The Stalin's terror, the war with fascists, engineering projects for civil aviation and secret designs of Soviet weapons in the era of the Cold War between the USSR and the USA – to name a few things that destiny prepared for him. At an age of 88, Leo Rozenman continues to invent.
An Orchestra Played for Him
Saratov, 1925. When a child was born in the family of a party official and a paramedic, an orchestra played out on the street. There was a May Day demonstration in the city. Soon Rozenman the senior was transferred to Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg, where 8-year-old little Leo started school and where, during the period of the most intense purge, his father was arrested under the accusation of being a Trotskyist. On the bright side, they weren't exiled.
Leo had graduated from the 8th grade just before the beginning of the war. He entered an institute without a high school diploma but it wasn't the right time for books – the family was in need. Leo found an electrician job. He was paid with food coupons. In February 1943, when he was still under 18, he volunteered to join the army. He survived by miracle and celebrated the Victory at the Far East.
The peaceful skies and study in Bauman Moscow State Technical University at the Instrument Engineering Faculty were ahead. He instantly joined serious research work; independently developed an amplifier for the automatic remote astrocompass that was eventually used in Arctic aviation. He met his future spouse Irina in Moscow. Together they moved to Kursk where he was invited to work in "Post Box 50" as Aviaavtomatika development design office was called. There he became the leader of the comprehensive experimental research facility.
The Sky Whispered the Answer
When on 1 May 1960, a United States U-2 spy plane was downed by Soviet Air Defence in the Urals, the engineers involved in investigation of the remains were especially focused on the newest attitude and heading reference system that was installed on the plane. It was then when Leo Rozenman was appointed to engineer the Russian equivalent. It was not that simple to replicate the system – the USSR did not manufacture the required components at the time. Nevertheless, within a short time, the first Soviet transistor-controlled attitude and heading reference system GMK-1 was engineered under his leadership. The most sophisticated module was developed by Mark Beizerov, a designer from Ramensk development design office. As compared to the then existing AHRS the new one was three times lighter and consumed almost four times less power owing to the replacement of electronic tubes with solid state electronics. The attitude and heading reference system GMK-1 was installed on such passenger planes as An-24 and YaK-40, military transport plane An-26 and others. This was the first state-of the-art and technically-sophisticated equipment that was batch-produced at a Kursk plant called Pribor ("Instrument").
Marked "Confidential"
American spy planes prowled not only the Soviet sky. In the late 1950s, American submarines passing under the ice of the North Pole started to emerge in the Arctic waters. The submarines carried the Polaris ballistic missiles. The USSR Government urgently decided to create the defence system against the intruders.
Leningrad research institute NII-15 engineered Berkut search and track system. The authors were awarded the Lenin Prize. IL-38 aircraft became a carrier for the system. Equipped with torpedoes and powerful computers, the aircraft, among other things, carried sonar beacons. The beacons were dropped on parachutes to guard the water area. They sent signals to the on-board computer that determined the target parameters and offered a decision – to engage the target or not. The development of the target designation unit as part of the sonar beacons was headed by Leo Rozenman.
The bench testing was successfully completed in the Black Sea Fleet, but the functionality of the system still had to be checked under the Arctic conditions. In summer 1961, ice-breaker Murman, equipped for expedition, departed from Murmansk to the Barents Sea, namely, to the islands of Vize and Viktoria of the Archipelago of Frantz Josef Land.
The crew was gone for several months among eternal ices and polar bears sometimes just sending messages to the main land by Morse code. Three natives of Kursk Leo Rozenman, Vladimir Sonin and Nikolay Aryupin together with assistants from Kyiv and Leningrad spent all days long taking measurements and returned to the ship only to sleep. Once during a trip to Viktoria Island, the iceberg they were on was unexpectedly raised by the tide and started to move to the open sea. "We grabbed our emergency flares but they were wet all through! The radio was also all in water," Leo remembers. "The ship was anchored one kilometre away from us, but the visibility was zero despite the polar day. We had to stay out in the cold for good ten hours until the crew of Murman began to worry and to look for us with searchlights. Finally, they found us."
The Birth of Romashkas
The destiny brought together the Rozenmans and Lidiya, the widow of Hero of the Soviet Union Stepan Perekalskiy. When a close friendship developed between the two families Leo wasn't involved in military engineering any more. His inventions were exclusively peaceful now. He got thirty patents and invention certificates, but his most well-known creation was first in the USSR electronic typewriter Romashka ("Camomile") that was manufactured by Kursk plant Schetmash from 1989 to 1993.
In the beginning, nobody took the project for serious except for engineers and inventors. However, the originals, as they called themselves, turned out to be luckier than their peers from Moscow and Leningrad. Talented programmer and circuit designer Boris Dryomov was responsible for the "brain" of the typewriter, while the overall design with all included units was covered by Rozenman. "When it became clear that our machine was simpler with the same functionality as Italian and Japanese models, the question of mass production was resolved positively. Romashka helped the plant, almost suspended by the time, to avoid bankruptcy," Rozenman says.
Some of his inventions were out of his general trend. For example, a winter walking anti-slipping device. Its efficiency was acknowledged even on a federal TV channel – in January 2004 Leo Rozenman was a guest at a Channel One show.
