Yakovlev and Freze's Car
the first Russian car
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The creators of the first Russian car are considered to be Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yakovlev (1857-1898) and Pyotr Alexandrovich Freze (1844-1918): on July 1 (14), 1896, at the Nizhny Novgorod Industrial and Art Exhibition, they presented the first car with an internal combustion engine made in our country.
It cannot be said that Russian engineers did not look for information about the achievements of science and technology abroad.
The famous Moscow propagandist of technical progress and invention P. K. Engelmeyer met K. Benz in Germany in 1883, and E. A. Yakovlev and P. A. Freze visited the World Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, where the Benz Victoria car was exhibited.
Thus, it would be wrong to treat the creation of the car by Yakovlev and Freze as a brilliant insight of technical thought.
Moreover, he was born at a time when there were prerequisites for the birth of the automotive industry all over the world.
It was in the summer of the same 1896 that Ford made the first trip on his "quadricycle", the Paris – Marseille – Paris automobile race was held in France at a distance of 1720 km long, and E. Michelin equipped several hundred cars with pneumatic tires.
In the same year, Russia introduced traffic rules, the German company Benz manufactured 181 cars, and in England the parliament repealed the law on a man with a red flag, who had to go ahead of any horseless carriage.
Both Freze and Yakovlev knew about the experiments with self propelled carriages in France and Germany, and the "Benz" of the Victoria model, which they could see in detail at the World Exhibition in Chicago, struck their imagination.
The crew part of the first Russian car by design followed the traditions of light horse drawn carriages.
The wheels with wooden rims and solid rubber tires rotated not on ball bearings, but on bronze bushings.
Their support surface had to be large and hence the massive hubs.
The spring suspension of continuous axles was then distinguished by a very large variety of designs, often quite complex.
The simplest design for light open carriages (for 2-4 people) is on four longitudinal semi elliptical springs.
A large number of sheets with significant friction between the sheets (a kind of friction vibration dampener) made it possible to do without shock absorbers.
Light carriages often did not have a frame.
The front and rear beams were pivotally connected by two longitudinal rods, forming, as they said then, a"stroke".
The body with a frame made of bent wooden beams was an independent load bearing system that was connected to the" stroke " through springs.
The wheels, equipped with solid rubber tires, did not absorb road shocks well, especially when driving on cobblestone pavements.
Therefore, the wheels had to be made as large as possible in diameter (1200-1500 mm).
In horse drawn carriages, the turn was carried out by the front wheels.
The shafts were connected to the outer parts of the hubs, and the axle itself with the wheels turned on a swivel relative to the body.
At the same time, the front wheels went under the so called "goose" (front of the body), and they had to be made with a diameter smaller than the rear ones, so that the "goose" and the trestles located above it were not very high.
But at the end of the XIX century, some crew masters began to install the front wheels on rotary pins.
And since the wheels rolled along arcs of different radii on turns, it was necessary to invent special mechanisms known as the Ackerman system or the Jeantot trapezoid (after the name of its creators).
Many crew masters followed these principles, and P. A. Freze also adhered to them when developing the chassis of the first Russian car.
He carefully studied the patent of K. Benz, issued to him in 1893, and found his own solution.
Frese placed the suspension springs of the front wheels next to the wheels, like those of the rear, non rotating wheels.
The front springs turned together with the wheels relative to the pins, and P. A. Freze provided for the pins not only in the front axle beam, but also in the crossbar located above it, rigidly connected to the body frame.
A steering trapeze was also attached to it, raised high above the road and thus not subject to impacts on possible obstacles.
For a relatively light (320 kg) stroller, P. A. Freze chose wooden wheels, believing that the cobblestone pavement requires a more durable construction.
Bicycle type wheels would have been easier, but there were no bicycle factories in St. Petersburg at that time where it would be possible to order wheels.
The firms " Dux " and "Leitner" were located quite far away: in Moscow and Riga.
It is not natural that the wheels were equipped with solid rubber tires, since the St. Petersburg company "Triangle" turned to the production of pneumatic tires only in 1898, two years after the experiments of the French manufacturer Michelin.
As for the engine and transmission, E. A. Yakovlev followed the path of K. Benz, but he corrected some of his mistakes and made the engine lighter.
