As a friend of Alexander Pushkin, invented the world's first telegraph, electric mine detonation and the most secure cipher
Inventor of the world's first telegraph and author of the first in the history of mankind to detonate a mine through an electric wire. Creator of the world's first telegraph code and the best secret cipher in the 19th century. A friend of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin and the creator of the first lithography in Russia (a way of replicating images). Russian hussar, who stormed Paris, and the first researcher of Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhism in Europe, scientist and diplomat. All this is one person - Pavel Lvovich Schilling, an outstanding Russian inventor of the Pushkin era and the Napoleonic wars. Perhaps one of the last representatives of the galaxy of encyclopedists, "universal scientists" of the Enlightenment, who left a bright mark in many often distant spheres of world science and technology.
Oh, how many wonderful discoveries we have
Prepare the spirit of enlightenment
And Experience, son of difficult mistakes, And Genius, friend of paradoxes …
These famous Pushkin lines, according to most researchers of the great poet's work, are dedicated to Pavel Schilling and were written in the days when their author was going with him on an expedition to the Far East, to the borders of Mongolia and China.
Everyone knows the genius of Russian poetry, while his learned friend is much less famous. Although in Russian science and history, he rightfully occupies an important place.
The profile of Pavel Schilling, drawn by A. S. Pushkin in the album of E. N. Ushakova in November 1829
The world's first electric mine
The future inventor of the telegraph was born on the lands of the Russian Empire in Reval on April 16, 1786. In accordance with the origin and tradition, the baby was named Paul Ludwig, Baron von Schilling von Kanstadt. His father was a German baron who switched to the Russian service, where he rose to the rank of colonel, and received the highest military award for bravery - the Order of St. George.
A few months after his birth, the future author of many inventions found himself in the very center of Russia, in Kazan, where his father commanded the Nizovsky infantry regiment. Paul spent his entire childhood here, here he became Pavel, from here, at the age of 11, after his father's death, he left for St. Petersburg to study in the cadet corps. In the documents of the Russian Empire, he was recorded as Pavel Lvovich Schilling - under this name he entered Russian history.
During his studies, Pavel Schilling showed aptitude for mathematics and topography, therefore, after graduating from the cadet corps in 1802, he was enrolled in the Quartermaster of His Imperial Majesty's retinue - the prototype of the General Staff, where the young officer was engaged in the preparation of topographic maps and staff calculations.
In those years, a great war was brewing in the center of Europe between Napoleonic France and Tsarist Russia. And General Staff Officer Pavel Schilling is transferred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as a secretary, he serves at the Russian embassy in Munich, then the capital of the independent Bavarian state.
Schilling became a member of our military intelligence - at that time the functions of diplomat and intelligence officer were even more confused than in our time. Bavaria was then a de facto vassal of Napoleon, and Petersburg needed to know about the internal situation and the military potential of this kingdom.
But Munich at that time was also one of the centers of German science. Rotating in the circles of high society, the young diplomat and intelligence officer got acquainted not only with the aristocrats and the military, but also with the outstanding European scientists of his time. As a result, Pavel Schilling became interested in the study of oriental languages and experiments with electricity.
At that time, mankind was only discovering the secrets of the movement of electric charges; various "galvanic" experiments were seen rather as amusing entertainment. But Pavel Schilling suggested that a spark of an electric charge in the wires can replace a gunpowder wick in military affairs.
Meanwhile, a big war with Napoleon began, in July 1812 the Russian embassy was evacuated to St. Petersburg, and here Pavel Schilling immediately offered his invention to the military department. He undertook to detonate a powder charge under water so that minefields could be made that could reliably cover the capital of the Russian Empire from the sea. At the height of World War II, when Napoleon's soldiers occupied Moscow, several of the world's first experimental explosions of powder charges under water using electricity were carried out in St. Petersburg on the banks of the Neva.
Maps for the Russian army
Experiments with electric mines were successful. Contemporaries called them "long-range ignition". In December 1812, the Life Guards Sapper Battalion was formed, in which further work continued on Schilling's experiments on electric fuses and detonations. The author of the invention himself, having abandoned a comfortable diplomatic rank, volunteered for the Russian army. With the rank of captain-captain of the Sumy hussar regiment, in 1813-1814, he fought all the main battles with Napoleon in Germany and France. For the battles on the outskirts of Paris, Captain Schilling was awarded a very rare and honorable award - a personal weapon, a saber with the inscription "For Bravery." But his contribution to the final defeat of Napoleon's army consisted not only in the courage of cavalry attacks - it was Pavel Schilling who provided the Russian army with topographic maps for an offensive in France.
