The Kyiv Welding Institute Born in 1934, and the All-Welded Paton Bridge

Across the Dnipro River in Kyiv stands a long bridge whose steel members are joined not by rivets but entirely by welding: the Paton Bridge, opened on November 5, 1953. According to Ukraine’s National Vernadsky Library, it is 1,543 meters long. The bridge is named after the engineer Yevhen Paton, who was directly involved in its design and construction. Paton died in August of that year and never saw it open.

Paton was also the person who founded a welding research institute in Kyiv. The institute continues today as the National Academy of Sciences’ “E.O. Paton Electric Welding Institute.”

From Bridge Engineer to Founder of a Welding Institute

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (IEU), compiled by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta (this entry first appeared in the 1993 print edition), Yevhen Paton was born in Nice, France, in 1870, and died in Kyiv on August 12, 1953. He studied in Dresden and St. Petersburg, served as a professor at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, and designed more than 35 bridges and viaducts between 1896 and 1929.

The IEU states that Paton set up an electric-welding laboratory at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1929, which became an institute in 1934. The institute’s own timeline gives that date as January 1, 1934. Paton served as director until his death.

Timeline: 90 Years Since the Laboratory

The Institute’s Name, and the Academy’s Name

The name has changed several times. According to the institute’s timeline, its name was “Electric Welding Institute” from 1934 to 1944, and it took on Paton’s name in March 1945. Its current official name is “National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine E.O. Paton Electric Welding Institute.” The academy above it has likewise changed names, from the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (ВУАН), to the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, to the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 1991, and to the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 1994 (the entry on Boris Paton in the Encyclopedia of Ukrainian History).

The Paton Bridge

According to a 2021 paper the institute’s own researchers published in the journal Technical Diagnostics and Non-Destructive Testing, the bridge consists of 24 spans and is 1,542.2 meters long — nearly matching the National Library’s 1,543 meters, likely reflecting a difference in exactly what was measured. The main girders, the paper explains, are four I-shaped girders made of 3.6-meter-tall steel plate, joined during assembly by automatic submerged-arc welding (a welding method that strikes an arc beneath a layer of granular flux material).

According to the title of a 1953 report the same paper cites, the bridge’s components were made at the Molotov Factory in Dnipropetrovsk (today’s Dnipro). This means parts made in a town downstream on the Dnipro were welded together upstream in Kyiv. The dams and reservoirs of the Dnipro are covered in the article on the Dnipro’s six dams.

Who Said It Was “the World’s First All-Welded Bridge”?

The Paton Bridge is sometimes introduced as “the world’s first.” Public institutions, however, do not use one uniform phrasing.

According to the National Heritage Board of Poland’s database of cultural monuments, a welded road bridge over a river in Maurzyce, central Poland, was built in 1928–1929 and came into use on August 12, 1929. It was designed by Stefan Bryła, an engineer who at the time taught bridge construction at the polytechnic in Lviv, then part of Poland. The same institute also states that the world’s first regulations for electric-welded steel structures were created for this bridge.

Given that there is a source calling the 1929 Maurzyce bridge “the first,” the Paton Bridge cannot be described unconditionally as “the world’s first all-welded road bridge.” The institute’s own timeline uses “the largest in Europe,” a claim about length or scale. How the American Welding Society recognized the Paton Bridge could not be confirmed in the society’s own documents.

Boris Paton and the Academy of Sciences

According to the National Academy of Sciences’ biographical register, the son, Boris Paton, was born in Kyiv on November 27, 1918, and graduated from the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in 1941. He began working at the institute in 1942, became its director in 1953, served as the Academy’s president from 1962, and died on August 19, 2020. He held both the directorship and the presidency until his death.

As of September 2026, the institute’s director is Ihor Kryvtsun and the Academy’s president is Anatolii Zagorodny (per the official websites of the institute and the Academy respectively).

From Research to Business

The institute’s timeline lists a number of examples of research results turned into products and companies. All are the institute’s own accounts.

• 1959: The institute establishes its own pilot plant and design bureau
• 1987: Establishes the foreign-trade company “Inpat” (ІНПАТ)
• 1993: Sets up a joint research center, “Pratt & Whitney–Paton,” with the US aircraft-engine company
• 1998: Obtains patents for a method of welding human living tissue in Ukraine, European countries, the United States, Canada, and Australia
• 2001: Establishes a joint venture, “Paton-Hewang,” in China to make flux-cored welding wire
• 2001: Develops the K922 machine for welding high-strength rails; exports it abroad from 2005
• 2011: Begins manufacturing “Patonmed,” a device for high-frequency welding of living tissue

The Encyclopedia of Ukrainian History’s entry on Boris Paton also states that the institute’s patents were taken out in the United States, West Germany, Japan, and elsewhere, and that the technology for welding living tissue is used in surgery. Sales and export figures cannot be confirmed from the institute’s public materials.

A Bridge Past 70

According to a March 11, 2026 announcement by the National Academy of Sciences, Oleksandr Shimanovsky, president of the Shimanovsky Institute of Ukrainian Steel Construction — which once designed the bridge and continues to monitor its condition — said that a 2018 inspection rated the bridge at the fifth of five levels, “unusable,” and a 2025 inspection reached the same conclusion. Where the design once assumed roughly 10,000 vehicles a day, he said, it now carries as many as 130,000 a day.

President Shimanovsky explained that the crossbeams beneath the expansion joints in particular are badly corroded by rainwater and winter road-salt, while the main girders remain in relatively good condition and the bridge’s overall strength is still holding up. He raised the option of replacing the heavy concrete deck with a lighter steel one to extend the bridge’s life, and while he said it was hard to imagine everything failing at once, he added, “it wouldn’t be strange if something happened at any moment.” The institute’s researchers wrote in their 2021 paper that the institute itself had inspected the welds on the main girders.