Pavel Schilling

Biography

Early life

Baron Pavel Lvovitch Schilling von Cannstadt was born in Reval (now Tallinn), Estonia, on 16 April 1786 (N.S.). He was an ethnic German of Swabian and Baltic descent. Soon after the birth of Pavel, their first child, Ludwig von Schilling was promoted to the commander of the 23rd Nizovsky infantry regiment, and the family relocated to Kazan where the regiment was based. Pavel spent his childhood years in Kazan; early exposure to diverse Asiatic cultures explains his lasting interest in the Orient. He was expected to follow a military career like his father, so at the age of nine he was formally enrolled at the Nizovsky regiment, and two years later, after his father's death, he was sent to the First Cadet Corps. By this time, tsar Paul's haphazard management had reduced military education to mere exhibition drill; Schilling's proper training commenced only after graduation, in 1802. He was commissioned as a podporuchik, posted to the Quartermaster general's office commanded by Theodor von Schubert and assigned cartographical surveying duties.

Family circumstances obliged Schilling to resign his commission in 1803. He then joined the foreign service as a language officer, and dispatched to the Russian legation in Munich, where his stepfather Karl von Bühler was the minister. After Bühler's retirement, Schilling served as an attaché to the legation in Munich from 1809 to 1811. He first became interested in electrical science while he was in Munich through contact with Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring who was developing an electrical telegraph. Since his duties as a diplomat were light, he spent much time with Sömmerring, and brought many Russian dignitaries to see Sömmerring's apparatus.

Napoleonic wars

When war threatened between France and Russia, Schilling put his mind to applying his electrical knowledge to military purposes. In July 1812 he, along with all Russian diplomats in Germany, was recalled to Saint Petersburg in anticipation of the impending French invasion of Russia. He brought with him a complete set of Sömmerring's telegraph, and demonstrated it to military engineers and tsar Alexander. He continued work on remote mine detonation. However, none of his inventions were ready for field service, and Schilling requested transfer to a military position in the fighting Army.

Placing him into the military structure was not easy. Schilling did not have any combat experience. As a retired Army officer, he was merely a second lieutenant (podporuchik); as a civil servant, he has reached a rank equivalent to Army major. The situation was not uncommon for the volunteers of 1812, yet it had puzzled military authorities and Schilling's application was rejected. In May 1813 he appealed directly to Alexander I, who authorised placing Schilling to horse artillery reserves; on 6 September [O.S. 25 August] 1813 he was posted to commander Alexander Seslavin's Sumy hussars with the rank of Shtabs-rotmistr (i.e. Captain Lieutenant) Schilling arrived at the regiment shortly after the Battle of Dresden. He was initially employed as a liaison with Saxon authorities, and had not seen real combat until December 1813, when Russian troops advanced into French territory. He received his first combat award for the Battle of Bar-sur-Aube of 27 February 1814; his actions during the Battle of Arcis-sur-Aube and the Battle of Fère-Champenoise were rewarded with the Golden Weapon for Bravery.

Return to foreign service

After the fall of Paris Schilling requested transfer from the Army back to civil service, and in October of the same year he returned to Foreign Affairs in Saint Petersburg. Russian foreign policy of the immediate post-war period concentrated on eastward expansion, thus Schilling was placed with the growing Asiatic Department. He continued to take an interest in electricity and lithography, a new method of printing which he wished to introduce into Russia. His presentation of the latest German lithographic printing technology aroused interest in the Ministry, and very soon he was dispatched back to Bavaria, with instructions to secure supplies of lithographic stone from the Solnhofen quarries. In July 1815 he arrived in Munich to meet with Alois Senefelder, the inventor of the lithographic process, who assisted Schilling with his errand; in December Schilling briefly visited Bavaria again, to take delivery of finished stones. During 1815 he met many French and German orientalists and physicists, particularly André-Marie Ampère, François Arago and Johann Schweigger.

On his return to Saint Petersburg, Schilling was appointed head of the Ministry's lithographic print shop, which was established in the spring of 1816. Curiously, the first document printed there was an erotic poem by Vasily Pushkin, the only Russian verse that Schilling could recite by heart. Setting up the print shop was rewarded with the Order of Saint Anna. Apart from disseminating reports, maps and instructions within the foreign service, Schilling's shop also produced daily summaries of intercepted letters and other covert surveillance. These were delivered to foreign minister Karl Nesselrode, and then, at the minister's discretion, to the tsar. Not later than 1818 Schilling began experiments with Manchu and Mongolian typography; from 1820 he assisted father Peter Kamensky in preparation of the Chinese-Mongolian-Manchu-Russian-Latin dictionary. His Chinese editions had exemplary quality for the time, on a par with the Peking Palace originals.

