Aurel Stodola

Aurel Boleslav Stodola (1859 to 1942) was a Slovak engineer, physicist and inventor, born in Vrbica-Hustak in the Kingdom of Hungary, who became a pioneer of technical thermodynamics and its applications. He studied mechanical engineering at the Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, worked as an engineer in Prague, and in 1892 became professor of machine construction at the Zurich Polytechnikum, where he taught until 1929 and founded the Laboratory for Energy Conversion. His textbook Die Dampfturbine, first published in 1903 and translated into several languages, formed a groundbreaking basis for building thermal turbomachinery, and his Steam and Gas Turbines, published in English in 1927, was a basic reference for engineers on the first generation of jet engines. He worked closely with Brown, Boveri and Cie on the first practical gas turbines, and in 1939 led the team that ran the first test worldwide of a gas turbine generating electricity. Stodola also collaborated with the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch on a mechanically driven prosthetic arm and kept friendly contact with Albert Einstein. He died in Zurich in 1942.