History of metallurgy in the Urals

[16][17] In the 11th to the 13th centuries, metal goods made by Western European artisans began to penetrate the Urals through trade routes, which contributed to the expansion of the range of products smelted.

Excavations at the Kama settlements or hill forts of Idnakar, Vasyakar, Dondykar, Kushmansky, and others have shown that in the 11th to the 15th centuries the main unit for smelting iron[note 2] was a blast furnace.

[21] By the end of the 1st millennium, ore mining and its own copper-bronze and iron production in the Urals gradually ceased due to the depletion of available resources, competition with more developed cultures, and ethnographic changes that had begun.

[35] It is known that 40 years before the arrival of Georg Wilhelm de Gennin to the Urals, the peasants of the Aramil settlement smelted iron in small furnaces and sold it, paying tithes to the district office.

After his trip abroad, Peter I, realizing the shortage of coal in the central regions and the need to strengthen weapons potential, ordered the construction of mining plants in the Urals, providing them with engineers from Tula, Kashira and other factories.

[46] The rapid development of the metallurgical industry in the Urals in the 17th-18th centuries was facilitated by the abundance of rich natural alloyed (copper, chromium and vanadium) ores in the region, as well as the availability of accessible forest and water resources.

In 1618-1622, the Englishman John Water, and in 1626 Fritsch, Gerold and Bulmerr, together with Russian attendants, carried out fruitless expeditions to search for ores in the region of the upper Kama and the Pechora.

[54][55] In particular, thanks to local residents who brought samples of bog ore to the offices of the Turin and Tobolsk governors for a fee, the deposits of the first iron-making plant in the Urals - Nitsynsky - were discovered.

[79][80][81][82][50] Actually, the beginning of the history of the mining industry in the Urals is considered to be January 1697, when Governor D. M. Protasyev reported to Moscow about the discovery of iron ore on the Tagil and Neyva rivers.

[109] In 1696, at the initiative of the head of the Siberian order, the Duma clerk A.A. Vinius, the ore found in the Verkhotursky district was sent for examination to the Moscow gunsmiths and the Tula blacksmith N. D. Antufiev (Demidov).

[125] In the first years of the 18th century, with the launch of the first state-owned and private factories, the production base of mining districts and the management system of the enterprises included in them began to be built.

The registered peasants at the factories performed mainly auxiliary work: they prepared firewood for the production of coal and heating houses, mined and fired ore and limestone, transported goods, and erected dams.

The law also guaranteed the inheritance of the ownership of factories, proclaimed industrial activity a matter of state importance and protected manufacturers from interference in their affairs by local authorities.

In addition to the Demidovs and Stroganovs, entrepreneurs Osokins, Tverdyshevs, I. S. Myasnikov, and M. M. Pokhodyashin, as well as officials and nobles: P. I. Shuvalov, M. M. Golitsyn, and A. I. Glebov began to build factories.

[170] In 1767, about 140 metallurgical plants operating in the Urals made the region a leader in world iron production and secured a monopoly position in Russia in copper smelting.

[175][176] The industrial revolution at the Ural mining plants consisted of three major stages: The replacement of wooden bellows with cylindrical blowers in the early 19th century reduced coal consumption by up to 20% and doubled the productivity of blast furnaces.

Since the 1850s, due to the appearance of cheap English, and later — Chilean, North American, and Australian copper on the market, the metallurgical industry of the Southern Urals entered a period of long-term crisis.

According to the data of 1849, the State Loan Bank pledged the Kanonikolsky, Beloretsky, Voskresensky, Troitsky, Blagoveshchensky, Yuryuzan-Ivanovsky mining districts a total amount of 1,106,995 rubles in silver.

[208] In 1870, at the invitation of the Russian government, the Austrian metallurgist P. von Tunner visited an industrial exhibition in St. Petersburg and inspected the Ural metallurgical plants.

[209] As a result of this trip, in 1871, he published a book[210] with a description of the factories, in which he noted the technical and organizational backwardness of the metallurgy of the Urals, and the high cost of production.

In his report, Mendeleev called the main reasons for the industrial crisis of the Ural metallurgy, off-road conditions, the preserved serf relations between factory owners and peasants, the use of outdated equipment and technologies, the monopoly of large entrepreneurs on ore and forests, and the arbitrariness of local authorities.

As a result of the expedition, a plan was drawn up for the development of Ural metallurgy with an increase in the volume of iron smelting to 300 million poods per year, which did not find the support of the authorities.

During the crisis years, the share of finished iron increased, new markets were searched for, syndicates and associations were created to fight the competition of factories in Southern Russia.

The state of production continued to deteriorate, there was a critical shortage of fuel, railroad transportation became practically unmanageable, enterprises worked with interruptions, equipment was not repaired or updated in a timely manner.

In November - December 1917, the boards of Ural joint-stock companies suspended the transfer of money to factories where Soviet control was introduced, which led to delays in the payment of wages and the accumulation of debts for the supply of raw materials and food.

In Sverdlovsk, and Ust-Katav, from the framework of the evacuated equipment, the production of artillery pieces and shells was built, supplementing the potential of the Motovilikhinsky, Zlatoust, and Izhevsky arms factories.

[253][252] The main directions of technical progress in ferrous metallurgy in the post-war period were: In April 1959, the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works began heating open-hearth furnaces with associated gas.

From 1947 to 1959, 4 blast furnaces, 18 open-hearths, 6 rolling mills, a unique converter shop for processing vanadium pig iron,[note 14] and the country's first continuous casting machine were built at the Nizhniy Tagil Metallurgical Plant from 1947 to 1959.

Although the level of technical equipment of the Ural metallurgical plants was lower than in other regions, the cost of iron and steel produced was 10-15% less than the average for the USSR Ministry of Ferrous Metallurgy.

[269][270] In 2008, the Ural plants produced 43.1% of all-Russian pig iron, 43.4% of steel, 43.4% of rolled products, 46.4% of pipes, 47.9% of hardware, 72.8% of ferroalloys, about 80% of bauxite, 60% of alumina, 36% of refined copper, 100% of titanium and magnesium alloys, 64% of zinc, 15% of lead, and 8% of aluminum.