I came across the name of our unjustifiably forgotten genius countryman Ognjeslav Kostović Stepanović by chance, while researching data on the occasion of the centenary of the founding of the first aviation company in the world.
The story of Kostović begins with David Schwartz and Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, born in 1838, who according to family tradition was a cavalry officer and rose to the rank of general. At the beginning of the Civil War in America, he was sent there as an observer, he was received by President Abraham Lincoln, he took off in a balloon to observe the course of the fighting with the army of the South, and it delighted him to such an extent that upon his return to Germany he requested a discharge from the army and devoted aircraft are manufactured. He was lucky to be able to buy the plans for the construction of an aircraft from the widow of David Schwartz, an inventor who went to school in Županja.
29 - 02...
The Hungarian Jew Schwartz worked for some time in Russia, in St. Petersburg, where Kostović had the right to work and experiment for twenty years in the Admiralty Shipyard in St. Petersburg and had an almost completed aircraft 60 meters long and 12 meters in diameter. He named his aircraft "airship" after the French word "to steer", because balloons could not be steered, but his metal invention was.
It never flew, the Russian Admiralty did not take over the invention. He considered its construction too expensive, so after a while it was destroyed by lightning. If it was lightning at all. It is certain that Schwartz returned to Austria-Hungary immediately after that accident.
29-04 ognjeslavOGNESLAV KOSTOVIĆ STEPANOVIĆ'S PASSION FOR FLYING: Airships...
Doubts remain that he stole Kostović's idea, but this cannot be proven. And so, two decades after Kostović, thanks to Schwartz, who may have stolen the Serbian-Russian idea, Count Zeppelin built his own aircraft, which was named after him, and in order to use it for passenger transportation, in 1909, in Frankfurt on the Main, he founded the first airplane - company in the world.
Here I am reminded of Tesla's idea during the First World War of rays that could destroy enemy ships, which the British Naval Command did not want to consider. Today, there is a lot of experimentation with electromagnetic radiation as a weapon.
TWO GENIUS BANANA WOMEN
29-03 OGNJESLAV-DIRI…and airplanes
Let's go back to our Ognjeslav. He was born in 1851 in a village near Novi Bečej, educated in Budapest. Three years after him, Mihajlo Pupin was born in Idvor, only eighty kilometers away. Two geniuses from my Banat. One went to America and gained world fame, the other to Russia and was almost forgotten.
But I'll beg you, I'm here too! In the same part of the Banat, on the Tisza downstream from Novi Bečej, my great-grandfather, a grain merchant, lived. Ognjeslav's father Stevan and his grandfather Jovan Kostović were also grain merchants. My wife Dragana's grandfather was a notary public in Perlez. It is not impossible, it is even probable, that he stamped and certified all their contracts. Here I am in their Banat society within the region of Novi Bečej, Idvor, Perlez, but there is something else. Civil aviation was developing so rapidly that a decade later, in 1928, my parents flew to Paris for their wedding trip, which was no longer financially feasible even for novice doctors.
SHIP CAPTAIN
Ognjeslav transported grain by ship down the Tisza and the Danube all the way to Odessa. He found himself there at the beginning of the Russian-Turkish war and was accepted into the Imperial Navy with the rank of captain. He settled in Saint Petersburg. In good weather, driving on the Danube was easy, the captain didn't have much to do, so he started drawing various plans and ideas for inventions in the cabin. Among the first was a structure for submarines with a crew of 8. He also offered her to the Russian Admiralty, but again he was not interested. Only a century later, atomic submarines play one of the most important roles in the war plans of the great powers.
He injured his eye during an experiment, had to go to the hospital, met a beautiful nurse there and with her had three daughters - Maria, Zora and Evgenija, who moved to Belgrade and got married there. I did not find many traces of those ladies, but one of them was married to a Serbian officer and in 1915 worked as a volunteer nurse in Valjevo together with the great Serbian painter Nadežda Petrović. Together with the Serbian army, Marija and Zora passed through Albania and then moved to France.
FAR AWAY IN RUSSIA
I guess the memory of Ognjeslav Kostović has been neglected in our country because he was a citizen of Austria-Hungary by birth, Novi Bečej was part of it then, and later he worked in Russia. However, he always emphasized his Serbian identity, celebrated Saint Nicholas, on that occasion he was visited by the famous scientist Dmitriy Ivanovich Mendeleev, which means that our Ognjeslav in Russia moved in elite society.
