You're reading: Ukraine’s contributions to the world of science

Before Ukraine won independence 25 years ago, most of its inventions were credited to the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire or the Polish state.

Some discoveries, such as the work done on X-rays by Ivan Puluj, are disputed or not widely known, but several of them are widely recognized and have contributed significantly to the scientific revolution. Nevertheless, each of the following inventions were developed in Ukraine or conceived by a scientist of Ukrainian descent.

Lighting up

The modern kerosene lamp was designed by pharmacists Jan Zeh and Ignacy Lukasiewicz in 1853 in Lviv, which was part of Poland at that time. For their lamp, they used oil drilled near the town of Drohobych in Lviv Oblast, and purified it to obtain the lamp oil used to fuel their lighting devices. Today, the Gasova Lampa (Kerosene Lamp) restaurant and museum in Lviv, which is dedicated to the two inventors, features a collection of kerosene lamps. Bronze statues of the inventors adorn the facade of the restaurant building on 20 Virmenska St. in Lviv.

The first mass-produced helicopter was designed by Ukrainian aircraft designer Igor Sikorsky. After immigrating to the United States in 1919, he founded Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation in 1923. His Vought-Sikorsky VS-300, designed in 1939, was a single-engine helicopter with a single three-blade rotor. Sikorsky pioneered invention of the rotor configuration is used by most helicopters today.

Sergey Korolyov, born in Zhytomyr, was for years the Soviet Union’s leading rocket engineer and spacecraft designer, and he personally oversaw the assembly of the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik. This invention was the starting gun for the space race, part of the larger Cold War confrontation between the Soviet bloc and the United States and its allies. Korolyov was also the chief designer of the Vostok rocket program, and was behind the first human spaceflight, by Yuri Gagarin, who completed the first low Earth orbit on April 12, 1961. As a rocket designer, he also developed the Soviet Union’s Intercontinental ballistic missile program.

Physicist and inventor Ivan Puluj is thought to have discovered the use of X-rays for medical imaging, but his contribution has been disputed. Wilhelm Röntgen, who appears to have discovered X-rays 14 years after Puluj, but is considered as the inventor of the X-ray lamp. However, Puluj designed the first X-ray tube, with which he took very high resolution pictures of broken limbs. His device was called the Puluj lamp.

Fighting disease

Renowned heart surgeon Mykola Amosov.

The world’s first electric tram and railway electrification system were developed by engineer and inventor Fyodor Pirotsky in Lviv. In 1880, in Saint Petersburg, Russia, he modified a horse-drawn tram to be powered by electricity. His experimental form of public transport ran for about a month. Pirotsky also met with German entrepreneur Carl Heinrich von Siemens, and the Siemens company designed its own electric tram in 1881.

The modern postal code was first introduced in the city of Kharkiv in December 1932. Although the code system of numbers and letters was abandoned in the Soviet Union in 1939, it is now used around the globe.

Anti-cholera and anti-plague vaccines were discovered by Berdyansk-born Jewish-Ukrainian Waldemar Haffkine. Risking his life, he performed his first experimental vaccinations on himself, but his discovery wasn’t widely accepted by his senior colleagues. Haffkine moved to India, where a cholera pandemic was ravaging the country. There, he applied his invention to save the lives of several million people from bubonic plague, and won widespread public recognition. The plague Laboratory in Mumbai was named the Haffkine Institute in his honor.

The world’s first kidney transplant was conducted by surgeon Yuriy Voronyi, from Kherson. In 1933, he took the kidney from a person who had died six hours previously, and transplanted it into the body of a woman. The kidney operated normally and was fully connected to blood circulation system. However, the transplant recipient died just two days after the transplant surgery due to the incompatibility of the recipient’s blood group. Nevertheless, Voronyi’s groundbreaking work proved the viability of the procedure, and highlighted the important problem of tissue rejection in future research.

Heart surgeon Mykola Amosov pioneered a number of new methods of surgical treatment for heart disease. He performed the first mitral valve replacement and introduced a method of artificial blood circulation to the Soviet Union. Amosov created and introduced into practice an anti-thrombotic heart prosthesis for the first time in the world in 1965. He spent most of career in Kyiv and was a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Science.

Window power

A more modern medical discovery was made by a team of scientists in independent Ukraine – the invention of the antibiotic batumin. In 2005, scientists from the Institute of Microbiology and Virology designed a drug that was extremely effective against the staphylococci bacteria. However, the new antibiotic is not yet being produced in Ukraine. Instead, Belgium bought a license to manufacture batumin.

In 2013, Kharkiv citizen Anatoliy Malykhin invented a new method for carrying out blood tests without direct contact with blood. He designed a device with a sensor that tests 131 indexes of person’s blood condition through contact with skin. The procedure takes around five minutes, while the laboratory method requires a day to test blood. Malykhin has sold his devices in China, Germany, and Egypt, and to several clinics in Ukraine.

In one of Ukraine’s most recent innovations, blinds that generate solar energy have been designed by inventors from Ukrainian company SolarGaps. Installed on windows, these venetian blinds can generate over 100 kilowatts of energy a month – enough to cover average electricity consumption of a household in Ukraine. The energy generated can be used either to heat an apartment, or it can be sold to the state electricity company at the feed-in tariff.