History
The history of Nizhny Tagil begins with the opening of the Vysokogorsky iron ore quarry in 1696. The deposits were particularly rich, and included lodes of pure magnetic iron. The surrounding landscape provided everything needed for a successful and productive mining and smelting operation — rivers for transport, forests for fuel, and suitable climate.
The city itself was legally founded in October 1722 among settlements connected to the construction of the Vyysky copper smelting plant, owned by Nikolay Demidov. Over the following decades, the city developed as one of the early centers of Russian industrialization, and it has been a major producer of cast iron and steel.
The first Russian steam locomotive was constructed there in 1833, and the father-and-son engineers who developed it, Ye.A. and M.Ye. Cherepanov (Черепанов), were in 1956 commemorated by an 8-meter (26 ft) bronze statue (executed by sculptor A. S. Kondratyev and architect A. V. Sotnikov) which stands in the center of the Theatrical Square in the heart of downtown.
Town status was granted to Nizhny Tagil in 1919.
According to some sources, the copper for the skin of the Statue of Liberty was mined and refined in Nizhny Tagil.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)