Semyon Kirlian

Semyon Davidovich Kirlian (Russian: Семён Давидович Кирлиан; Armenian: Սիմոն Կիրլյան; 20 February 1898 – 4 April 1978) was a Russian inventor and researcher of Armenian descent, who along with his wife Valentina Khrisanovna Kirlian (Russian: Валентина Хрисановна Кирлиан; died 1972), a teacher and journalist, discovered and developed Kirlian photography.

Kirlian was born in Yekaterinodar, now Krasnodar, Russia in an Armenian family. He possessed an early interest in, and aptitude for, work with electricity. Just before the Russian Revolution of 1917, Kirlian attended a conference in his home city at which Nikola Tesla gave talks and demonstrations; Tesla was one of Kirlian's predecessors in the field of corona discharge photography. In the 1930s Kirlian earned his living as an electrician in Krasnodar, near the eastern coast of the Black Sea in southern Russia—then the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (Russian SFSR), part of the Soviet Union. He married Valentina Khrisanovna in 1930.

By 1939 Kirlian had acquired a reputation as the best local resource for repairing electrical equipment, and was regularly called upon to fix the apparatus of scientists and laboratories in the area. In that year, he happened to witness a demonstration of a high-frequency d'Arsonval electrotherapy device. He noticed that there was a small flash of light between the machine's electrodes and the patient's skin, and wondered if he would be able to photograph it. (Kirlian was not the first person to witness this phenomenon, though the urge to photograph and investigate it seems to have been original with him.) Experimenting with similar equipment, he replaced glass electrodes with metal substitutes to take photographs in visible light; at the price of a severe electrical burn, he was able to take an unusual and striking photograph of an apparent energy discharge around his own hand.

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