How A Failed Soviet Experiment Solved A 200 Year-Old Precision Machining Problem

For most of industrial history, precision manufacturing was trapped by a single fact. The steel that made good tooling was too hard to cut, so dies and molds had to be machined soft and hardened afterward, and hardening warped them. Skilled die makers then spent days or weeks with files, stones and spotting compound putting the shape back by hand. Some shapes, including any genuine sharp internal corner, could never be produced at all, because a rotating cutter has a diameter and always leaves a radius. This documentary is the story of the process that removed that limit. In 1943, at the All-Union Electrotechnical Institute in Moscow, Boris and Natalya Lazarenko were assigned to stop tungsten electrical contacts from eroding under sparking. They failed. What they found instead was that submerging the contacts in a dielectric fluid did not smother the discharge, it organized it, turning random destruction into a repeatable, measurable removal of metal. The circuit they built around that discovery still carries their name, the thesis describing it holds a priority date of 3 April 1943, and Lazarenko received the USSR State Prize in 1946. Because the Soviet Union was not party to the international patent conventions at the time, the work crossed borders as published science rather than protected property. At the same time in the United States, Harold Stark, Victor Harding and Jack Beaver were attacking the same physics from the opposite end, burning seized taps and broken drills out of finished castings at 60 sparks per second. The video traces what happened next. Charmilles in Geneva built the ELERODA D1, the first industrial EDM machine, shown at Milan in 1954. Agie followed within months. The order of operations in the die trade inverted, because hardened material could now be cut after heat treatment instead of before it, and one patent from the period describes a 90-hour electrode process replaced by roughly an hour. Benching work that had defined a skilled trade largely disappeared, and the craft relocated to electrode design, programming and process control. From there the coverage moves through wire EDM and its numerical control lineage, the optical line-following systems that preceded CNC, Fanuc's automatic wire threading and the arrival of unattended overnight machining, Sodick's linear motor drives, and the consolidation that folded Charmilles, Agie and Elox into single owners. It closes on the hard limit case, the roughly 100,000 film cooling holes in a modern jet engine, drilled through single-crystal nickel superalloys that no conventional tool can cut, along with the process's real costs: its slowness, the recast layer and its fatigue implications, electrode wear, and the fire risk of oil dielectrics in unattended operation. Subscribe to Trade Archive for more on the machines, materials and companies that built modern industry. SOURCES Ho, K. H., and S. T. Newman. "State of the Art Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM)." International Journal of Machine Tools and Manufacture 43, no. 13 (2003): 1287-1300. Institute of Applied Physics. "Boris Lazarenko." Chisinau, Moldova. https://ifa.usm.md/boris-lazarenko/. Jameson, E. C. Electrical Discharge Machining. Dearborn, MI: Society of Manufacturing Engineers, 2001. Schumacher, Bernd M., Reinhard Krampitz, and Jean-Pierre Kruth. "Historical Phases of EDM Development Driven by the Dual Influence of Market Pull and Science Push." Procedia CIRP 6 (2013): 5-12. "A Review of Advances in Electrical Discharge Machining." Journal of Manufacturing Processes. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2025. GF Machining Solutions. "70 Years of EDM." Corporate history. Geneva, Switzerland. Fanuc Corporation. Corporate History and ROBOCUT Product Documentation. Oshino-mura, Japan. Sodick Co., Ltd. Corporate History and Linear Motor Technology Documentation. Yokohama, Japan. Electro Arc Manufacturing Company. Corporate History. Michigan. United States Patent 4,322,922. Electrode Production Method. Guitrau, E. Bud. "EDM in Mold Manufacturing." MoldMaking Technology. Cincinnati, OH: Gardner Business Media. Modern Machine Shop. Reporting on high-speed machining, EDM workflows and mold production. Cincinnati, OH: Gardner Business Media. Rao, et al. Study of Electrical Discharge Machining of Inconel 718. ScienceDirect. Sarix SA. Micro-EDM Technical Documentation. Sant'Antonino, Switzerland. Mordor Intelligence. Electrical Discharge Machining Market Report, 2024. Verified Market Research. Electrical Discharge Machining Market Size and Forecast, 2024. Research and Markets. Global Electrical Discharge Machining Market, 2024.