THIS MONTH IN ENGINEERING | August 1880 — St Petersburg’s Electric Experiment

St. Petersburg, known through history as Petrograd and later Leningrad is often called Europe’s most beautiful city. Peter the Great founded it in 1703 as Russia’s “Window to the West,” and Italian, French, and German architects filled it with palaces, canals, and cathedrals to rival Paris or Vienna. Unlike Berlin or Warsaw, much of its historic centre survived WWII intact, which is why today the city still feels like a living museum of imperial ambition and artistry.

But St. Petersburg was not only about façades and opulence. In August 1880, on the outskirts of the city, Russian engineer FYODOR PIROTSKY carried out an experiment that would shape the future of transport. He converted a horse-drawn tram in the suburb of Sestroretsk to run on electricity. It was a modest, short-lived test, but it proved a radical idea: that power could be transmitted over distance and distributed safely to move people, not just machines.

Pirotsky’s experiment was the world’s first electric tram demonstration. It lasted only weeks, but it inspired others, most notably WERNER VON SIEMENS, who founded Siemens, still one of the world’s largest engineering firms and whose Berlin tramway opened in 1881 and became the world’s first permanent, commercially successful electric line. St. Petersburg showed what was possible; Berlin showed how it could scale.

For engineers, this was more than transport history. It was a lesson in distribution: delivering power reliably, balancing loads, and protecting users. At Goldfish & Bay, the same principles underpin our work today. Whether designing switchboards in high-rise towers or ensuring emergency circuits stay live under stress, we’re still applying the logic Pirotsky tested nearly 150 years ago.

The grandeur of St. Petersburg may be easy to see. Its quiet contribution to electrical engineering is harder to spot, but it still flows through every powered system we build.

Sources: IEEE Spectrum | The Engineer | St. Petersburg State Transport Archives | Siemens Historical Institute | ASCE Library

Images: Fyodor Pirotsky, the engineer. | Sestroretsk promenade, site of the 1880 experiment. | Early electric tram prototype. | Nevsky Prospekt, trams shaping city life. | Overloaded tram (1920s–30s), demand surges.

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