Sabakin, Lev Fedorovich

Born 1746, in the city of Staritsa, in what is now Kalinin Oblast; died Aug. 12 (24), 1813, in Izhevsk. Russian mechanical engineer.

From 1776 to 1784, Sabakin worked in Tver’, where he constructed an astronomical wall clock. From 1784 to 1786 and from 1797 to 1799 he lived in Great Britain, where he studied machine building. In 1786 he translated into Russian and published some of the Scottish inventor J. Ferguson’s lectures on machines, to which he appended the first description in Russian of the general-purpose steam engine.

From 1800 to 1804, Sabakin worked as a mechanical engineer in the Ekaterinburg Mining Administration, where he constructed a number of mechanisms for the Ekaterinburg Gem-cutting Factory, a scale for heavy loads, a steam engine, machines for minting coins, a screw-cutting lathe, a cylindrical bellows, and an eight-cylinder fire pump. From 1804 to 1812 he worked at the Votkinsk and Izhevsk plants.

Sabakin played a significant role in the education of his grandson, P. P. Anosov, who had been orphaned at an early age, teaching him the basics of mechanics.