Schilling retained control of the print shop until the end of his life, however, this was only one of his side activities. His main responsibilities at the foreign service were development, distribution and safeguarding of ciphers for Russian embassies and overseas agents. After the 1823 service reform Schilling was appointed head of the 2nd Secret Branch, and held this post until his death. The secretive nature of this work remained classified throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and escaped notice by contemporaries and biographers. Friends and correspondents knew that he was a middle-level servant in the foreign service, but nothing more. Schilling was not engaged in diplomacy, but was perceived as a diplomat; the deception was supported by the facts that he often travelled abroad and met foreign dignitaries without apparent restrictions. Secrecy was compensated with generous payouts, for example in 1830 Nicholas I authorised a bonus payment of 1000 golden ducats; Schilling's subordinates received lesser, but still substantial rewards.

Decline and death

Schilling's state of health deteriorated through the 1830s. He was morbidly obese, and by 1835 suffered pains of unknown nature. He requested permission to travel to Europe for medical help, and with the help of Nesselrode secured the tsar's written consent that was actually an order for an industrial espionage mission, in areas from telegraphy to charcoal kilns. In September 1835 Schilling attended a conference in Bonn, as instructed by Nicholas I, and delivered his telegraph set to Georg Wilhelm Muncke. Upon return to Saint Petersburg, he conducted further experiments in telegraphy. In 1836 he briefly appeared at Andreas von Ettingshausen's laboratory in Vienna, researching new insulation materials. In May 1837 Schilling received instructions to draw a budget for a telegraph line connecting Peterhof with Kronstadt, and to begin preliminary field work. By this time he experienced regular pain caused by a tumour. Doctor Nicholas Arendt, his childhood friend from Kazan years, now Life Medic to the tsar, performed a surgery that did not help. Schilling died a few months later, and was buried with honours at the Smolenskoye Lutheran Cemetery in Saint Petersburg. All records, models and equipment left by Schilling passed to Moritz von Jacobi, who would build the first operational telegraph line in Russia, connecting the Winter Palace with the Army Headquarters, in 1841.

Works

Cryptography

Schilling's main contribution to cryptography was his bigram cipher, adopted for government use in 1823. The Schilling ciphers combined features of substitution ciphers and multiple-choice polyalphabetic ciphers using bigrams as source input. Each bigram consisted of two letters of source plaintext (in French language, the lingua franca of diplomacy), separated with a predetermined number of characters. The bigram was then converted to a number using permanent codetables containing 992 (32x31) pairs of alternative numbers. The method also involved padding source plaintext with random garbage and occasional encoding of single characters instead of bigrams.

The first three sets of codetables prepared by Schilling were issued to viceroy of Poland Grand Duke Konstantin, special envoy to Persia prince Alexander Menshikov, and to foreign minister Karl Nesselrode on his journey to the United States. The method was used by Russian diplomats until the 1900s. Individual ciphers were rated safe for up to six years of service, later downrated to three years; in reality, some codetables remained in use for up to twenty years, violating all security protocols.

Oriental expedition

In the 1820s Schilling's scholarly papers on oriental languages brought him degrees and membership in British, French and Russian learned societies. He was a long-time friend to the chief of the Russian Orthodox mission in Peking, and leading Russian orientalist Nikita Bichurin (father Hyacinth). After Bichurin was disgracefully demoted and exiled, Schilling advocated for his pardon, and in 1826 he secured the transfer of Bichurin from imprisonment at Valaam Monastery to a desk job at the Foreign Ministry in Saint Petersburg. Schilling assisted Alexander von Humboldt during the initial stages of the 1829 expedition to Russia. After Humboldt had declined an offer to lead another expedition into the Russian Far East, the role was awarded to Schilling. Preparations began immediately after signing of the Treaty of Adrianople in September 1829. Core staff of the expedition included Schilling himself, Bichurin and Vladimir Solomirsky, bastard son of Dmitry Tatishchev. Alexander Pushkin, well acquainted to all three, wanted to join, but Nicholas I ordered him to stay in Russia.

