Alphonse Sagebien

Alphonse Eléonor Sagebien was a French hydrological engineer born in Amiens, who lived from 1807 to 1892 and invented the Sagebien wheel, a device that made hydraulically powered systems much more efficient at extracting energy from moving water. He graduated in 1833 with an engineering degree from the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures and worked primarily in metallurgy, discovering mineral seams still worked today in the department of Pas-de-Calais. After 1848 he shifted to hydrological engineering, designing and patenting the wheel, which extracted 50 percent more energy from flowing water than earlier paddle based systems and won the gold medal at the 1878 exhibition.