Besides the innovations he brought to the oil industry and the construction of numerous bridges and buildings, Shukhov was the inventor of a new family of doubly curved structural forms.

His father Grigory Ivanovich Shukhov was a minor government official, promoted for his efforts in the Crimean War.

During his high school years he showed mathematical talents, once demonstrating to his classmates and teacher an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem.

After graduating from the gymnasium, Shukhov entered the Imperial Moscow Technical School, in which his teachers included Pafnuty Chebyshev, Aleksey Letnikov, and Nikolay Zhukovsky.

During his stay in the US, Shukhov came to know a Russian-American entrepreneur, Alexander Veniaminovich Bari who also worked on the organization of the Fair.

Within several months, Shukhov's frustration with standard and routine engineering made him abandon the office and join a military-medical academy.

After the October Revolution Shukhov decided to stay in the Soviet Union despite having received alluring job offers from all around the world.

Vladimir Shukhov is often referred as the Russian Edison for the sheer quantity and quality of his pioneering works [citation needed].