Yoshio Masuda

Yoshio Masuda was a Japanese naval officer, born in 1925 and died in 2009, regarded as the father of modern wave power technology. He began studying methods of extracting power from ocean waves in Japan in the 1940s and is credited with inventing the oscillating water column principle, a device in which the rise and fall of waves inside a partly submerged chamber drives air through a turbine to generate electricity. He first applied the principle to navigation buoys powered by wave energy, and buoys built on his design were commercialized in Japan from 1965 onward and later adopted in the United States, establishing the oscillating water column as one of the enduring approaches to wave energy conversion.