Yevhen Paton, the Great Ukrainian Pioneer of Arc Welding

The bridge is one of the oldest human inventions, maybe even older than the wheel. Today we cannot even imagine life without bridges. Millions of people owe the possibility of safely and conveniently crossing rivers to the work and ideas of Yevhen Paton, a man of profound and versatile knowledge, a brilliant researcher, inventor, and engineer.

Paton was born on March 5, 1870, in Nice, France, where his father, Oscar Paton (his surname of British origin was pronounced in the French manner – Patón), was serving as Russia’s consul. His mother Kateryna devoted her life to raising her five sons and two daughters.

As Yevhen Paton reminisced later, his parents did their best to educate their children, who were growing up abroad, as patriots of Ukraine remembering their kin and homeland. They gave special care to the youngest, Yevhen, and wanted him to become a prominent scientist.

Listening to his father’s interesting and instructive stories, Yevhen was eager to discover the amazing and enigmatic world of Nature. From his early years he was very inquisitive and inclined to natural sciences. His father believed that Germany offered a better education than France did, so he sent him to a classical school in Stuttgart. There, Yevhen had seven lessons a day: math, physics, chemistry, natural history, and languages. He was a very bright student, but he had to leave Stuttgart and complete his course in Boryslav (Breslau), western Ukraine, where his father was transferred to an administrative position.

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Yevhen Paton. Boryslav, 1886

Later, he studied engineering at the Dresden Polytechnic Institute, which was famous for Europe’s best school of bridge-building. There, Professor Wilhelm Frenkel, a scientist of world renown, noticed the gifted student. After Yevhen graduated with two diplomas in 1894, Frenkel invited him to the bridge-building chair as his assistant.

That same year, Paton started working as an engineer at the reconstruction of the Dresden railroad hub and personally designed, according to him, “about ten thousand tons of railroad structures.”

In 1895, Paton moved to St. Petersburg where he designed bridges and metal floorings at the technical department of the Petersburg-Moscow railroad, combining his engineering work with teaching.

His career took a new turn in October 1914, when he was unanimously elected Professor of the Engineering Department at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (KPI), and from then on, his life was dedicated to Ukraine.

Yevhen Paton, dean of the Engineering Department at KPI.

While heading the Kyiv bridge-building station from 1921 to 1931, he designed 35 riveted bridges across rivers in Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia.

Soon after he was elected to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1929, Paton organized the Electric Welding Laboratory and the Electric Welding Committee at the Academy. He never had a spare minute. He had thousands of new ideas and was always in the epicenter of advanced research in the new and extremely important field of electric welding.

Yevhen Paton with his prototype arc welding machine. Kyiv, 1935

In 1939, after years of intensive research and countless experiments, Paton and his team produced an entirely new method of automatic submerged arc welding, which proved to be highly efficient. By June, 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the USSR, 18 industrial plants were already using the Paton Method. Arc-welded seams invariably proved to be much stronger and cheaper than other types of metal joints.

In the fall of 1941, his institute was relocated to the Urals, and in January 1942 the local works began to produce the legendary T-34 tanks with arc-welded armor.

Yevhen Paton sees a T-34 off to the frontline. 1942.

Nazi intelligence officers hunted for the “secret of the Soviet tank armor,” particularly the secret of the welded seams. Pieces of armor from destroyed tanks were sent to the best laboratories in Germany. The Germans managed to find out the chemical composition of the steel, but not the secret of the seams. They just could not make out how the armor was even stronger – not weaker – at the seams. They saw that the seams were welded. But how, by what technology? So, Paton’s knowhow remained undisclosed. It was later used in welding space rocket frames.

In 1949, when he was almost 80, Paton offered a new idea that revolutionized the entire field of bridge construction engineering: the idea of an all-welded bridge. His project, that of an all-welded road bridge across the Dnipro River in Kyiv, was unique for its novelty and size. Just think of it: the bridge has 20 balks with 58 meters between the pillars and four navigable spans on the main watercourse. Its total length is 1,492 meters and its metal structures weigh a total of 10,000 tons.

It took tremendous effort, insistence, and even courage to convince the conservative Soviet bureaucrats that welded metal structures would bear up the huge loads on such a long road bridge, and it took thorough calculations and hundreds of experiments and tests to prove that the method was practicable.

At the time, it was hard for engineers to imagine that welded seams could be stronger than riveted joints. Time has proven Paton right: his bridge is more than 70 years old – an impressive age for a metal bridge that has not undergone a single major repair in all these years – and still endures loads that exceed its designed capacity almost three times!

Eventually, Paton’s indisputable authority in Soviet and international scientific circles prevailed, and construction works started in December 1951 under his personal supervision. They finished in late October 1953, but unfortunately, he did not live to see his brainchild and – by the old tradition of bridge-builders – walk across it. He died on Aug. 12, just 12 weeks before his bridge was opened.

Official ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Paton bridge. Kyiv, Nov. 5, 1953.

Yet, his scientific genius, his ideas and his school live in his bridges, in his institute, in the creative work of his disciples and followers, and in the grateful memory of millions of people. The Institute of Electric Welding, founded and fostered by Yevhen Paton, was for many years led by his son Borys, President of the National Academy of Sciences.

“I find satisfaction in having taught others to work and prepared a whole generation of young welding researchers,” wrote Paton. “They are really good, they are promoting our common cause. I am proud to see my sons among them.”

Yevhen Paton with his sons Borys and Volodymyr in the design division of the Institute of Electric Welding. Kyiv, 1950

In 1969, for the first time in the world, an innovative method of arc welding in complete vacuum developed by the Institute was tested on the Soyuz 6 spaceship.

In 1986, the Institute’s engineers and personnel took the most active part in eliminating the consequences of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster. For his part, Borys Paton had vehemently and argumentatively opposed the idea of building the nuclear power plant in close proximity to Kyiv.

There is a very beautiful place in Kyiv – one of so many in this ancient and ever-young city. It is on the steep slopes running down to the Dnipro River. Tall maples, birches, acacias, lindens and chestnut trees that grow on the slopes and in the central park look especially beautiful in September and October, glowing with almost all the colors of Nature’s palette. Spanning between two hills over the Park Alley stands a small pedestrian bridge built back in 1912 by Yevhen Paton’s design. He called it one of his best brainchildren, and it is, probably, the only bridge in the world that was first assembled on the ridge of a hill, and then earth was removed from under it.

This tracery-like bridge was very popular with residents and guests of Kyiv and was one of the city’s attractions. In 1983, the original metal structures, weakened by corrosion, were dismantled, disassembled, and taken to the Museum of Folk Architecture in the town of Pereiaslav, a hundred miles southeast of Kyiv. They were replaced by identical structures.

Few remember the designer’s name, but all residents of Kyiv know the Lovers’ Bridge, as they call it. Light, exquisite and romantic, it soars between two hills, opening an amazing view on the Dnipro River with the picturesque sights of its islands and left bank.

Park Bridge with locks, ribbons and writings on the railings

Known as “Lovers’ Bridge,” there by which young people leave small padlocks on the railings to symbolize the strong bonds of love. There are dozens of them hanging on the rails and three on the lamp posts along the bridge. One of them is very small, the size of a cherry. Some loving couples even put two locks together.

The bridge is covered with names, autographs and declarations of love mostly painted with red nail polish. Besides padlocks, there are hundreds of ribbons, handkerchiefs, socks and paper hearts tied to the railings. And there is a metal plaque with a declaration of love in English and the date – November 25, 2006 – nailed to the down side of the planks.