In any case, the mass of the car, built by him together with P. A. Frese, turned out to be the same as that of the small model "Velo" by K. Benz, the production of which began in 1894.
It is also important to note that the German and Russian cars had almost the same wheelbase and similar design.
But the Russian car was wider in track, was equipped with heavier wooden wheels (in German – bicycle type) and was equipped with a folding leather top.
This meant an increase in weight by 50-70 kg compared to the design of K. Benz.
1 candle lantern; 2 transmission belt brake pedal; 3 signal horn with a rubber pear; 4 and 5 gear shift handles; 6 additional air spool handle; 7 gas handle; 8 ignition advance toggle switch; 9 steering lever; 10 hand brake lever; 11 folding leather upper; 12 silencer; 13 rear wheel sprocket; 14 carburetor; 15 with carburetor drain valve; 16 chain; 17 – the asterisk of the differential axis.
Apparently, E. A. Yakovlev significantly simplified the engine and transmission, in particular, he performed the actual engine of smaller dimensions than that of K. Benz.
The "Benz" engines installed on the "Velo" model, with a working volume of 1045 cm, developed a power of 1.5 hp at a speed of rotation of the crankshaft of 450 min, and since 1896-2.75 hp at a speed of 600 min.
At E. A. Yakovlev, this power was 2 hp.
E. A. Yakovlev, as well as the German inventor, equipped his engine with an evaporative cooling system.
When the engine was running, the water was constantly boiling, the steam entered the condenser, where it was cooled and condensed into water.
But some of the water evaporated.
It is curious that T. von Liebig, who in 1894 made a run from Reichenberg to Mannheim and back in a Benz Victoria car with a similar cooling system, consumed 21 liters of gasoline and 150 liters (!) of water per 100 km of the way.
E. A. Yakovlev's water supply (about 30 liters) was placed in two side brass tanks.
The condenser itself in the form of a horizontal long cylinder was placed behind the back of the seat.
Following the example of K. Benz, E. A. Yakovlev also manufactured an evaporative carburetor.
The pictures of the car show its lower part with a drain tap.
This carburetor resembled a vertical cylindrical tank with a diameter of about 200 mm.
It was heated by exhaust gases, gasoline evaporated, saturating the air passing through the tank with vapors.
The composition of the working mixture could be changed in the mixer, where it was combined with additional air if necessary.
A rotary lever placed under the driver's seat served to regulate its composition.
There was no quantitative adjustment of the mixture entering the cylinder, as well as advance ignition.
Electric ignition was carried out from a battery and an induction coil with an electromagnetic interrupter (a kind of Rumkorff coil).
These design features did not allow adjusting the engine speed in relation to the load on it and along the way predetermined its operation as if in a stationary mode.
It was possible to control its operation, either by greatly enriching the mixture, or by creating gaps in the current supply to the candle.
Such actions were necessary when changing gears.
The cars of K. Benz, E. A. Yakovlev and P. A. Freze had a similar transmission design, the basic scheme of which was borrowed from machine tools.
It consisted of two belts (for K. Benz – leather, for E. A. Yakovlev – rubberized fabric), working on stepped pulleys.
Each corresponded to a lower and higher gear, and each had an idle speed.
The movement of the belts and, thereby, the gearshift was controlled using two levers on vertical axles located to the right and left of the steering column.
Slipping of the belts when switching replaced the action of the clutch mechanism.
Two chains served to transfer the torque to the driving wheels.
They were connected by an intermediate shaft with pulleys attached to it.
But this shaft was made split and its half shafts were connected by a differential.
The maximum speed of the first Russian car was 20 versts per hour.
The rational combination of their own and borrowed technical solutions indicates the creative approach of E. A. Yakovlev and P. A. Freze to creating their own "horseless crew".
At the same time, it should be noted that the appearance of the first Benz car in St. Petersburg (a four seat model "Victoria") could not add anything to the knowledge that the inventors had after visiting the Chicago exhibition in 1893.
The St. Petersburg merchant E. Zeleny in the spring of 1895 ordered a car to the company "Benz".
The car No. 218 arrived in the capital on August 1 (14), 1895, and it was purchased by the architect A. K. Zhirgalev, who made his first trip on August 9 (22), 1896 to the Field of Mars.
It is quite obvious that there was no point in copying this bulky four seater car (it weighed 864 kg) of the Victoria model.
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