Aleksandr Loran

Who is Aleksandr Loran?

Aleksandr Grigoryevich Loran, sometimes called Alexander Laurant or Aleksandr Lovan or Aleksandr Lavrentyev, was a Russian teacher and inventor of fire fighting foam and foam extinguisher.

He was born in 1849 in Kishinyov in the Russian Empire, now in Moldavia. After graduating from the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical Institute, he continued his education in Paris, where he studied chemistry.

Returning to Russia, Loran became a teacher in a school in Baku, which was the main center of the Russian oil industry at that time. Impressed by the terrible and hardly extinguishable oil fires that he had seen there, Loran tried to find such a liquid substance that could deal effectively with the problem. So he invented fire fighting foam, which was successfully tested in several experiments in 1902-1903. In 1904 Loran patented his invention, and developed the first foam extinguisher the same year.

Subsequently he founded a company called Eurica, based in Saint Petersburg, and started to sell his fire extinguishers under that brand.