Petr Titov

Born 1843; died Aug. 16 (28), 1894, in St. Petersburg. Russian self-taught shipbuilder.

When Titov was 12 years old, he began working as an apprentice to his father, a steamship machinist. In 1859 he found employment at a shipbuilding shop of the Neva Shipyard in St. Petersburg; he began as a laborer and eventually became a master shipbuilder. He supervised the construction of such ships as the frigate General-Admiral (1873) and the clippers Razboinik (1878) and Vestnik (1880). In 1882 he became chief engineer at the Franco-Russian Plant in St. Petersburg, where the cruisers Vitiaz’ (1884) and Rynda (1885) were built, as well as the ironclads Imperator Nikolai I (1889) and Navarin (1891).

Titov developed a number of advanced manufacturing processes, including the treatment of shipbuilding steel, marking and punching holes in plates, and riveting. He also invented a caisson for repairing the submerged part of a ship’s hull without bringing the ship into dry dock. Late in life, under the guidance of A. N. Krylov, Titov mastered the fundamentals of mathematics, the strength of materials, and naval architecture. He developed the designs for ironclad ships that won the first and second prizes in a closed competition sponsored by the Ministry of the Navy in 1892.