Nikolai Tikhomirov (chemical engineer)

Nikolai Ivanovich Tikhomirov, born Nikolai Viktorovich Slyotov, was a Russian and Soviet chemical engineer and inventor, born in Moscow in November 1859 and died on 28 April 1930. He studied chemistry at Imperial Moscow University and worked in the textile and sugar industries, writing manuals on wool production and beet sugar analysis and patenting new sugar-production methods and filters with automatic washing. From 1894 he worked on rocket projectiles, and in 1921 his workshop became a state laboratory for rocket technology, renamed the Gas Dynamics Laboratory in 1928. Under his leadership the laboratory developed smokeless pyroxylin powder in 1924 and, in March 1928, launched a rocket on smokeless powder with a range of about 1,300 metres, a design that served as the foundation for the rockets of the Katyusha launcher. He was awarded the Hero of Socialist Labor posthumously in 1991, and a lunar crater bears his name.