Yevhen Paton

Yevhen (Evgeny) Paton was born in Nice on 5 March 1870, the son of a Russian consul. He graduated from the Dresden Polytechnic (1894) and the St Petersburg Institute of Railway Engineers (1896), and in 1904 accepted an offer to set up the bridge-engineering chair at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, which he led until 1938. The family lived in a professors’ house on the KPI campus.

In Kyiv he designed the pedestrian Park Bridge over Petrivska Alley (opened 1910), linking the City Garden and Khreshchatyi Park — locals call it the “Devil’s Bridge” or the “Lovers’ Bridge”. In 1925 a new Dnipro bridge was built with his involvement on the piers of the destroyed Mykolaiv chain bridge.

From the late 1920s Paton turned to electric welding. A laboratory he founded at the Academy of Sciences in 1929 became the Electric Welding Institute in 1934 (now named after him); its automatic submerged-arc welding was used during the Second World War to mass-produce tank hulls. The great Kyiv landmark of this work is the Paton Bridge, one of the world’s first all-welded bridges (1,543 m), opened on 5 November 1953, less than three months after his death. He is buried at Baikove Cemetery.