"The Battle of Fer-Champenoise". Painting by V. Timm
Previously, maps were drawn by hand, and in order to supply all the numerous Russian units with them, there was neither the time nor the required number of skilled specialists. At the end of 1813, the hussar officer Schilling informed Tsar Alexander I that the world's first successful experiments in lithography - copying drawings - were carried out in German Mannheim.
The essence of this latest technology for that time was that a drawing or text was applied to a specially selected and polished limestone with a special "lithographic" ink. Then the surface of the stone is "etched" - treated with a special chemical composition. Etched areas not covered with lithographic ink after such processing repel the printing ink, and on the places where the drawing was applied, the printing ink, on the contrary, easily adheres. This makes it possible to quickly and efficiently make numerous prints of drawings from such a "lithographic stone".
By order of the Tsar, Pavel Schilling with a squadron of hussars arrived in Mannheim, where he found the specialists who had previously participated in lithographic experiments and the necessary equipment. In the rear of the Russian army, under the leadership of Schilling, they quickly organized the production of a large number of maps of France, urgently needed on the eve of the decisive offensive against Napoleon. At the end of the war, the workshop created by Schilling was relocated to St. Petersburg, to the Military Topographic Depot of the General Staff.
The strongest cipher of the 19th century
In Paris, captured by the Russians, while everyone is celebrating the victory, the hussar Schilling first of all gets to know the French scientists. Especially often, on the basis of interest in electricity, he communicates with Andre Ampere, a man who entered the history of world science as the author of the terms "electric current" and "cybernetics", by whose last name the descendants will call the unit of measurement of current strength.
Andre Ampere. Source: az.lib.ru
But besides the "electrical" hobby, the scientist-hussar Schilling has a new big task - he studies trophy French ciphers, learns to decipher strangers and create his own methods of cryptography. Therefore, soon after the defeat of Napoleon, the hussar Schilling takes off his uniform and returns to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he is officially engaged in the creation of a lithographic printing house - in diplomatic activities then a significant part of it was lively correspondence, and technical copying of documents helped to speed up the work and facilitate the work of many scribes. As Schilling's friends joked, he generally became interested in lithography because his active nature could not withstand the tedious rewriting by hand: lithography, which at that time was hardly known to anyone ….
But the creation of a lithograph for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs became only an external part of his work. In reality, Pavel Schilling works in the Secret Expedition of the digital unit - that was the name of the encryption department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was Schilling who was the first in the history of world diplomacy to introduce into the practice of using special bigram ciphers - when, according to a complex algorithm, pairs of letters are encrypted with numbers, but not arranged in a row, but in the order of another given algorithm. Such ciphers were so complex that they were used until the advent of electrical and electronic encryption systems during the Second World War.
The theoretical principle of bigram encryption was known long before Schilling, but for manual work it was so complicated and time-consuming that it was not previously applied in practice. Schilling invented a special mechanical device for such encryption - a collapsible table pasted on paper, which made it possible to easily encrypt the bigrams.
At the same time, Schilling additionally strengthened the bigram encryption: he introduced "dummies" (encryption of individual letters) and the addition of a text with a chaotic set of characters. As a result, such a cipher became so stable that it took European mathematicians more than half a century to learn how to break it, and Pavel Schilling himself rightfully earned the title of the most outstanding Russian cryptographer of the 19th century. A few years after Schilling's invention, new ciphers were used not only by Russian diplomats, but also by the military. By the way, it was the hard work on the ciphers that saved Pavel Schilling from being carried away by the fashionable ideas of the Decembrists and, possibly, saved an outstanding person for Russia.
"Russian Cagliostro" and Pushkin
All contemporaries familiar with him, who left their memoirs, agree that Pavel Lvovich Schilling was an extraordinary person. And first of all, everyone notes his extraordinary sociability.
He impressed the high society of St. Petersburg with the ability to play chess several games at once, without looking at the boards and always winning. Schilling, who liked to have fun, entertained the St. Petersburg society not only with games and interesting stories, but also with various scientific experiments. Foreigners called him "Russian Cagliostro" - for his mysterious experiments with electricity and knowledge of the then mysterious Far East.