Schilling's main, covert mission was to evaluate the spread of Buddhism among local tribes, to outline the course of action to contain it, and to compile a binding statute that would regulate all aspects of Buddhist religious practice. The imperial government did not tolerate any independent ideologies and settled on subjugating the Buddhist leaders to the state. Meanwhile, the number of Buddhist monks was increasing at pace, almost doubling over a decade. Outright repressions were ruled out, for fears of mass emigration of nomads, and of potential conflict with China. The government was also concerned with the decline of border trade at the Kyakhta checkpoint and the increase in smuggling; Schilling was tasked with identifying the routes and the markets used by smugglers and to evaluate the volume of illegal trade. Officially, the mission was limited to "studies of population and international trade on the Russo-Chinese frontier"; any research apart from these tasks had to be paid by Schilling personally. To raise money, Schilling sold his scientific library to the Ministry of Education.

In May 1830 Schilling began the journey from Saint Petersburg to Kyakhta, a frontier market town that became his base for the next 18 months. His travels out of Kyakhta to various Buddhist shrines and border stations amounted, in total, to 7208 versts (7690 kilometres). Schilling himself wrote that the purpose of these travels was primarily ethnographic research. According to Bichurin, Schilling spent most of his time with Tibetan and Mongolian lamas, studying ancient Buddhist scriptures; he was concerned more with linguistics and history of Far Eastern peoples, rather than ethnography. His main quest was the search for the Kangyur - a Tibetan religious text closely guarded by the lamas and known to Europeans only in fragments. At the beginning, Schilling tried to obtain the complete Kangyur from China. He could not imagine that poor nomadic Buryats and Mongols could create, own and safeguard whole libraries of sacred literature. However, he soon found out that the Buryats of the Russian Empire owned three copies of three different editions of the Kangyur; one of the three was preserved in Chikoy, less than twenty miles east from Kyakhta. Schilling earned the respect of the lamas for being the only Russian who could read Tibetan texts, and easily obtained permission to read and copy them. According to Leonid Chuguevsky, it is likely that the lamas were aware of Schilling's mission and his liberal view towards state control over religion, and in their own way tried to appease the friendly but dangerous visitor.

Telegraphy

Schilling first became involved in telegraphy while he was in Munich. He assisted Sömmerring with his experiments with an electrochemical telegraph. This form of telegraph uses electricity to cause a chemical reaction at the far end, such as bubbles forming in a glass tube of acid. After returning to St. Petersburg he conducted his own experiments with this type of telegraph. He demonstrated this to Tsar Alexander I in 1812, but Alexander declined to take it up. His successor Nicholas I (ascended 1825), wary about the spread of "subversive" ideas, was particularly opposed to introducing any mass communications. He agreed with the use of electrical telegraphy for selected military and civil offices, but prohibited public discussion of telegraph technology, including even reports on foreign inventions. Schilling could demonstrate his experiments to the public with no ill consequences, but he never tried to publish his research in print. After the death of Schilling, in 1841, Moritz von Jacobi tried to do it, and the journal containing his review article was confiscated and destroyed by a special order of the tsar. When Schilling learned of Hans Christian Ørsted's discovery in 1820 that electric current could deflect compass needles, he decided to switch investigation into needle telegraphs, that is, telegraphs that used Ørsted's principle. Schilling used from one to six needles in various demonstrations to represent letters of the alphabet or other information.

The first Schilling telegraph was completed in 1828. The demonstration set consisted of a double-wire copper line and two terminals, each having a voltaic pile providing current of around 200 mA, a Schweigger multiplier for indication, a send-receive switch and a bidirectional telegraph key. There were no intermediate repeaters yet, limiting the potential range of the system. The switches and the keys used open vials filled with mercury. Likewise, the shaft of the multiplier pointer was hydraulically dampened by suspending its paddle in a pool of mercury. The coil of each multiplier contained 1760 turns of copper wire insulated with silk. Two magnetized steel pegs ensured that in absence of current the pointer always returned to its off-state, and provided some additional dampening.

The 40-character code table used variable-length coding, from one to five bits per character. Unlike the dot-dash bits of the Morse code, the bits of Schilling telegraph were encoded by current direction, and marked as either "left" or "right" in the codetable. The economic value of variable-length coding was not obvious yet; relying on operator's memory or scratchpads to record incoming bits was deemed too unreliable. Thus, fellow researchers compelled Schilling to design an alternative multi-wire, parallel-send system. Von Sömmerring used eight bits; Schilling reduced the number of bits to six (again, for a 40-character alphabet).

