Hydraulic press - from idea to capacity of 1000 tons

Hydraulic press functions due to a very important feature of ordinary water. It is very poorly compressed, therefore, when it is placed in a vessel having closed walls, it exerts an equal pressure in all directions in them. But if such a vessel filled with water is equipped with two pistons, on the one hand - small, on the other - large, then pressing the smaller one with some force, it is easy to squeeze out or lift the second one. The greater the difference in their areas, the greater the strength of the impact. On this effect, all hydraulic presses operate all over the world.

The discovery of this dependence belongs to Pascal, however, during his life no one could use it. After his death, a treatise on hydrostatic pressure was published, and it followed that a small piston in a closed vessel with water, controlled by the effort of one person, could balance the piston a hundred times larger in area if a hundred people pressed at once. The idea was liked by many, but for a long time nobody could create a hydraulic press.

For a hundred years, the inventors struggled to solve this problem, but under no circumstances, no one could get an absolute hermeticity of the water system, because as soon as the pressure in it increased, the liquid began to seep, and the tension aimed at creating pressure was lost. Only at the end of the XVIII century Henry Models came up with a sealing layer for the pistons. Since then, and to this day, it is fairly believed that without his invention, perhaps, so far no one has ever created a hydraulic press. Business immediately came to an end and began to develop.

Already seven years later, the hydraulic press was created by the Englishman Brahma. This was the first sample for an infinite number of large and small adaptations, among which was a lifting jack, and a press for punching soft metals.

True, hydraulic presses of enormous power for iron appeared only in the middle of the 19th century. This was the era of forging large billets, so powerful hammers were required. The development of machine-building stimulated rapid development, the introduction of new types of equipment, and at many plants began to apply already stamping, very noisy steam hammer weighing one hundred and twenty tons.

The author of the first hydraulic forging press was D. Gazvel - the head of the workshops of the Vienna Railway, whose workshops were located in the city, and the use of steam equipment for forming metal scarecrow residents. Then D. Gazvel decided to install instead of a hammer hydraulic press with a capacity of seven hundred tons and with his help to produce locomotive parts.

Two years later, his invention was presented at an exhibition in London, which gave impetus to the creation of even more powerful pistons around the world. Prominent was Witworth's press - a student of G. Model, who allowed to stamp products directly from ingots of iron. Replacing the hammer with a hydraulic press, it achieved a significant reduction in the cost of products, and this in turn prompted the modernization of many machine-building plants, where steam hammers were discarded and replaced with hydraulics. By the beginning of the 20th century, the power of hydraulic presses had reached thousands of tons.