Stepan Litvinov
Litvinov, Stepan Vasil’Evich
Born 1785, in Barnaul; died there in 1848. Russian inventor of steam engines.
Litvinov began working at the age of 12 in the office of the Kolyvan’-Voskresenskii plants; he later worked in the Nerchinsk plants. He invented a rotary blower with continuous air feed to the furnace and the “dual-blast bellows,” which was the prototype of a double-action piston compressor (1817). In 1817–27 he built steam power installations, for which he proposed a number of novel, advanced ideas, such as a uniflow boiler unit, a steam superheater, and two-stage steam generation.