Mines and fuses

Another field of Schilling's research, directly related to telegraphy, was practical military applications of electricity for remote control of land and naval mines. In 1811 Johann Schweigger suggested the idea of exploding bubbles of hydrogen released from the electrolyte by passing electric current. Schilling discussed the idea with Sommering, and realised the military prospects for the invention. He devised a water resistant conducting wire that could be laid in wet earth or through rivers. It consisted of a copper wire insulated with a mixture of India-rubber and varnish. Schilling had in mind the military use of telegraphy in the field as well, and was excited about the prospects. Sömmerring wrote in his diary "Schilling is quite childish about his electro-conducting cord."

In September 1812 Schilling demonstrated his first remote-controlled naval fuse to Alexander I on the Neva River in Saint Petersburg. The invention was intended for coastal defense and sieges, and was deemed unsuitable for the fast-paced maneuver warfare of the 1812 campaign. The Schilling fuse, patented in 1813, contained two pointed carbon electrodes that produced an electric arc. The electrode assembly was placed in a sealed box filled with fine-grained gunpowder, which was ignited by the arc.

In 1822 Schilling demonstrated the land version of his fuse to Alexander I at Krasnoye Selo; in 1827 another Schilling mine was shown to Nicholas I. This time the test was supervised by military engineer Karl Schilder, an influential Imperial Guard officer and an inventor in his own right. Schilder pushed the proposal through the bureaucracy, and in April 1828 the Inspector general of military engineers authorised development of electrically-fired mines for series production. Russia had just entered the war with the Ottoman Empire, which frequently involved sieges of Turkish defenses in the Caucasus. The main problem that Schilling faced was the lack of batteries fit for field service, an issue not resolved until after the end of hostilities. According to Russian biographers of both Schilling and Schilder, reports of electrically-fired mines being used during the siege of Silistra are almost certainly incorrect.

Immediately after his return from Siberia, Schilling resumed work on mines and fuses. In September 1832 a series of electrically-fired land mines, imitating both defensive and offensive operations, were successfully tested by Schilder's battalion. This time the technology was ready for deployment and was issued to the Army; Schilling was awarded the Order of Saint Vladimir, 2nd class. Schilling continued improving land mines until the end of his life. In March 1834 Schilder test-fired the first naval mine employing insulated wires invented by Schilling; in 1835 the military performed the first test demolition of a bridge with an electrically-fired underwater charge. These demolition sets were produced and issued to military engineers' units from 1836 onwards. On the other hand, the Russian Navy resisted the novelty until the invention of a reliable contact fuse by Moritz von Jacobi in 1840.

Legacy

Schilling maintained regular correspondence with many scientists, writers and politicians, and was well known to Western European academic communities. He arranged publications of historical manuscripts and provided oriental sorts and matrices to European print shops; however, during his lifetime he never attempted to publish a book in his own name or to submit an article to a journal. The only known publication, the preface to the Index of the Narthang Kangyur, was printed posthumously and anonymously. His studies of oriental languages and Buddhist texts were soon forgotten. The real author of the Index was "rediscovered" in 1847, and then forgotten again. Schilling's research into telegraphy is much better known; the physicists and engineers who wrote about Schilling were concerned primarily with his telegraph, and thus shaped the public image of Schilling as an engineer. Later, various authors wrote about Schilling's oriental studies and travels, his collaborations with European academics and Russian poets, but none managed to grasp all the facets of his personality. Schilling the linguist, Schilling the engineer and Schilling the socialite apparently acted as three different persons. Moritz von Jacobi was probably the only contemporary who directly linked Schilling's achievements in telecommunications to his underlying proficiency in linguistics.

The Schilling needle telegraph was never used as such, but it is partly the ancestor of the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, a system widely used in the United Kingdom and British Empire in the nineteenth century. Some of the instruments of that system remained in use well into the twentieth century. Schilling's demonstration in Frankfurt was attended by Georg Wilhelm Muncke who subsequently had an exact copy of Schilling's apparatus made. Muncke used this for demonstrations in lectures. One of these lectures was attended by William Fothergill Cooke, who was inspired to build a version of Schilling's telegraph of his own, although he did not realise that the instrument he saw was due to Schilling. He abandoned this method for practical use in favour of electromagnetic clockwork solutions for a while, apparently believing that needle telegraphs always required multiple wires. That Schilling's method of suspending the needle by a thread horizontally was not very convenient was also an influence. This changed when he partnered with Charles Wheatstone and the telegraph they then built together was a multiple-needle telegraph, but with a rather more robust mounting based on the galvanometer of Macedonio Melloni. There is no evidence for the claim sometimes advanced that Wheatstone also lectured with a copy of Schilling's telegraph, although he certainly knew about it and lectured on its implications.