Stephen Salter

Stephen Salter was a Scottish mechanical engineer and Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Edinburgh, best known as the inventor of the wave energy device that came to be known as Salter's Duck. Developed in the 1970s in response to the oil price shocks of that decade, the Duck is a pear-shaped floating device that rocks with the motion of ocean waves, its nodding motion driving an internal generator; in controlled tank testing it was shown to convert a very high proportion of incident wave energy into electricity, among the most efficient wave energy converters ever demonstrated. Despite that technical performance, the Duck was never brought to commercial deployment at sea, and its history is often cited in the wave power field both as a landmark proof of concept and as a caution about the gap between laboratory efficiency and the engineering, funding and political difficulties of taking marine renewable technology to open water. Salter continued to work on wave energy, and later on climate engineering proposals, for much of his career at Edinburgh.