George and the bread factory
“Guys! I forbid you to produce less than 200 tons of bread per day,” Georgy Marsakov said approximately 92 years ago, and turned the game around by creating an engineering miracle. What did he come up with? Let’s figure it out.
The 1920s in Moscow, as throughout the USSR, were not sweet. The city’s population grew inexorably, and food did not increase. Bakeries simply physically could not ensure sufficient production of one of the main food products – bread, due to the fact that, despite the century of industrialization, its baking was done by hand.
The country’s leadership understood that here, just like in all other areas, a transition to machines was necessary. For example, the joint-stock company Melstroy decided to copy machines from Werner & Phleiderer. But import substitution did not work out, since the costs of creating a copy of the bakery from scratch were very significant.
However, in that very “Melstroy” worked a very talented engineer Georgy Petrovich Marsakov, who was damn passionate about the idea of creating his own furnace. The desire is quite natural, considering that a couple of years before joining Melstroy, he designed a slaughterhouse and a refrigerator.
Marsakov, it must be said, was an extraordinary person. Born in 1886 in the family of a simple tradesman, he was taught by his father to work with his hands from an early age and had talent for engineering. Marsakov’s father, realizing that the child needs a proper education at the age of 16, sends him to a gymnasium, after which Georgy enters the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute of Emperor Nicholas II. It was here that Georgy showed remarkable determination in achieving his goal. First, he was able to pass 25 exams in 2 months (it seems to me that there were similar cases among my friends at the university, but that was due to the abundance of tails from the last session), and then he distinguished himself by his desire to graduate from college as quickly as possible. This desire arose due to the fact that during an internship at the Naval shipbuilding plant in Nikolaev, he was the only one out of 156 fellow students, the vice director of the plant, engineer Kamenev, suggested, without postponing the matter, to stay at the plant or return there after graduation. Georgy chose the second option, after which he came to the institute and asked to be enrolled in eleven exams, a thesis and a graduation project. The dean probably thought it was some kind of joke and asked him to leave the office. However, I told you earlier that Marsakov was persistent. Within five months, he managed to brilliantly defend his graduation projects on a thirty-horsepower diesel engine and a refrigeration unit (which he probably later brought to life).
The beginning of a unique bakery begins with the fact that in the same 1924. Georgy was appointed to manage the construction of the bakery of the Tsaritsyn Central Workers’ Cooperative. He plunges headlong into the process, begins to disassemble foreign ovens and learn the intricacies of making bread. In the process, Marsakov established that the maximum temperature for white bread is 180 degrees, and for black bread 210 degrees. Above this, the bread “burns.” Taking into account the fact that the output of factory bread should be better than homemade bread, Marsakov estimates the correct modernization of what he saw on foreign equipment and creates an electric steam oven of his own design for the Tsaritsyn plant. He also mechanized production to a large extent, thanks to which the bakery could produce 40 tons of bread per day. After the launch of the plant, Georgy Petrovich was invited to work as a technical director at the Electrokhleb joint-stock company (Kharkov).
In Kharkov, he was given the task of building a bakery similar to Tsaritsyn’s in Ivanovo-Voznesensk. To do this, it was necessary to organize a design bureau in Dnepropetrovsk at the F.A. plant. Artem. Having access to resources and analyzing foreign products, he creates his own: a flour shaker, a dough kneader, a “deja” (dough container) portable by an electric locomotive along a roller table, and other equipment. However, after a series of financial difficulties and conflicts with Elektrokhleb, Marsakov left and led the construction of the Ivanovo bakery using artisans, and then in 1927. went to Moscow, where he received a position as an engineer at the Moscow Union of Consumer Societies (MSPO).
MSPO and Marsakov wanted the same thing – for him to study foreign equipment for the production of bread and set up the production of analogues. But having played Frostpunk and re-read the works of Henry Ford, Marsakov discards the concept of foreign machines and suggests that the ideal bakery would be a ring conveyor built around a huge oven.
“Instead of using a chain to pull a conveyor with guide rollers along the rails, wouldn’t it be easier to put the rails on stationary rollers fixed to the ground? The rollers on ball bearings, driven by an electric motor, will move the rails. The chain will become redundant“, he wrote in the memo.