The facilities of the admiralty shipyard in St. Petersburg were at his disposal for experiments, and he used those possibilities to the maximum. Little by little, he filed a hundred patents for larger or smaller projects. Due to the impatience with which he began to realize, he abandons one idea because another, more interesting one would dawn on him, he looks like the much, much more famous Nikola Tesla, except that he lived in America where business people understood, realized to the end and commercialized his ideas , while the sluggish Russian society let its officer work, but never fully financed him, did not help to put his inventions into practice.
Is it too bold that I put Ognjeslav Kostović in the same sentence as Nikola Tesla? Certainly both were inventors. Albert Einstein once nervously said of Tesla: "He is not a scientist, he is only an inventor", and Tesla replied to the creator of the theory of relativity: "He is not a scientist, he is an official of the patent office." They respected each other like that, but towards Banačan Pupin, who also had a sense for politics, was a diplomat and had excellent, direct connections with the American president, they behaved politely, I guess even with sincere respect. They haven't even heard of one of their countrymen, Ognjeslav Kostović.
PETROL ENGINE WITH WATER COOLING AND ELECTRIC CHARGING
Ognjeslav learned to fly a balloon in order to better understand what he needed to know and master in order to succeed in realizing his main work - the belt. The balloon was very difficult, almost impossible to control, it depended on the current of the winds. It was necessary to build something stronger, of a completely different construction.
Thinking about such problems, he constructed a flying boat, a kind of first hydroplane. Both for him and especially for the submarine, he needed a drive, so he invented a gasoline engine with water cooling and electric charging. At the same time in Germany, independently, Nikolaus Otto invented a similar engine, the development of which he left to Gottlieb Daimler. The first difference was that Daimler's engine had one cylinder, and Ognjeslav's eight, arranged like a box. Another, essential, difference is that Daimler soon built the first car with that engine, which he named "Mercedes" after the eleven-year-old daughter of the Austrian diplomat Emil Jelinek, one of the first buyers of the car.
There is no need to talk about how the company "Daimler-Benz" and its flagship brand "Mercedes" developed, but Ognjeslav made his own engine in Russia to use it for vessels and aircraft and, what would be said today, he could picture with them. As far as I know, not a single photo of him standing next to his motorcycle has appeared so far.
PRECEDENT OF PLASTIC
A very important invention of his was arbonite, the first predecessor of plastic materials. Ognjeslav needed it for a submarine and an airship. He made it from thin layers of peeled veneer glued with special cement. He used it to make suitcases, barrels, boats, pontoon bridges, and a universal military chest.
The Russian army took over that invention - finally they bought something from their captain Kostović, a trifle, of course, but the tsar rewarded Ognjeslav with a diamond ring. In England, the same material was made under the name plywood.
JUSTICE FOR KOSTOVIC
I took the data for this article from various media, newspapers, I didn't have any documents in my hands that definitely exist, I hope the Aviation Museum in New Belgrade has them, maybe some of the inventions, some engine or object made of arbonite are in the depot. It would be worth checking whether Ognjeslav's daughters have descendants, whether they have photographs unknown to the public. There is certainly a lot of it in Russia, the archives are probably preserved, if during the First World War some of Kostović's work was a military secret, today it certainly is not. Who knows what is sleeping in some dusty archives.
Ognjeslav Kostović died in 1916 in Saint Petersburg and was buried there. We need to establish whether his grave has been preserved, whether the Serbian embassy in Moscow knows about Kostović, cares about that place.
His own brother Ladislav Kostović was a successful merchant and also an Austro-Hungarian diplomat, the last consul of that empire in the Netherlands. He was buried in Novi Bečej, his burial place can probably be found if it has been preserved. It would be a shame if it wasn't.
Traces of Serbian genius can be found in various places in Serbia, Russia, Germany, France, we should follow them and see where they lead. He deserves to be taught about him alongside Tesla, Pupin, and Milankov, to have schools, streets and squares named after him. This country has the right to be proud of another great man. We love monuments, he certainly deserved to be erected, first of all in Novi Bečej, but I suggest that he find a place near the entrance to the Belgrade airport named after Nikola Tesla, whose reconstruction will be completed one fine day.
