberg and S. Berdychevsky, as well as a new sea mine, which passed all the tests for the first time and was adopted. He also made a set of original surgical instruments for the clinic of ophthalmologist Filatov. For the first time in the Russian Empire, he made an equator for an astrograph with a clock drive. And one of his last equatorial mounts, which he did not have time to finish, was closed only in 1959 and was used to mount a 19” reflector.
In May 1893, M. Lyubimov, a professor at Moscow University, asked Timchenko to make a "device for demonstrating stroboscopic phenomena" by means of a meticulous change of glass plates with the image obtained by a camera. Timchenko successfully fulfilled the order using a new mechanism "snail", which he himself invented specifically for this device. This device was a prototype of a film camera and was demonstrated at the Congress of Physicists and Physicians in Moscow City in January 1884, a year earlier than the Lumière brothers in Paris. And the interrupt mechanism invented by Timchenko was used in cinemas from the beginning of the 20th century to the middle of the 60s.
In 1900, at the Paris Industrial Exhibitions, he received his last gold medal, and in 1902 in Nizhny Novgorod city he received his last silver medal… Active exhibition work after that almost ceases. But Joseph Timchenko returned to active work at the Imperial Novorossian University and in particular performed many works at the observatory: his project built a pavilion for new equipment, he redesigned the clock mechanism of the Cook refractor, built several small equatorial mounts, and repaired the intermediate. In particular, it regrinds the pins of the horizontal vice of the tool. All work was performed at night in the basement when traffic stopped. Prior to this meridian circle, Tymchenko made several original devices that were used in observations up to the 1960s. And almost all geomagnetic devices and meteorological stations were built by Tymchenko himself.
In 1911 he built his own observatory in his native village in the Kharkiv region.
in 1913 the optician and the mechanic and his family were evicted from the workshop. The only thing that was created by a mechanic during the World War is a high-performance machine gun for rifles.
And the World War, imperceptibly for the periphery of the empire, turned into a civil war. When the Bolsheviks came to Odessa city, the old university was disbanded as a "stronghold of the old regime," and then several institutes were formed from it, including a physical institute, to which the half-surviving workshop of Yosyp Timchenko was assigned.
In the early 1920s, the works were stopped, and scientific and technical life in Odessa was barely active. But Timchenko, despite his advanced age, continued to work alone on the completion of his equator with a clockwork mechanism, sometimes in his workshop were meetings of the Odessa branch of the Russian Society of World Knowledge. At the beginning of 1924, the master was awarded the title of professor of the Institute of Physics.
He was not only an inventor and designer, but also a teacher of many mechanics. Thus, in the early 1920s, he and his best students took an active part in the equipment of one of the first Soviet film companies - Odessa plant "Kinap". For Kuyalnytsia mud sanatorium in the days of the Russian Empire, he designed special exclusive equipment.
He died on May 20, 1924.
Devices manufactured and invented by a tananical mechanic include an anemorumbograph, which automatically records data on wind strength and direction, a pluviograph, a record mercury barometer, various seismographs, bathometers, barographs, chronometers, and a mechanical software device for observing the motion of a telescope with the help of a telescope. bodies, a lecture electrometer, a weighing instrument to explain Pascal's law to students, and other equipment.
Sources:
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2 Äåíü â ³ñòî𳿠àñòðîíî쳿
3 ÂÈÄÍÛÅ ÀÑÒÐÎÍÎÌÛ – Ó×ÅÍÈÊÈ À.Ê.ÊÎÍÎÍÎÂÈ×À /Ì.Þ.Âîëÿíñêàÿ//Ñòðàíèöû èñòîðèè àñòðîíîìèè â Îäåññå", ÷.2, 1995, Îäåññà, ñ.17
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