Kolbasev, Evgenii

Kolbas’ev, Evgenii Viktorovich 

Born June 3 (15), 1862, in Odessa; died Nov. 20, 1918, in Inkerman, near Sevastopol’, in the present-day Crimean Oblast. Russian inventor in the area of naval engineering, captain first class.

Kolbas’ev graduated from the St. Petersburg Naval School in 1883. From 1891 he taught at the Kronstadt Divers’ School. During the 1880’s he invented ship and underwater telephones and developed systems for telephone communication with a diver and for underwater lighting. In 1893 he organized in Kronstadt a workshop for manufacturing diving and telephone equipment for ships (later the same workshop was used to build the radio stations designed by A. S. Popov).

Kolbas’ev invented an original floating mine and designed several submarines, one of which had provisions for installation of his version of a torpedo tube that allowed for salvo firing.

REFERENCES

“Ispytaniie telefonov E. V. Kolbas’eva.” Voennyi sviazist, 1951, no. 1.
Pozdnev, A. Tvortsy otechestvennogo oruzhiia. Moscow, 1955. Pages 283–84.
Golovin, G. I., and S. L. Epshtein. “Pioner telefonii v russkom flote.” Morskoi sbornik, 1948, no. 10, p. 79–84.