Armed with a homemade model of his project, Georgy went to surrender to the commission, but was rejected. The commission members believed that if everything were so simple, then someone else would have done something like this a long time ago. But German Krasin stands up for the idea, countering with the phrase: “If Ford had known about this ring conveyor system, he would have jumped on it.”, and as a result, funds are allocated for the pilot plant.
On Bolshaya Semenovskaya Street, the engineer was assigned the last floor of an existing three-story bakery, which did not have enough space. He had to equip a workshop in the building of a former stable, build a boiler room and assemble a boiler of a completely new design, which made it possible to obtain the ultra-high steam pressure necessary for baking bread. All this was done in six months, and on January 30, 1929, the first automatic bakery of the ring system was launched.
It should be noted that the boiler project was also not approved by high minds, because again, it’s some kind of mess and smart people would have done this a long time ago if it were correct. But time has put everything in its place.
At a meeting of the bureau of the Moscow Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) L.M. Kaganovich said that while 12 tons of bread are produced on three floors of the bakery, equipped with German machines, 50 tons of bread are produced a day upstairs in one room at the Marsakov automatic bakery.
In the end, everyone understands everything in 1931. Bread Factory No. 5 (named after Zotov) is being built according to Marsakov’s design. In the same year, a decree was issued by the party and government on Moscow’s complete transition to mechanized bread baking and obliging consumer cooperatives to begin construction of such a number of factories that could provide the population of new Moscow with bread. As a result, 4 more plants appear: No. 7 – in Zamoskvorechye, No. 8 – named after. Gorky in Cherkizovo, No. 9 – named after. 17th Party Congress on Novodmitrovskaya Street, No. 11 – named after. Mikoyan on the current Star Boulevard, as well as a couple of factories in Leningrad – Levashovsky and Kushelevsky.
By the way, after a successful experiment, Marsakov was given an apartment in Moscow. You may ask, where did he live before? Yes, I just slept on bags in my experienced bakery.
The production of bread at the automatic factory proceeded as follows. Flour from the warehouse located in the basement was transported by conveyor to the fourth floor, where the starter department was located. From here, the finished dough went to the third floor into the dough mixing department, which consisted of three rigid ring conveyors, where the fermentation process took place.
After fermentation was completed, the pieces of dough went into the dough cutting department on the second floor, and from there into the oven department located nearby on the same floor. The bread was baked in three round ring ovens. After baking, the bread was unloaded from the ovens and entered the bread storage facility on the ground floor along inclined slopes. In general, the question really arises – why didn’t anyone think of this before?!
They say that M.A. Gorky, who was a baker in his youth, was so impressed when visiting bakery No. 5 that tears of joy flowed from his eyes. Of course, considering that in his story “Twenty Six and One” he writes: “There were twenty-six of us – twenty-six living machines, locked in a damp basement, where we kneaded dough from morning to evening, making pretzels and crackers.“, and now in the new bright rooms human labor is practically reduced to zero and all the work is done by the mechanisms. Moreover, such a plant supplied up to 250 tons of products per day, which completely closed the issue of bread supply.
“We have automatic bakery factories where workers work 7 hours and take a shower every day, where workers are not allowed into production without a medical examination, and where the strictest medical supervision is established. Laboratories are equipped here that analyze and check the quality of flour and water, guaranteeing the good quality of bread“wrote Anastas Mikoyan, head of the People’s Commissariat of Supply and Food Industry.
But in modern Russia, such bakeries were not needed. Private bakeries have significantly supplanted the giants and they have turned from factories into completely different objects.
Of the seven factories, only Bakery No. 8, 11 and Kushelevsky continue to operate.
It is worth noting that the beautiful avant-garde buildings after the transformation look like a very attractive dominant feature of the area. Recently, in general, there has been a great interest in this kind of architecture, of which I am a fan. As they say, they knew how to build before.
As for Marsakov’s further fate, after resolving the issues with bread, he was sent to Bilimbay to the iron foundry, where he also proposed his concept of ring conveyors. Along the way, he proposed new projects for a kitchen factory, a theater building and Azovstal, of course, round ones.
His passion for circles was so fanatical that he even developed a project for an entire conveyor city.
It was not possible to find any more detailed specifics about his further fate.
Like many similar geniuses, Marsakov was quickly forgotten, and even now few people remember him. Only rare admirers of his work continue to draw crop circles, reminding us of the engineer and his concept.
Author: Dmitry Katarugin
