Rzheshotarskii, Alfons

Born Oct. 22 (Nov. 3), 1847, in Radom, in what is now Poland; died Jan. 16 (29), 1904, in St. Petersburg. Russian metallurgist.

After graduating from the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology in 1875, Rzheshotarskii worked at the Putilov Plant (now the Kirov Plant). In 1876 he began working at the Obu-khov Plant (now the Bol’shevik Plant), where he was under D. K. Chernov’s supervision; in 1899 he was appointed the plant’s chief metallurgist. From 1902 he was also head of the subdepartment of metallurgy of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute.

Rzheshotarskii’s main work was devoted to improvement of the open-hearth and Bessemer processes and to the heat treatment of steel, as well as to the development of the practical and scientific basis of metallography. In 1895 he established the first metallographic laboratory in Russia, at the Obukhov Plant. His fundamental work, Microscopic Studies of Iron, Steel, and Cast Iron (1898), was the first systematic study of the microscopic structure of ferrous metals under various types of mechanical and heat treatment; it was awarded the gold medal of the Russian Technical Society.

Rzheshotarskii directed the development in Russian plants of new technological processes that led to a dramatic improvement in the mechanical properties of artillery pieces and steel armor.