1918–2020
Borys Paton
Electric welding scientist
Did you know that metal was first welded aboard a spacecraft in 1969, using a unit built by Kyiv’s Institute of Electric Welding? The institute’s director, Borys Paton, headed the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine for 58 years.
Key accomplishments
- Created electroslag welding together with H. Voloshkevych (1949)
- The world’s first welding experiments in space, aboard the Soyuz-6 spacecraft (1969)
- Director of the Institute of Electric Welding (1953–2020) and president of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (1962–2020)
- A method of welding living soft human tissue for surgery
Welding that helped win a war
Borys Paton was born in 1918 in Kyiv into the family of Yevhen Paton, the scientist after whom the Institute of Electric Welding was later named. In 1941 he graduated from the Kyiv Industrial Institute (now the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute) and became an engineer at the Krasnoye Sormovo plant in the city of Gorky. From 1942 Paton worked at the Institute of Electric Welding, which had been evacuated to Nizhny Tagil, and helped introduce automatic welding of tank armor.
How do you weld metal in space?
In 1949, together with H. Voloshkevych, he created electroslag welding, a way of joining very thick metal parts for powerful power plants and heavy equipment. In 1953 Paton became head of the Institute of Electric Welding and led it until 2020. The institute took on space as well: in 1969 the world’s first welding experiments were carried out aboard the Soyuz-6 spacecraft with its Vulkan unit, and in 1984 welding was done in open space.
58 years at the head of the Academy
In 1962 Paton was elected president of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (from 1994 the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). He headed it for 58 years, until his death in 2020. In independent Ukraine he was made a Hero of Ukraine (1998). According to the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine, after 1991, despite sharp cuts in funding, he managed to preserve the Academy’s main scientific schools.
What his school left behind
Technologies from Paton’s school are used in building pipelines and bridges, in rocket engineering and in medicine. In 2021 the State Prize of Ukraine in Science and Technology was renamed the Borys Paton National Prize of Ukraine.
