Charles Baird (engineer)

Charles Baird (20 December 1766 – 10 December 1843) was a Scottish engineer who played an important part in the industrial and business life of 19th-century St. Petersburg. His company specialised in steam-driven machinery and was responsible for Russia's first steamboat.

Born at Westerton, Bothkennar, Stirlingshire, a farm owned by the Gascoigne family, Charles was one of the nine children of Nicol Baird, who later became a toll collector and then superintendent of works for the Forth and Clyde Canal. He was originally baptised Gascoigne Baird in January 1767. His younger brother Hugh Baird also became an engineer. Charles Baird started his working life in 1782 as an apprentice at the Carron Ironworks near Falkirk.

By the age of 19 Baird had a supervisory post in the gun department, and in 1786 he accompanied a Carron Company manager, Charles Gascoigne, a son of the owner's family, to Russia to establish the Aleksandrovsk gun factory at Petrozavodsk, and a cannonball foundry at Kronstadt. Gascoigne had been invited to Russia by Samuel Greig, a Scot who was an admiral in the Russian Navy.

Gascoigne Baird came to be known as Charles Baird, perhaps to avoid confusion with Charles Gascoigne, and had his change of name to Charles Baird officially sanctioned by the church authorities in Scotland in February 1792. In 1792, Baird entered into partnership with Francis Morgan, whose daughter Sophia he had married in June 1794. Their St. Petersburg business became known as the Baird Works (Russian: Завод Берда) and specialised in steam-driven machinery. It supplied machinery for the Imperial Arsenal, Mint, and glassworks, and undertook a range of projects from bridge-building to ornamental metalwork. Baird also had a sugar refinery using his own innovative method of refining.

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