Lavr Proskuryakov

Lavr Dmitrievich Proskouriakov (18 August 1858, the village of Borisovka, Voronezh Governorate – 14 September 1926, Moscow) was one of the foremost authorities on bridge engineering and structural mechanics in the Russian empire and the early Soviet Union.

Lavr Proskouriakov was born on 18 August 1858, into a large peasant family. In 1884, he graduated from the Saint-Petersburg Institute of Railway Engineers and worked as a designer of bridges. Since 1887, he lectured at the same institute, and starting from 1896, Proskouriakov held the position of Full Professor at Moscow State University of Railway Engineering.

Even the early Proskouriakov's projects of the bridges across the rivers Western Bug (1885) and Sula in the Ukrainian city of Romny (1887) attract attention by their novelty and ingenuity. The drawings of those bridges were published by Professor L.F. Nikolai, the head of the bridge faculty at the Petersburg Institute of Railway Engineers, in his tutorial on bridge design for railway engineers.

In the summer of 1895, Proskouriakov was sent abroad by the decision of the Institute academic council to take part in the International Railway Congress in London, as well as explore local mechanical laboratories and bridges. Besides London, he visited laboratories in Paris, Zurich, Munich, Vienna and Berlin, and then went to the United States in order to get acquainted with the biggest bridge structures and local mechanical laboratories.

Proskouriakov was the first in Europe to reject then existing lattice bridge trusses with lots of vertical and diagonal members, which were extremely difficult for truss analysis. Instead, he designed a statically determinate triangular web truss with the minimum number of diagonals, which provided better distribution of stresses due to moving loads throughout a bridge structure.

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