Benoit Fourneyron

Benoit Fourneyron was a French engineer who built the first practical water turbine in 1827, at the age of twenty five. His design used a horizontal wheel fitted with two sets of curved blades, and by 1837 a sixty horsepower model of his turbine was operating at roughly eighty percent efficiency, an exceptional figure for the period. Fourneyron's turbine was widely adopted in factories across Europe and the United States, and turbines built on his principle were still in service decades later, including at Niagara Falls in 1895 for early hydroelectric power generation.