Charles Gordon Curtis

Charles Gordon Curtis was an American engineer who invented the Curtis steam turbine, a design that helped establish the steam turbine as the standard machine for generating electric power. Patented in 1896, his multi-stage impulse turbine combined ideas from the earlier Laval and Parsons turbine designs into a compact machine that, while less efficient than Charles Parsons' rival reaction turbine, was simpler to build and well suited to smaller installations and marine propulsion. Unable to interest investors at first, Curtis sold the rights to his turbine patents to General Electric in 1901, and General Electric's development of the Curtis turbine became a foundation of its power-generation equipment business; a licensed version, the Brown-Curtis turbine, was also widely used to power Royal Navy warships. Curtis also built the first working gas turbine in the United States in 1899.