Liubarskii, Vasilii

Liubarskii, Vasilii Vasil’evich 

Born 1795; died Dec. 18 (30), 1852. Russian metallurgist.

After graduating from the Cadet Mining Corps in St. Petersburg in 1816, Liubarskii directed the laboratory at the Kushva Plant in Goroblagodatskii Okrug. From 1819 to 1820 he worked in the laboratory of the Ekaterinburg plants, and from 1820 to 1827, at the joint laboratory of the Department for Mining and Salt Affairs and the Cadet Mining Corps in St. Petersburg. In 1827 he became deputy chief of the Goroblagodatskii plants. Later he served as mining inspector for the Urals Mining Works.

Liubarskii wrote about the iron ores of the Urals and about blast smelting. In 1823 he established the presence of platinum and iridosmine in the Urals and described their composition. In 1826 he and P. G. Sobolevskii developed a method of refining crude platinum and turning it into a malleable metal. This marked the beginning of powder metallurgy.

REFERENCE

Shabarin, S. K. “K stoletiiu so dnia smerti V. V. Liubarskogo.” In Trudy Vsesoiuznogo nauchnogo inzhenerno-tekhnicheskogo obshchetsva metallurgov, vol. 2. Moscow, 1954.