Alexander Bari

Alexander Veniaminovich Bari (; – April 19, 1913) was a Russian and American engineer, entrepreneur and social activist, founder of the first Russian engineering company. Bari was a close friend of Vladimir Shukhov, Leo Tolstoy, Dmitri Mendeleev, Nikolay Zhukovsky, Fyodor Schechtel, Ivan Rerberg.

Biography Alexander Bari was born on in Saint Petersburg. He was the second son of a well-educated Baptized Jew . Veneamin Bari was a publicist, striving to educate Jews, he was favoured by Alexander von Humboldt, in whose honour the son was named.

Veneamin Bari, who at that time was corresponding with Karl Marx, was forced to leave the Russian Empire and in 1862 emigrated to Swiss Zürich with his children and wife Henriette Sergeevna. In 1865 the family moved to the US, but Alexander stayed in Zürich and graduated from a gymnasium in 1867. In 1870 he graduated from ETH Zurich with a degree in engineering. During his university years, he met , who later recalled Bari as a leader of a student fellowship, who introduced him to the ETH and the city life. He particularly remembered how Bari acquainted a young man in a café, who turned out to be a son of a factory owner, and on the next day they were invited to have a tour around the father's factory.

After graduation, Alexander Bari decided to reconcile with his family and went to the USA. As he had no means to purchase a ticket, he took the job as an assistant engineer on the steamer. In the USA Bari received citizenship and started working as an assistant engineer at a machine and bridge-building plant in Detroit, later he was hired as an engineer at an industrial company in Philadelphia. Soon he won a competition to build pavilions for the Centennial Exposition and received the gold medal. Bari helped the Russians a purchase of laboratory equipment, tools, and instruments. In gratitude he was elected as a corresponding member of the RITS in 1877.

In Philadelphia, he met Eda von Grunberg (Zinaida Jakovlevna in Russian), his future wife. She was from a German family that moved to Russia in the times of Catherine the Great. Eda came to Philadelphia with her elder sister, who married Alexander's older brother.

The first 10 km long oil pipeline on the Absheron Peninsula was opened in Autumn 1878, it started at Balaxanı and ended in the Black City. The pipe's diameter was 0,76 m. In 1879 the second Russian oil pipeline was opened by ‘G. M. Lianozov and Co’.

Personal life

Alexander Bari was a friend of many brightest people of his time — Dmitri Mendeleev, Nikolay Zhukovsky, Sergey Chaplygin, Fyodor Schechtel, Ivan Rerberg, and others were frequent guests in his house. Since 1884 Bari lived at , 24, later he moved to the house №22.

In 1898 Bari first met Leo Tolstoy. With daughter Anna Alexandrovna he paid visits to the writer's house in Khamovniki. After the assassination of Pyotr Stolypin Bari wrote to his friends that ‘the situation is dreadful and the worst is coming’.

Olga Bari (1879–1954), one of Alexander Bari's daughters, became an artist and was one of the Mir iskusstva members. She lived in the USSR for all her life and scarcely exhibited.