Grum-Grzhimailo - stove works great master

The surname of the hero of this article is known to every honors pupil in school geography. Thanks to his travels, the naturalist Grum-Grzhimailo Grigory Efimovich introduced the world to the deserts and mountain systems of Central Asia and China. This name carries a pass to the Sikhote-Alin in the Southern Pamir. It is his first expeditions to the Pamirs that are now known to every lover of geography.

Grum-Grzhimailo Vladimir Efimovich

But today's speech will not be about him, but about his younger brother, a man no less outstanding, but unfairly belied and forgotten. Engineer Vladimir Grum-Grzhimailo did a lot in the world of metallurgy. What constituted the meaning of his life-the fiery furnaces of metallurgical plants, after his death constituted the basis of the industrialization of the Soviet Union.

Moscow Bureau of Groom

They arrived in Moscow in the early days of July 1924 - a professor at the Ural University, metallurgist Vladimir Grum-Grzhimailo with his family. We arrived at the invitation of the High Council of National Economy to open the first project office in the country for metallurgical and thermal engineering structures. Vladimir Yefimovich - 60. Life will take him another 4 years, but they will be the most fruitful among 40 years of hard work. The Moscow bureau performed more than 1200 furnace projects, of which 800 were immediately built. Then from this bureau a whole institute is formed, the famous "SteelProject". But while it's just a long empty room under the roof of the house number 3 on the Big Afanasyevsky lane, where the experimental electrical engineering institute is still located. In the attic will make several partitions of the lining. The latter will be inhabited by Grum-Grzhimailo himself. Drawing tables will be put in the rooms, and their children will be with them. This family environment has been preserved in the Institute for many years.

The beginning of an engineer career

About the beginning of his engineering career, Vladimir Efimovich Grum-Grzhimailo recalled with great irony: "I did not know the languages, I did not like books". But, of course, he did not mean any books. Military school, where he was identified as a noble child after his father's death, Groom graduated well. And the Petersburg Mining Institute is among the best. The family was a large family, lived poorly, so he refused to offer to remain a post-graduate student at the institute and went to Nizhny Tagil as an engineer at the plant. It was an unforgettable universal school of life and profession. He managed to solve a question that occupied the minds of many people for 150 years, and to solve it by means available to a fifth grade pupil - the movement of the flame in the furnace is the movement of a light liquid in a heavy one. This thought came to him during a conversation with a stoveman, who explained to him that the whole thing is in the movement of gases. But, of course, the path from these words to the scientific theory was long enough. He turned into 5 volumes of his book "Flame Furnaces". This was a fundamental work, which was later referred to by many foreign authors.

Revolutionary years

Colleagues and subordinates of Gruma remembered him as a loud, not embarrassed to speak directly and, perhaps, unceremoniously. True, always to the point. He appreciated this trait of his character, considered it a sign of will and personal dignity. In 1907 he, already managing the mountain Alapayevsky district, ran for the Third State Duma, but lost. This year turned out to be a turning point. After losing elections to the Duma, Grum-Grzhimailo also quarreled with employers who were in a hurry to take back all concessions to the workers. Groom resigned and received it. But for that, he was a brilliant, already well-known to the whole of Russia engineer, so that this circumstance was used by other people who offered him a chair at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. Here he worked for 11 years, and here his hydraulic theory of flame in furnaces was finally formed. All professional journals of the world published essays on it. There was nothing of the kind in metallurgy until that moment.

Years of the First World War

Groom was one of the first to benefit from the application of his theory. And the customer on his stove was the state. It happened after the beginning of the war, to which the industry of Russia was not ready. The army needed armor-piercing shells, but there was nothing to manufacture them. The core of the bureau was then Groom and the Putilov engineers. Despite the modest size of the enterprise, it was the first design institute in Russia for flaming furnaces, which soon put everything necessary for defense needs. The Bureau had a permanent order even in the revolutionary 17th year. But in 1918 everything ended - the bureau ceased to exist. Vladimir Efimovich leaves for Moscow.

Memory of the great engineer

The revival of the name Grum-Grzhimailo for some mysterious reasons dragged on until the end of the 20th century. Only in the late 80's in the Urals appeared the book of writer Felix Vibe "A Tale of Hardworking Groom". The Institute "SteelProject", paying tribute to the memory of the founder, told about it in the edition, published in 1000 copies, to the 90th anniversary of the founding of the first Gruga's Petrograd bureau.

Grum-Grzhimailo Grigory Efimovich also remained in the memory of the descendants. His name is more than a dozen butterflies and insects.