Marcel Deprez

Marcel Deprez was a French electrical engineer who carried out some of the first experiments proving that electric power could be transmitted usefully over long distances. Between 1876 and 1886 he conducted transmission trials at Creil, and at the 1881 International Exposition of Electricity in Paris he presented a scheme for distributing electricity by long-distance direct current transmission. His best known demonstration came at the 1882 Munich electrical exhibition organized by the German engineer Oskar von Miller, where Deprez transmitted about 1.5 kilowatts of power at 2 kilovolts across roughly 35 miles between Miesbach and Munich, a result that helped establish high-voltage direct current transmission as workable and influenced the later, higher-capacity commercial transmission systems built by engineers such as Rene Thury.