Pavel Schilling became interested in Eastern, or, as they said then, "oriental" countries as a child, when he grew up in Kazan, which was then the center of Russian trade with China. Even during his diplomatic service in Munich, and then in Paris, where the leading European center for oriental studies was then located, Pavel Schilling studied Chinese. As a cryptographer, a specialist in ciphers, he was attracted by mysterious hieroglyphs and incomprehensible oriental manuscripts.
The Russian diplomat Schilling put his interest in the East into practice. Having established a new encryption, in 1830 he volunteered to lead a diplomatic mission to the borders of China and Mongolia. Most diplomats preferred an enlightened Europe, so the king approved Schilling's candidacy without hesitation.
One of the participants in the eastern expedition was to be Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. While still engaged in lithography, Schilling could not resist the "hooligan act", he wrote by hand and reproduced in lithographic way the poems of Vasily Lvovich Pushkin - the uncle of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, a well-known writer in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This is how the first manuscript in Russian, reproduced by technical copying, was born. After defeating Napoleon and returning to Russia, Vasily Pushkin introduced Schilling to his nephew. Alexander Pushkin's acquaintance with Schilling grew into a long and strong friendship.
On January 7, 1830, Pushkin appeals to the chief of gendarmes Benckendorff with a request to enroll him in Schilling's expedition: "… I would ask permission to visit China with the embassy going there." Unfortunately, the tsar did not include the poet in the list of members of the diplomatic mission to the borders of Mongolia and China, depriving the descendants of Pushkin's poems about Siberia and the Far East. Only the stanzas have survived, written by the great poet about his desire to go on a long journey together with the Schilling embassy:
Let's go, I'm ready; wherever you are, friends, Wherever you want, I'm ready for you
Follow everywhere, running away haughty:
To the foot of the wall of distant China …
The world's first practical telegraph
In the spring of 1832, the Far Eastern embassy, which also included the future founder of Russian Sinology, Archimandrite Nikita Bichurin, returned to St. Petersburg, and five months later, on October 9, the first demonstration of the work of his first telegraph took place. Prior to that, Europe had already tried to create devices for transmitting electrical signals over a distance, but all such devices required a separate wire to transmit each letter and sign - that is, a kilometer of such a "telegraph" required about 30 km of wires.
Nikita Bichurin. Source: az.lib.ru
The telegraph invented by Schilling used only two wires - this was the first working model that could be used not only for experiments, but also in practice. Data transmission was carried out by different combinations of eight black and white keys, and the receiver consisted of two arrows, the signals transmitted over the wires were displayed by their position relative to the black and white disk. In fact, Schilling was the first in the world to use a binary code, on the basis of which all digital and computer technology works today.
Already in 1835, Schilling's telegraph interconnected the premises of the vast Winter Palace and the palace itself with the Admiralty, and under the chairmanship of the Minister of the Navy, a Committee was created to consider the electromagnetic telegraph. They began to carry out the first experiments on laying a telegraph cable underground and in water.
At the same time, work did not stop on the method of electric detonation of sea mines proposed by Schilling. On March 21, 1834, on the Obvodny Canal near the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St. Petersburg, the inventor demonstrated to Tsar Nicholas I the electric detonation of underwater mines. From that moment in Russia, active work began on the creation of underwater minefields.
In 1836, Schilling received a tempting offer for a lot of money to start work on the introduction of the telegraph invented by him in England. However, the author of the invention refused to leave Russia and took up the project of arranging the first large telegraph between Peterhof and Kronstadt, for which he planned to lay wires along the bottom of the Gulf of Finland.
Pavel Schilling's telegraph. Source: pan-poznavajka.ru
The project of such a telegraph was approved by the tsar on May 19, 1837. For his submarine cable, Schilling was the first in the world to propose to insulate the wires with rubber, natural rubber. At the same time, Schilling announced a project for connecting Peterhof and St. Petersburg by telegraph, for which he planned to hang copper wire on ceramic insulators from poles along the Peterhof road. This was the world's first proposal for a modern type of electrical network! But then the tsarist officials took Schilling's project as a wild fantasy. Adjutant General Peter Kleinmichel, the very one who will soon build the first railway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, then laughed and said to Schilling: "My dear friend, your proposal is madness, your air wires are truly ridiculous."
Pavel Schilling never saw the realization of his visionary ideas. He died on August 6, 1837, having outlived his friend Alexander Pushkin for a very short time. Soon after the death of the Russian inventor, telegraph networks began to envelop the globe, and the electric underwater mines invented by him during the Crimean War of 1853-1856 reliably protected St. Petersburg and Kronstadt from the British fleet that then dominated the Baltic.
